Why California Will Stay Blue

San Francisco Chronicle: While the rest of the nation went red in Tuesday's midterm elections, California emerged even bluer. What's going on? The standard answer is that registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans, and that many decline-to-state voters lean Democratic. But there's a more telling reason, one that promises to keep California blue for years. The state's rising numbers of new voters - newly minted immigrant voters, minorities and voters between the ages of 18 and 29 - are overwhelmingly Democratic in their preferences. While California has not been majority white for more than a decade, its voting population has been slower to change, reflecting the time lag needed for immigrants to become citizens and register to vote, and for their children to grow to adulthood. Today, one-third of registered voters are minorities, 19 percent of whom are Latinos. Asian Americans represent 7 percent, with African Americans at 6 percent. These voters supported Democrats in statewide races by double-digit margins, according to exit polls. Voters under 30 years old favored Jerry Brown over Meg Whitman by a whopping 27 points. If any Republican statewide candidate had a good chance of making inroads with these new voters, it was Whitman - a political moderate with tens of millions of dollars to burn on advertising. But the state's immigration politics tripped her up, in large part because her opposition to providing a citizenship pathway for illegal immigrants was out of sync with voters' attitudes toward immigration.