Political tectonic plates slipped past one another Wednesday, as the number of registered Democrats surpassed Republicans in Orange County, once a GOP bastion in California and in the nation.
Orange County helped launch and nurture Republican politicians from Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to the congressman who went by the nickname “B-1 Bob” (Dornan).
It’s where Reagan launched his 1984 presidential re-election campaign, and tossed off the one-liner, at private fundraisers and later publicly: “It’s nice to be in Orange County, where the good Republicans go to die.”
But for weeks, students of political data have been counting the days when the inevitable would occur, and it happened with the latest registration numbers, posted Wednesday. Democratic registration hit 547,458 to the GOP’s 547,369, or 34% of the 1.6 million registered voters in Orange County. No-party preference voters grew the fastest to 449,711, or 27%.
As President Trump began running for the White House in 2015, there were 124,600 more registered Republicans than Democrats in the county. He promised to grow the party. The reverse has occurred. The numbers in 2015:
- 575,329 were Republicans, 40%.
- 450,704 were Democrats, 32%.
- 327,222 were no-party preference voters, 23%.
What a change from the Orange County of yesteryear.