“Orange County used to be reliably Republican when it was fairly homogeneous,” said Jim Brulte, a former chairman of the California Republican Party who lives in San Juan Capistrano. “We’re not that Orange County and we haven’t been that Orange County for two decades.”Today, more than one in three of the county’s residents are Hispanic and more than one in five are Asian, according to census data. “In Orange County, if you run a cookie-cutter campaign, you are going to lose,” Mr. Brulte said. Mr. Newsom had carried Orange County by a narrow 50.1 percent in 2018, the year that Democrats picked up four House seats. “Orange County is national ground zero for the realignment of college-educated voters away from Trump’s Republican Party,” Mr. Clegg said, adding that vaccines had proved a particularly potent issue.

Source: New York Times September 18, 2021 18:22 UTC