by Edward Ring
California’s one-party rule endures not through ideals but incentives—where regulation, unions, and entrenched privilege keep Democrats powerful and challengers crushed.
Anyone who wants to conduct business or politics in California who isn’t a Democrat is crazy. They run everything here. Their power is absolute. Democrat politicians run the state legislature, the cities, the counties, and hold most of the “nonpartisan” elected positions for judges and district attorneys. California’s public sector unions are all led by partisan Democrats, and these unions control the state and local public sector bureaucracy, including public safety departments. Democratic Party partisans control the K-12 schools, colleges, and universities; they dominate the media; and, of course, they dominate every special interest group of any consequence, including the powerful environmentalist lobby, the state’s many tribes, nearly every trade association, and most major corporations.
But how did it get this way? How did the system get so skewed that anyone who stands up to the Democratic Party machine in California gets crushed? Isn’t there a record of failure that by now would have people demanding accountability? Hasn’t it gotten so hard to survive as a small business, a farmer, or a low-income household in California that voters would consider voting for anyone but another Democrat?
Not really. A majority of these people, beleaguered as they are, nonetheless vote Democrat. They believe what they’re told by Democrats, even when they are ultimately voting against their own interests. However, to understand the reasons behind the Democratic Party’s supremacy in California, you must look beyond the party rhetoric. This is not to suggest that Democrat donors pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into nonstop propaganda, versus tens of millions of dollars from Republican donors, doesn’t have an impact. Of course it does. Saturating voters with nonstop messages on every conceivable platform works. Scaring voters witless with warnings of racist, sexist, climate crisis-denying Trumpian fascists poised to destroy democracy and then the world, works. It works all too well. But there are other incentives to be a Democrat that aren’t so obvious.
The first hidden incentive for voters and donors in California to remain Democrat is, ironically, the product of a quintessential Republican initiative, the Jarvis-Gann Initiative of 1978, which limited property taxes to one percent of assessed value at the time of purchase and limited annual property tax increases on any continuously owned property to two percent per year. This has given millions of Californians yearly property tax bills that someone in Texas can only dream of. These property tax benefits can be passed on to heirs, and the practical political consequence is to exempt longtime California residents from the punitive rates of taxation that might induce them to question the tax and spend policies of Democrats.
There’s plenty of irony present as well in the next hidden incentive for California voters to remain Democrat, which is the exclusionary consequences of their support for the extreme environmentalist movement in their state. While the publicly proclaimed agenda of environmentalists is to protect the planet, the practical consequence of the policies they successfully lobby for is something else entirely. What environmentalists in California have done is effectively shut down housing construction. A few homes get built, at great cost, on schedules spanning decades instead of months, and the result is a housing shortage that makes purchasing or renting a home too expensive for people with average household incomes. What better way to keep the riffraff out?
Why aren’t there more homes built atop the wide-open, gently sloping east hills that run for a hundred miles from Berkeley to Gilroy in the San Francisco Bay Area? Why are nearly a hundred square miles of flatland south of San Jose closed to housing development? There’s no shortage of land in California. The state has over 25,000 square miles of rangeland. Ten million people would fit into less than 10 percent of just that open grazing land, and they could all live in ranch houses on quarter-acre lots.
But home builders are denied the ability to build homes that people can afford. Byzantine permitting requirements through countless state, regional, and local agencies. Expensive fees, requiring payment even before approvals are secured. The constant threat of litigation. Unreasonable code requirements add additional expenses. And what is the end result? People already living in California have pulled up the ladder. One of the best critics of environmentalism, California-style, is the San Francisco-based land use attorney Jennifer Hernandez, whose 2021 essay “Green Jim Crow” exposes California’s green masquerade, hiding what is, regardless of motivations, an exclusionary, implicitly racist impact.
At this point, it’s probably important to disclaim any suggestion that Californians should get rid of Prop. 13. It’s one of the only things allowing anyone of modest means to still live there. But it would be helpful if the millions of California voters who benefit from Prop. 13 would pay more attention to the misery that Democrats have inflicted on people who didn’t get to purchase homes back when they were affordable.
Similarly, the whole concept of “disproportionality” is a useless, divisive crutch, used by leftists to demand redistribution, reparations, or some other sort of identity-based special treatment. But again, it might be helpful for Democrats who are so publicly committed to being anti-racist, comfortable in the homes their parents or grandparents purchased in the 1950s and 1960s, to recognize that California’s restrictions on new housing are disproportionately harming those minority communities they claim to care about so much. Democrats who embrace the whole “disproportionality” narrative should not selectively ignore the narrative whenever it points to uncomfortable facts.
Democrats in California haven’t just crammed down the housing market; they’ve also overregulated the state’s oil and gas, farming, ranching, and logging industries to the point of near collapse. Which brings us to one of the most powerful hidden incentives of all to be a Democrat in California. When there is scarcity in all things, the corporations that remain standing are positioned to raise prices to captive consumers who lack competitive alternatives.
This remains one of the most underreported truths about politics in America, and California is the prime example. Public power utilities have their percentage profits capped by regulations. So, of course, they prefer to sell electricity at $0.40 per kilowatt-hour rather than $0.10 per kilowatt-hour. That gives them four times as much revenue from which they can extract a fixed percentage profit. The same general principle applies across all industries where regulations artificially limit supply.
What incentive is there for a home builder who has managed to navigate all of the permits and litigation to encourage deregulation? Why not support Democrats, who pass regulations that drive competitors off to Texas or Florida, where they can operate with far less harassment? The builders who are left in California get to construct homes at prices two to three times greater than the same homes would cost in other states.
In California, where regulations have created artificial scarcity, only the biggest corporations can survive. But they don’t just survive; they thrive. Smaller operations, whether they’re farmers, home builders, or small retail and manufacturing businesses, cannot afford the overhead needed to comply with regulations that require full-time compliance staff, including in-house attorneys and expensive outside consultants. It’s too much. Smaller businesses fold, and big businesses pick up their assets and their customers.
This model also explains why California’s public-sector unions are run by partisan Democrats. With every regulation, tax, or fee imposed on businesses, and with every subsidy and benefit they bestow on low-income households in exchange for votes, the population of public employees is increased. This, in turn, increases public sector union membership and dues. Everybody knows that public sector unions inherently prefer big government. But less talked about and equally significant is their inherent partnership with gigantic corporations. Every new regulation that expands government is also a tool to destroy smaller, emerging competition, allowing the biggest commercial enterprises to consolidate their markets and expand their profits.
So it is that Democrats have captured California, with incentives that are entirely pragmatic, designed to further political and economic goals. They have cleverly obscured the true nature of their motivations with rhetoric that supports environmental and social objectives while, in fact, having little to do with either. In many cases, in fact, the impact of the policies they claim have environmental and social justice motivations accomplish precisely the opposite of their stated intent.
The reasons to be a Democrat in California, ultimately, are cynical and self-aggrandizing. It is a union of special interests that has perfected an appealing populist rhetoric, while in fact the political economy they’ve built is essentially a fascist partnership of big government, big labor, and big corporations. The voters they’ve seduced are millions of legacy homeowners, exempted from the hardships this partnership inflicts on everyone else, along with the low-income victims of the system, deceived by the rhetoric and pacified with government benefits.
Until the incentives that apply in California are completely upended by a catastrophe, or by the unlikely emergence of transformative new leadership, or both, the Democratic Party in California is an invincible machine. It’s built on raw power and sold to voters based on expertly crafted delusions.
Edward Ring is a senior fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is also the
director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center,
which he co-founded in 2013 and served as its first president. Ring is
the author of Fixing California: Abundance, Pragmatism, Optimism (2021)
and The Abundance Choice: Our Fight for More Water in California (2022).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/10/22/why-californians-choose-democrats/
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