Proposition 187 and GOP Nativism Turned California Blue in 1994: A Thirty-Year Retrospective

As California goes, so goes California.

California politics began to shift in the 1990s to such a degree that the state turned into a Democratic stronghold by the early 2000s and has remained so until today. Immigration restrictionists often blame that political shift on immigration, using some version of a “demographics are political destiny” argument. There are two main explanations of why that shift occurred. The first is that Hispanics are naturally Democrats, so as their numbers increased they naturally turned the state blue (Gimpel (2010) makes this point for presidential election outcomes by county) while an increasingly liberal white electorate also helped.

The second theory is that Republican support for anti-immigrant ballot initiatives and nativist candidates tarnished the GOP brand in the eyes of immigrants, their children, Hispanics, and whites who were turned off by the nativist appeals. Those who turned off were much more likely to vote for and self-identify as Democrats who were relatively less nativist. More evidence supports the second theory than the first.

The political inflection point in California occurred in 1994 when the Republican candidate Pete Wilson ran a nativist campaign to seek reelection and Proposition 187 was on the ballot. The voters reelected Pete Wilson, Proposition 187 became law, and the state electorate shifted Democratic as a result. Since this is the 30 year anniversary of that seminal election in 1994, below is a summary and analysis of 30 years of research on how it affected California politics.

California Partisan Background  

California was never a Republican or conservative stronghold contrary to popular myth. Democrats controlled the legislature since 1959 with brief exceptions during the 1969 to 1971 and from 1994 to 1996 periods. Democratic governors were also elected in 1958, 1962, 1974, and 1978. On the policy front, California had been long known for high progressive income taxes, elevated welfare benefit levels and spending even after adjusting for the cost of living, stringent environmental protection, restrictive gun ownership laws, and onerous building restrictions. Reflecting the nationalization of politics, California’s only claim to being a Republican state was that it voted for the Republican presidential candidate in every post World War II election prior to 1992, except for 1948 and 1964. As of this writing, the two presidents elected from California have also both been Republicans – Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan – although that could change if Kamala Harris is elected later this year.

This post will examine how the demographic changes, Proposition 187, other propositions that were viewed as anti-immigrant, and Republican Governor Pete Wilson’s embrace of nativism in his 1994 campaign helped to shift the Golden State’s politics on the state level. This state-level shift undoubtedly affected how the state voted in presidential and national elections, but less so than the reverse.

Proposition 187 and Pete Wilson

Known as the “Save Our State” initiative, Proposition 187 had three components. The first was to make illegal immigrants ineligible for public social services, public health care services (unless emergency under federal law), and public school education at elementary, secondary, and post-secondary levels. The public school exclusions were a dead letter because of a prior Supreme Court ruling while the other welfare provisions were already law. The second component would require various state and local agencies to report suspected illegal immigrants to the California Attorney General and the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service for deportation, including students in public schools. The third section made it a state level felony to manufacture, distribute, sell or use false citizenship or residence documents. Proposition 187 appeared on the ballot in 1994 when California Republican governor Pete Wilson was running a very hard-fought campaign for reelection in the midst of a recession year that particularly affected California. Wilson’s campaign embraced Proposition 187, the Republican Party threw its financial support behind it, and it pushed other nativist talking points in order to win the election.

Prior to the vote, many Republican supporters of Proposition 187 admitted that its passage would not affect social service spending in California, mostly because illegal immigrants were already ineligible for welfare, and the rest of the package would likely be struck down by the courts. Republicans Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett even opposed Proposition 187 in print. Their opposition was summed up by William F. Buckley Jr. thusly:

The Kemp-Bennett position says: Look, there shouldn’t be illegal immigrants in California, but it is the business of the Federal Government to keep them away. To pass such a measure as 187 situates the GOP with a strain of xenophobia which will very quickly (California will be more than 50 per cent Asian/Hispanic at the turn of the century whatever happens to illegals) evolve into anti-GOP resentments by the majority of Californians. That could lead to such electoral catastrophes as pursued many GOP candidates who were slow in boarding the civil-rights crusade.

Bennett and Kemp were right. 

Proposition 187 and Pete Wilson Were Unpopular Among Immigrant Minorities

Proposition 187 was approved by the voters in November 1994. However, the proposition was intensely unpopular among Hispanics who viewed themselves as the targets of the proposition while other groups supported it (Figure 1). Michael Barone highlighted anecdotes in his book The New Americans that show how off-putting the Proposition 187 and Wilson campaigns were for Hispanic Republican businessmen. Speaking of Wilson’s comments supporting Proposition 187, Jose Legaspi said, “He was saying we don’t work hard.” Gregory Rodriguez said, “It was a big civics lesson. People felt they were being maligned as a group. We were being called lazy and loafers.” A Republican state senator even suggested that Hispanics in California would be required to carry identity cards. These factors galvanized the Hispanic vote against Proposition 187 and the GOP.     

Governor Pete Wilson was also intensely unpopular among Hispanics and other minorities in the state (more on this below). What’s different is that Wilson’s unpopularity tainted the Republican Party and has lingered for decades after the 1994 vote. A 2000 Tomas Rivera Policy Institute survey during the 2000 election revealed that 53 percent of Hispanic voters in California still associated the Republican Party with Pete Wilson. In 2010, Latino Decisions polled California Hispanics if they were concerned that Pete Wilson was the campaign co-chair for Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman. Their responses were stunningly negative (Figure 2). His political legacy in California is his position on immigration, Proposition 187, and the 1994 election campaign as explained by a recent article in the San Diego Reader.

Hispanic Votes for Governor: Comparing California and Texas

Pete Wilson’s 1994 unpopularity among Hispanics was new in California. The GOP typically received about half of the Hispanic vote in gubernatorial elections before 1994. In 1986, 46 percent of Hispanic voters in the state voted for the Republican governor George Deukmejian. In 1990, 47 percent supported Pete Wilson’s election, but they went heavily Democratic in 1994 and afterward (Figure 3).

In 1990, Wilson was seen as relatively pro-immigration. As a Republican Senator from California, he voted for the Reagan amnesty and tried, but failed, to include a large guest worker visa program in the final bill. If he had succeeded in including a large guest worker visa program as Senator, then illegal immigration wouldn’t have been a major issue in 1994. By that year, his pro-immigration credentials were entirely sullied.

Texas provides an excellent counter example to California. In 2022, Hispanics made up 40.3 percent of the population in California and 40.2 percent of the population of Texas. From 1980 to 2022, the non-white population of both states grew at about the same rate and were very closely correlated (coefficient of +0.99). Texas’s population was 61.1 percent non-white in 2022 while California’s was 66.3 percent non-white. The big difference between them is how their respective state GOPs treated a growing minority population during the 1990s and the first few decades of the 21^st century.

The Texas GOP behaved differently. In 1990, Governor Bush only earned 27 percent of the Hispanic vote compared to the California GOP’s 47 percent (Figure 4). In that year, Democrat Ann Richards was elected in Texas and Republican Pete Wilson won election in California. In 1994, the Texas Republican candidate George W. Bush ran on a pro-immigration platform and publicly eschewed the anti-immigration politics that Wilson championed. Bush received only 28 percent of the Hispanic vote in that year but Wilson’s Hispanic vote total collapsed to only 25 percent. In 1998, George W. Bush built on the inclusive, pro-immigrant language he used in his first campaign to earn 50 percent of the Hispanic vote while California Republican Dan Lungren inherited Wilson’s legacy and only earned 17 percent – practically the reverse of 1990.        

The Democratic share of the two-party vote in Presidential elections tells a related story (Figure 5).  Despite similar demographics, Texas and California have very different vote shares for Democrats in presidential elections. Texas’s dropped after the mid-1990s and California’s increased.       

The Texas GOP went from alienating Hispanics in the early 1990s to splitting them with Democrats in 1998, which continue to this day. The California GOP went from virtually splitting the Hispanic vote in 1990 to only capturing 17 percent of it in 1998 and rebounding somewhat since then. The Texas and California examples show that Hispanics can both be alienated or courted over the course of a few elections. Gimpel (2010) argues that Republican successes in Texas have more to do with Hispanic Democrats being deactivated by weak Democratic candidates than the GOP activating Hispanics, but that’s endogenous to how the two parties dealt with the issues of immigration on the state level. A GOP that is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as anti-Hispanic activates Hispanic voters in favor of the Democratic Party.  

Shifts in Partisanship: Comparing California and Texas

Monogan and Doctor (2021) argue that the 1994 campaigns for Proposition 187 and Governor Wilson crashed Hispanic support for the GOP in California and shifted it toward the Democratic Party. They used a metric called macropartisanship, which is a measure of political party affiliation, to document the shift of California Hispanics away from the Republicans and toward the Democrats (Figure 6). The authors conclude that, “time series analysis substantiates that this action [Wilson’s support for Proposition 187] led to a long-term 7.1 percentage point Democratic shift among California’s Hispanics.”

Democratic Party identification hit a low point in 1991 at the end of popular Republican executive rule at the national and state level. Both Hispanics, whites, and others were moving toward the Republican Party and away from the Democrats in California prior to 1991. That trend reversed in 1991, which is also the same year that Governor Wilson began to blame illegal immigrants and immigration in general for California’s troubles. A 1992 special Senate election in California also emphasized that trend. Those events reversed a decade’s long trend of Hispanics becoming less Democratic (Figure 6). Texas macropartisanship was stable throughout the period by comparison where Democratic Party affiliation in Texas didn’t budge (Figure 7). By 1998, California Hispanic identification with the Democratic Party was up 11 percentage points while it was down three in Texas. 

Monogan and Doctor (2021) estimate that the long-term effect of Proposition 187 was that Hispanics shifted 7.1 percentage points toward the Democrats while white increases in Democratic identification were so small that they were statistically insignificant.  Overall, they estimated a 4.3 percentage point shift in favor of the Democrats as a result of Proposition 187—more than enough to throw many elections to the Democratic Party.

Compared to national trends in Democratic Party identification, California and the rest of the nation moved together from 1969 to 1990 (+ 0.88). From 1991 to 2010, Democratic self-identification in California and the country as a whole became uncorrelated (-0.11) as California became more Democratic than the rest of the United States. Something occurred to Hispanic political party affiliations at the exact time when the California GOP was becoming more nativist and that’s probably not a coincidence.

Korey and Lascher (2006) found that California was divided into two eras of macropartisanship from 1980 to 2001. The first ran through 1991 and saw increasing Republican identification while the Democrats gained afterward. Much of that post-1991 change comes from Hispanics becoming increasingly Democratic and Democrats becoming increasingly Hispanic. One important point is that it is hard to determine if people tend to align their party identification with their ideologies or whether they align their ideologies with their party identification. The large number of conservative and moderate Hispanics who vote for the Democrats in California suggest the latter. Although the authors admit that there is no way to determine the precise reasons for the boost in Hispanic support for the Democrats, their findings are consistent with the argument that Hispanics and Asians were turned of to the Republican Party in the 1990s as a result of Proposition 187 and other anti-immigrant actions.  

Dyck, Johnson, and Wasson (2011) found that Proposition 187, the other propositions, and Pete Wilson’s divisive campaign quickened Hispanic movement away from the GOP and toward the Democratic Party. There was a 20-point shift of Hispanics increasingly identifying as Republicans from 1980 to 1991 that then reversed to a 30-point Hispanic swing against the GOP from 1991 to 2001. The growth of the Hispanic population from 1980 to 2001 made that swing enormously consequential for election outcomes. They concluded that two-thirds of the Hispanic turn away from the GOP occurred after the passage of Proposition 187. The anti-immigrant political strategy of the 1990s California GOP influenced Latino voters to leave the GOP and not return.   

Proposition 187 Alienated Hispanics

Hispanic voters were alienated from the GOP and welcomed by the Democratic Party during the fights over Proposition 187, Wilson’s reelection, and during a series of other propositions proposed in the mid-1990s. One way this shift occurred was by galvanizing more Hispanic naturalizations in response to the perceived threat. Increases in naturalization and the political activities of the naturalized are informative because prior to Proposition 187, naturalized Hispanics were less likely to participate in electoral politics and other activities with political organizations than similar native-born Hispanics according to DeSipio (1996). 

Pantoja, Ramirez, and Segura (2001) wanted to see whether Hispanics who naturalized because of the perceived political threat of Proposition 187 and Wilson’s campaign voted differently. They found that newly naturalized Hispanics in California behaved very differently from other Hispanic citizens of California and newly naturalized Hispanics in Florida and Texas. Voter turnout was higher for California Hispanics who naturalized in the shadow of the divisive Proposition 187 campaign than for Hispanics who naturalized at the same time in other states who were not the targets of anti-immigrant campaigns – 60 percent in the Golden States versus 37 percent in Texas. 

There was an 80 percent increase in naturalization applications filed between October 1994 and January 1995 but a roughly 650 percent increase in Los Angeles County following the kickoff of the Proposition 187 campaign. From 1993 to 1996, the number of naturalizations in California rose by 554 percent.  Excluding California, the nationwide increase was only 269 percent. Texas saw an even lower 219 percent increase. The nationwide, California, and Texas trends are all consistent with the threat thesis described by Pantoja, Ramirez, and Segura (2001).  The persistent difference between California and Texas is startling (Figure 8). The years of 1993 and 1994 were watershed years in California and not in Texas. Their conclusion is “[O]ur findings suggest that immigrant-bashing and other activities perceived to be anti-Latino potentially have huge negative political consequences for those political forces perceived to be the source of such attacks.”  

Not only were immigrants more likely to naturalize in California as a result of Proposition 187, they were also more likely to vote. Ramakrishnan and Espenshade (2001) found that immigrants in California were twice as likely to vote as immigrants in other states without anti-immigrant ballot propositions. That trend continued for subsequent generations as well. Second generation immigrants in California were 83 percent more likely to vote than their generational peers in other states while Californians in the third and higher generations were 32 percent more likely to do so. The so-called California effect dissipated in subsequent years, possibly because anti-immigrant propositions and candidates in other states activated voters there, but it did not fade away entirely. Proposition 187 prompted a large-scale increase in voting by the first and second generations.       

Barreto (2005) found that growth of the Hispanic vote in California was driven entirely by foreign-born Hispanics of the type activated by the Proposition 187 campaign and other anti-immigrant actions. Foreign-born Hispanics were more likely to vote in California in that year than native-born Hispanics and about even with non-Hispanics. From 1998 to 2002, the foreign-born Hispanic vote grew by 22.1 percent while the native-born Hispanic vote dropped by 5 percent. These new voters broke heavily for the Democratic Party.

Focusing on voter registration and turnout in Los Angeles County, Barreto and Woods (2001) find that Hispanics in the 1998 gubernatorial election were more likely to register and vote than other groups. After 1994, Hispanic registration significantly favored the Democrats as a result of that year’s contentious election that was reinforced by later contentious battles over Propositions 209 and 227. 

Citrin and Highton (2002) found that Hispanic turnout in California was always higher than in Texas but that the gulf widened in 1994 and afterwards. From 1990 to 2000, the percent of the California adult population that was Hispanic jumped from 22 to 26 percent but the percent of the voting population that was Hispanic went from 9 percent to 14 percent. In 2000, there were more Hispanic adults as a percentage of the population, a greater percentage of the total registered population, and of the voter population in the state of Texas than in California. The way the GOP treated them led to different political behavior. 

Pantoja and Segura (2003) argue that immigrant Hispanics in California in the mid-1990s became more politically active and interested in following the candidates than Hispanics in other states because of Proposition 187. The percentages of California Hispanics who were concerned with race relations, anti-Hispanic bigotry, and other negative issues stemming from these propositions were all higher among naturalized Californians than naturalized Texans. Interestingly, this activation effect only holds for naturalized Hispanics.

Political activities are not just limited to voting though. Barreto and Munoz (2003) look at non-citizens attending political meeting, volunteering for campaigns, and their money donations to political causes. They find that foreign-born Hispanics are not less active than naturalized and native-born Americans. Surprisingly, non-citizens in California were not more likely to be involved in political activities than those in other states.     

Reagan Amnesty Did Not Cause the Surge in Hispanic Anti-GOP Voters

Barreto, Ramirez, and Woods (2005) investigated whether the beneficiaries of the 1986 Reagan amnesty drove the bump in naturalizations in the mid-1990s. They found that amnestied immigrants did not drive that increase but that other demographic and mobilization variables explain the rise of the Hispanic vote in California from 1996 to 2000. 

Proposition 187 May Have Alienated Whites

Like the above papers, Bowler, Nicholson, and Segura (2006) argue that Propositions 187, 209, and 227 reversed the trend of Hispanics self-identifying as Republicans in the early 1990s and then rapidly shifted them to the Democratic camp. This paper differs from those above by finding an anti-Republican and pro-Democratic effect among non-Hispanic white Californians. In other words, California’s transformation is not just due to Hispanics being repelled by the GOP but also from non-Hispanic whites also leaving the GOP in response to these propositions (Table 1).

Changes in partisanship and party identification are usually slow and gradual but the rapidity of the shift in California points to an extraordinary catalyst – like Proposition 187 affecting a group of new citizens less attached to either party. One lesson from Bowler, Nicholson, and Segura (2006) is that anti-immigrant propositions or candidates don’t just activate opposition from the groups targeted but also lose more voters in every demographic group in the long term than they gain.               

Dyck, Johnson, and Wasson (2011), however, found that white voters were not turned away from the GOP as a result of Proposition 187 but that that loss in Hispanic voters was far greater than any gain, explaining the GOP’s future defeats. From 1980 to 2001, they found that the change in voting habits of non-Hispanic whites were unremarkable. Monogan and Doctor (2021) also found that the white vote in California did not shift as a result of Proposition 187. Still, there’s good reason to think that Proposition 187 changed the minds of more than just Hispanics in California or that other biggest political changes were underway.

Did Proposition 187 Really Matter?

The evidence above is convincing, but there is paper by Irish Hui and David O. Sears that casts doubt on whether Proposition 187 and other similar propositions at the time really changed California politics and I would be remiss without mentioning it. Using several data sources, they find zero effect from those propositions on macropartisan political alignment in California. Their paper is worth considering as part of a broader literature on this topic and should increase your caution when interpreting the above.  

I Was Wrong About Immigration Politics – Mea Culpa

In October 2014, I wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed that argued the modern nativist movement may doom the national Republican Party to electoral defeat if it succeeded in taking over the party. I followed that up with other pieces, research, and appearances on television and the radio. My evidence was the history of the California Republican Party, the Federalists, Know-Nothings, and Whigs in the 19th century all committing seppuku on an altar of immigration restrictionism, and opinion polling that seemed to show that many non-white and younger voters rejected immigration restrictionism while also holding several mainstream or conservative opinions.

However, Republicans have done well since then by winning the 2016 Presidential election and they seem to be very close to winning in 2024 too. They bombed the 2018 midterm, lost the 2020 election, and underperformed in the 2022 midterms, but little if any of their underperformance there can be blamed on immigration and the border chaos in 2022 may have slightly helped the GOP. Most of their political problems since I wrote my WSJ op-ed stem from the personality of their presidential candidate in each election since 2014, the conservative electorate’s deference to him, and unrelated policy issues like abortion. Border chaos and the GOP’s restrictionist reaction to it may have even helped them. Thus, I was wrong about the political consequences of embracing an anti-immigration position.

Conservatives skeptical of immigration often go further, claiming that modern immigrants and their descendants are less likely to become Republicans than the descendants of earlier immigrant groups. Polls show that Hispanics lean Democratic in the 2024 election, but not by much. Polls like these overstate Democratic support among the subsequent generations of Americans because there are millions of descendants of Hispanic and Asian immigrants who do not self-identify as Hispanic or Asian in polls because of ethnic attrition. Ethnicity and race (with the likely exception of being black) are not as sticky in the United States as many progressives and conservatives assume – the government just created a new one that will likely result in a new and deeply held ethnic identity for many because culture is often downstream of politics. Despite my warnings in The Wall Street Journal a decade ago, I’ve long maintained that immigrants and their descendants are basically assimilating to American policy and political opinions – for better and worse.

My only counterargument is that Hispanics and Asians would have moved more toward the GOP sooner without the harsh anti-immigration policy positions of recent years even if all else had remained the same. The policy opinions between immigrants, their children, and the GOP are just too close. An inevitable trend was perhaps slowed down or diminished somewhat, but not by much. But what would a pro-immigration national Trumpist GOP look like? It’s too improbable and unlikely to confidently imagine because disliking foreigners is the only consistent ideological commitment he’s made. Nationalism without nativism would be as unusual and unlikely as a conservative teacher’s union. Still, that’s my only (weak) defense.

I was wrong that the GOP’s embrace of an anti-immigration policy would doom the party’s political and electoral prospects, but I’ve been correct about the descendants of immigrants increasingly assimilating to American policy positions and support for the Republican Party – for better and worse. Immigration skeptics were correct that embracing restrictionist policy positions wouldn’t doom or even harm the GOP’s political prospects, but wrong about the political assimilation of the descendants of immigrants into the American political mainstream – including their propensity to vote Republican, meaning that there’s even less reason to be a nativist today than 10 years ago. Which error do you think is greater?

Conclusion

There are two big disagreements in the research cited above. The first is whether there really was a change in Californian partisanship and voting behavior around 1994, with most of the evidence pointing to “yes” and one paper by Hui and Sears (2018) finding otherwise. The second disagreement is how non-Hispanic whites reacted to Proposition 187 and the GOP’s nativist turn. Bowler, Nicholson, and Segura (2006) found that whites left the GOP as a result of their nativism and perceived racial appeals because they were too explicit as Mendelberg (2001) describes. In contrast, Dyck, Johnson, and Wasson (2011) and Monogan and Doctor (2021) find no change in white attitudes. However, they agree that Hispanics rejected the GOP in large part due to Proposition 187, Wilson’s campaign, and the other GOP-supported propositions.

Demographics aren’t political destiny, how political parties and movements react to changing demographics helps explain why. The thoughtful reader who still doesn’t want to credit California GOP-fueled nativism with turning most of the state’s voting Hispanics into strong supporters of the Democratic Party must explain why such a titanic shift occurred in California right when prominent Republicans began to campaign on the harms of immigration, but not in Texas where Governor George W. Bush ran on a pro-immigration platform and actually began to split the Hispanic vote. The political history of the 1990s strongly suggests that political decisions can turn a group of voters against a political party when they feel targeted by it. 

The California Republican Party’s decision to represent the anti-immigration wing of the American electorate in the early 1990s destroyed that state’s GOP for at least a generation in exchange for winning one election in 1994 and a symbolic victory on Proposition 187 that didn’t actually change policy. That was a bad deal. What happened in California at that time appears to be a perfect storm of events that undermined the GOP in that state, but state Republican Parties in other states that passed harsher immigration laws like Arizona, Texas, and Florida don’t seem to have suffered the same fate and neither has the national GOP.

The oft-repeated phrase “as California goes, so goes the nation” should be replaced with “as California goes, so goes California” in at least this one case. Anti-immigration politics can likely explain California’s dramatic shift leftward, but that effect is confined to the Golden State.