Chart of the day: California is somewhere else

I love this chart! Got it from Kevin Drum (he added the helpful arrow) who got it from this American Prospect article.

It's a visual representation of what I keep harping on in the comments of national blogs these days: California may seem like a strange alien land, but we're working through a future the rest of the country can learn from and emulate.  Instead of finding the secret to harmonious bipartisan cooperation, we've managed to ride demographic change, hard work at energizing a new electorate, and recurrent conservative stupidity to eradicate most Republican influence at the state level.

The Governator's tenure masked this, but he was just an electable cartoon character. No other Republican has made a dent at the state level in this century.

 This doesn't mean we've arrived at nirvana. It means that the locus of political pulling and hauling is now within the Democratic party.

It also means that politics is once again a struggle about different ideas about how to make the state prosperous and liveable, rather than simply about how to get around folks trying to freeze the state in a mythical 1950s.

There could be worse times to live in.