California's political map still splits neatly along a coastal-inland divide, but the geography of the state's conservative movement has quietly shifted, according to a new report from the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonpartisan think tank. The findings offer the clearest picture yet of how California's political identity has changed in the years since the 2024 presidential election, when coastal counties voted overwhelmingly Democratic while nearly all inland counties turned red, except for three small counties bordering Nevada.
For decades, the conventional wisdom held that Southern California, and Orange County in particular, was the heart of California conservatism. That is no longer the case, the PPIC report found. Orange County has steadily moved leftward, diluting what was once one of the most reliably Republican regions in the state. "[Orange] County is more of a swing county than the bastion of conservatism like it used to be," said Eric McGhee, the study's author, according to SFGATE.
Instead, the report locates California's strongest conservative sentiment in the north, particularly in the suburbs surrounding Sacramento and in the Redding and Red Bluff area, where at least 40% of residents describe themselves as conservative. That marks a meaningful realignment for a state where political battle lines were long drawn between north and south rather than coast and interior.
Still Bluer Than It Looks From Outside
Despite the rightward lean of inland California, the PPIC's data shows that even the most conservative pockets of the state remain well to the left of deep-red states elsewhere in the country. "There is variation around the state, but the conservative parts of the state aren't as conservative as Texas or Kansas or Mississippi," McGhee said.
That nuance shows up clearly on the issues. A majority of Californians statewide support action on climate change, favor abortion access, and hold positive views of immigration, the report found, and that includes many residents in conservative-leaning regions. The main exceptions are Shasta County and a cluster of counties along the state's central eastern border, including Inyo and Mono counties, where support for immigrants falls below 50%. Support for state-level climate action peaks around the San Francisco and Los Angeles metropolitan areas but still reaches 65% statewide. On abortion, 70% of Californians support access either without restrictions or with rules that keep it largely legal.
The PPIC built its findings by dividing California into 46 distinct regions and drawing on data from its annual statewide survey, which contacts thousands of residents each year about policy issues. Researchers then used a statistical model to estimate opinion in areas where direct survey data was thinner.
Housing Anxiety Spreads Inland
One of the report's most striking findings has little to do with partisan identity at all: nearly every part of California now agrees that housing is a serious problem, though the intensity of that concern varies sharply by region. Coastal areas remain the most alarmed, with more than 70% of respondents there calling housing a major issue. But more than half of residents in nearly every other part of the state agree.
What has changed most dramatically over the past two decades is where that anxiety is growing fastest. The Kern, Shasta and north central regions have seen the sharpest increases in housing concern, rising 20 percentage points or more since the PPIC last conducted this kind of regional analysis in 2020. Meanwhile, worry has actually eased in San Francisco, Marin and San Mateo counties, as well as in coastal Los Angeles.
"We think of the Bay Area as being where the housing crisis is, but it's actually not where the housing crisis is," McGhee said, according to SFGATE. The comment underscores a broader theme in the report: California's affordability struggles, long associated with expensive coastal metros, are increasingly being felt in the state's interior, where housing costs have historically been lower and growth has been faster.
Economic Pessimism Runs Deepest on the Coast
The report also found widespread pessimism about the state's economic trajectory, though that anxiety is not evenly distributed. Liberal-leaning coastal areas are the most worried about what lies ahead. More than 80% of residents in parts of the Bay Area and central Los Angeles predicted difficult economic times, compared with more than 60% in the far north and Central Valley who said the same.
That gap is notable because it runs counter to assumptions that economic anxiety tracks most closely with conservative, rural areas. Instead, California's most affluent and liberal metro regions appear to be bracing hardest for a downturn, even as concern about affordability and housing costs climbs fastest in the state's interior.
Watching the Central Valley
The PPIC last released this kind of detailed regional breakdown in 2020, and the clearest shift since then, according to the report, is in how inland Californians think about housing affordability. Asked where he expects to see the biggest changes the next time PPIC conducts this analysis, five to ten years from now, McGhee pointed to the Central Valley and fast-growing Sacramento suburbs. "A lot of the affordability crisis is really about the interior of the state," he said.
That forecast suggests California's political and economic fault lines may continue to move inland, even as the coastal-versus-interior divide that shaped the 2024 election results remains the dominant feature of the state's political map. For now, the PPIC's findings complicate simple narratives about who is conservative, who is worried about money, and where California's next political battlegrounds might be, pointing less to a single red-blue split and more to a patchwork of regional pressures reshaping the state from the inside out.
