Voters, mind you, not Democrat Party leaders. The latter have offered voters almost nothing but La Résistance 2.0 since the moment that Kamala Harris called off her victory party in early November. It worked so well for them the first time around, they believe, and Democrat leaders either have nothing else to offer or simply refuse to accept reality.
Voters, on the other hand, have had enough … even in California. According to Politico’s new poll, Golden State voters have no real interest in going to war with Donald Trump. Instead, they seem less enthused than ever about the state’s one-party rule and the fruits it has borne:
In a dual survey of California voters and political professionals who are driving the state’s agenda, the electorate is strikingly more likely to want a detente with the White House. Voters are also more divided on issues like immigration and climate change, where Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic state lawmakers have asserted progressive ambitions that rebuff the president’s agenda.
A plurality of voters is skeptical of legal immigration, and less than half think the state should be able to set its own strict standards on vehicle emissions, an authority California has used for more than half a century.
The results suggest a disconnect between the policymaking class and voters in an overwhelmingly blue state where Trump made broad inroads in 2024 amid widespread frustrations over crime and a prohibitively high cost of living. Registered Democrats, however — who comprise nearly half the electorate — are more enthusiastic about progressive policies and more eager to challenge Trump’s Washington.
This might reflect the recognition by voters — even in deep-blue California — of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of La Résistance in either iteration. The first time around, Democrats launched their “resistance” on the false claim that Trump won office illegitimately through “Russia collusion.” Voters eventually discovered that was a lie, and those who paid attention now know that the lie came from Hillary Clinton’s dirty-tricks team and Barack Obama’s FBI.
This time around, there’s no question at all about legitimacy. Trump stomped Harris in the election and won both the popular vote and the Electoral College, the firsrt GOP candidate to do so in 20 years. The election was completely legit and more importantly obviously so. Attempts to “resist” a legitimately elected president are a rejection of elections and democracy, not a healthy opposition based on policies and principles. Most voters won’t sign onto hate campaigns, which is what La Résistance has been in both iterations, but again nakedly so in v2.0.
But there’s more to this voter shrug than just exhaustion, as Politico hints. It turns out that Trump’s policies are addressing real concerns that California voters have, and that California’s Democrat leadership keeps ignoring. Even the auto emissions standards that California has championed for my entire life — and which Democrats in other states attempted to impose elsewhere — has seen support dwindle down to a virtual tie. Democrat leaders, however, support it by an 82/14 margin. Voters support legal immigration but want less of it, more control of illegal immigration, and more emphasis on assimilation; Democrat leaders push “diversity” and siloing instead.
And this disconnect is in California. Imagine what the disconnect looks like across the country between voters and Democrat leaders. In fact, we don’t have to imagine, because the latest poll from Harvard-Harris CAPS shows where American voters are on the policies that matter most to them:
This gets us back to the 80/20 phenomenon of La Résistance 2.0. In their rush to offer knee-jerk opposition to anything Trump proposes, Democrat leaders have aligned themselves with the political fringe on almost every issue. That’s especially true on illegal immigration, nearly literally an 80/20 issue with voters and almost a 2:1 issue among Democrat voters. Democrat leaders are tripping over themselves to fly to El Salvador to stand in solidarity with an illegal alien who has a record of domestic-abuse allegations as well as significant evidence of being in an organized-crime ring operated outside of the US.
That won’t sell — not in California, and not anywhere else, either. And yet Democrat leaders are so lacking in any answers to these issue sets that the only thing they can offer voters is rehashed Trumpophobia and Monty Python’s Argument Clinic politics.
