(LifeSiteNews) — When President-elect Donald Trump flipped 10 of California’s 58 counties from blue to red in November, winning nearly 40 percent of the vote, optimists glimpsed the green shoots of a conservative revival in the failed liberal state.
Yet Republicans have not won a statewide office in California since 2006 and continue to be outnumbered by Democrats in the state legislature by two to one.
While California Family Council was “excited to see several seats held by progressive anti-Christian legislators flipped to elect more family-friendly conservatives, both houses of the legislature are still dominated by a party hostile to biblical values,” CFC vice president Greg Burt told LifeSiteNews.
“When Trump was elected in 2016, Democrats in California doubled down on their most leftist policies, knowing the new president was unpopular in the state,” Burt said. But as the percentage of Californians voting for Trump increased in both 2020 and 2024, “I would expect some caution” in the state capitol in the new year.
“I think the hard leftists in the Democratic Party will not change their tune, but I’m hoping the moderate Democrats will find their backbone and resist going along with their liberal leaders,” Burt said.
California’s head liberal leader is Governor Gavin Newsom, who within days of the election announced plans for an emergency legislative session to “Trump-proof” the state’s policies related to abortion, gender ideology, “climate change,” and illegal immigration.
During the special session held December 2, Newsom proposed spending up to $25 million to begin prepping a fresh wave of lawsuits. California sued the Trump administration 123 times during his first term as president, and Newsom is keen to again spearhead the progressive resistance in the second term.
The previous “not my president” rallying cry rings hollower today because Trump won the national popular vote. Newsom, meanwhile, has mismanaged California into insolvency and is poorly positioned to fund a new legal offensive. Due to his extravagant spending, along with a mass exodus of taxpaying businesses and residents, the state’s budget has swung wildly from a surplus of nearly $100 billion in 2022-23 to a deficit of some $70 billion in 2024-25.
The mayor of Newport Beach, California, countered with a call to “Newsom-proof Orange County.” The comment was prompted by the detention in November by the U.S. Coast Guard of 21 illegal immigrants off the shores of his affluent city. The mayor complained that California’s “sanctuary state” laws shield illegal immigrants from deportation but burden local communities with providing services while contributing to rising crime and homelessness.
The neighboring city of Huntington Beach has resisted leftist mandates from Sacramento involving voter IDs, pro-LGBTQ flags and library books, and COVID-era masks and lockdowns. The city had a reputation for combative conservatism even before pro-Trump candidates swept all seven seats on the city council in the recent election.
Last March, Huntington Beach voters amended the city charter to require photo identification to vote in municipal elections, spurring state officials to sue the city. Although the city won a major court ruling, under a new state law effective on January 1, local governments in California are now prohibited from requiring voters to show ID before casting a ballot.
Clashes between a conservative desire for local autonomy and a progressive insistence on state hegemony have produced other new laws in California that work to undermine traditional Christianity.
Cities and counties, for example, no longer have the right to prevent the establishment of abortion facilities within their jurisdictions. That big change stemmed from a high-profile controversy in Beverly Hills, where city officials declined to promptly approve a permit for a facility specializing in late-term abortions.
The new law refers to so-called “reproductive freedom,” including a purported “right to abortion and contraception,” as a “fundamental constitutional right” in California thanks to a ballot proposition passed by voters in 2022 after Roe v. Wade was overturned.
School districts are now prohibited from requiring staff to notify parents of changes in their child’s gender identification or pronouns. That law, the first of its kind in the nation, was Sacramento’s response to pro-parent policies enacted by more than a dozen school districts across the state.
The “California Freedom to Read Act,” a new ban on “book bans” in public libraries, will ensure minors have unrestricted access to material about topics like homosexuality, gender ideology, and critical race theory. Critics of the law have warned it will make public libraries unsafe for children and expose them to pornography.
The impetus for the “California Freedom to Read Act” was the formation in conservative communities of review committees to identify children’s books with inappropriate content that would require parental permission to access.
“With Democrats so dominant in Sacramento that they can dismiss the cultural grievances animating political discourse in red states,” according to CalMatters, “Republicans are turning to local governance to push back against California’s progressive values. The state has moved quickly to shut down these flashes of rebellion through bills such as (the ban on restricting library books).”
“How California conservatives are fighting back” was the title of a CalMatters article last August that mentioned local school boards as a path back to political power for Republicans. Last November, nearly three dozen conservative candidates were elected to school boards across the state on parental rights platforms.
Founded in 2003, California Family Council is the public policy partner of Focus on the Family, Alliance Defending Freedom, and Family Research Council. CFC is also connected to California Family Alliance, which produces annual scorecards for state legislators “showcasing where each member of the Assembly and Senate stands on issues of critical importance to biblical values.” The 2024 scorecards were released in October, helping voters make informed choices the following month.
CFC also maintains a detailed watchlist that tracks bills of interest as they move through the state legislature. The nonprofit organization’s blog highlights recent developments like the purging of Christian foster parents in California; the proposed expansion of the state’s assisted suicide law to include people with non-terminal conditions like early stage dementia; and Newsom’s push to censor political speech under another new law.
CFC’s Burt suggested future progress in promoting Christian conservatism in politics and the public square in California will require greater commitment by allies currently watching from the sidelines.
That would likely include the great majority of Catholics as well as the Sacramento-based California Catholic Conference (CCC). The CCC serves as “the official voice of the Catholic community in California’s public policy arena,” but its visible level of engagement in key policy debates is typically limited.
The current president of the CCC is Cardinal Robert McElroy of the Diocese of San Diego, known for his heterodox positions on the sinfulness of homosexual acts, female “ordination,” and the exclusion from participation in the Eucharist of divorced and remarried or self-professed “LGBTQ” Catholics.
“Sadly, too many biblically faithful Christians are still self-censoring, lying low as the culture becomes more hostile to biblical values,” according to Burt. “That has emboldened our legislative leaders and the culture elites in the media, arts, and education who are hellbent on rebelling against God and his moral laws as revealed in Scripture. So that needs to change if we want to see California change.”
Robert Jenkins is a pseudonym for a Catholic writer living in Sacramento, California.