The Swing State Where California Is the Issue

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RENO, Nevada — Jim DeMartini got his new McLaren for free. Or at least, that’s how he’s worked out the math in his head.

“I was paying $200,000 a year in state income tax [in California],” he tells me at his kitchen table of his home in the foothills of western Reno. “I paid $440,000 for that car, and two years living here, we got it for free, right?”

For 46 years, before he settled in Nevada, DeMartini operated a farm that at its peak totaled 1,100 acres outside of Modesto, California. But in 2020, he picked up and moved across state lines.

“California just got to be a communist state,” he told me. “[It was] Kamala Harris, it was Governor Newsom, it was a leftist, anti-business legislature who just felt they had to control everything. They even went so far as banning straws.”

Walking through the front door of DeMartini’s palatial home confirms his political party of choice. He has two huge, metal elephants guarding the entrance, like sentinels on watch. A hat resting on a coat hanger reads “I’m voting for the convicted felon.” Mail aimed at Trump supporters dots his kitchen table. All that, of course, is if you missed the Trump flag on the veranda and the Trump signs in his driveway.

DeMartini is part of a rising demographic that could jeopardize Harris’ chances of winning this battleground state: Ex-Californians who hate their former home state’s politics.

Since 2020 alone, over 150,000 Californians have moved to Nevada — California expats today make up over 20 percent of Nevada’s population. County to county migration flows from the last census show that of the top 16 counties supplying new residents to Reno’s Washoe County, 11 of them are in California.

It’s not clear exactly how many of these voters are Republicans. Nevada certainly has its fair share of California liberals who have moved into the state — many conservatives here complain that liberal “refugees from Commie-fornia” have driven Nevada politics leftward over the past two decades.

But the gap between registered Republicans and Democrats in the state has shrunk from 111,000 in 2020 to 71,000 in 2023, and the number of nonpartisan voters has exploded. In a state that was decided by less than 34,000 votes in 2020, a bloc of highly motivated, California-hating ex-Californians with an axe to grind could play a pivotal role in shaping the outcome this year.

“I think ex-Californians could certainly be a significant help [to making Nevada red in November],” says Nevada Republican State Sen. Jeff Stone — a former California state legislator who now runs the website “Help Me Flee California.” “They can also explain to Nevadans what Kamala Harris did as a district attorney in San Francisco, as the attorney general in the state of California.”

Unlike Las Vegas, Nevada’s largest city, Reno exists in the shadow of California. It’s less than an hour’s drive from the California side of Lake Tahoe, home to tony ski resorts, multimillion dollar homes dotting the landscape and a whole lot of Harris/Walz lawn signs. For many California refugees, they’ve found a new, more accommodating home here that’s within spitting (or driving) distance of their old one.

On the outskirts of Reno, a tech boom spurred on by a Tesla gigafactory has brought a series of young, often Democratic tech professionals to the state. But the city and the state are also home to a growing number of Republicans, many of whom are tax refugees or see Nevada GOP Gov. Joe Lombardo’s victory in 2022 as a welcome sign that the state is trending right.

Joe Dutra, the self-proclaimed “cowboy Willy Wonka of Nevada,” is one of those Republicans. He comes from a family whose Sacramento roots date back to the 1800s. When he started his candy business, he did so out of the back of a 20-foot trailer in California’s capital city, packing up chocolate-covered sunflower seeds. In 2006, though, as the business was growing and California taxes were getting onerous, Dutra bought a building in Reno to facilitate a budding candy empire that he thought he could one day hand over to his children.

Now, after some big upgrades, he has a 47,000-square-foot factory producing vats of candy in Reno every day — and he says he may need to expand even more soon.

“In California, you were just a business,” Dutra says in his office, which is adorned with photos of him meeting politicians of both parties, including Donald Trump in 2017, and a hat that reads ‘Make Candy Great Again.’ “Here, you’re somebody that’s bringing jobs to the community … [Nevada’s government] was easy to work with, as compared to doing something in California.”

According to Dutra, most ex-California business people he knows are just like him — staunch Republicans who “just believe in less regulations and lower taxes.” And he thinks there are more of those reliably Republican voters here now than ever before.

“I think I’ve seen a lot more people moving out in the last four years,” he says. “It’s been a big push.”

Chuck Muth, a longtime Republican consultant in Nevada, thinks these voters exited the state precisely to get away from California politicians like Harris. “There are Californians who fled California and moved to Nevada because they wanted to get away from [Harris’] types of policies … there absolutely is potential in a messaging campaign that suggests, ‘hey, this is what you fled in California, you sure as hell don’t want it in Washington, D.C.’”

Nevada hasn’t exactly welcomed the flood of Californians with welcome arms. Many here are convinced the newcomers are driving up housing prices, exacerbating social ills and even driving like maniacs. T-shirts and bumper stickers in downtown Reno read “Don’t California My Nevada.” A poll conducted earlier this year showed that 51 percent of Nevada residents said the government should make it more difficult for Californians to move into their state.

“We got to a signal light after we first moved here [in 2009], and there was a car in front of us and it had a bumper sticker,” Kathy Benson, a retired CPA originally from the Bay Area, told me in the patio of Centro Bar & Kitchen, a small-plate restaurant in downtown Reno. “The bumper sticker said ‘we don’t give a shit how you did it in California.’ So [my husband] and I looked at each other and said ‘we are going to like this state.’”

Nevada Republicans see this group as ripe for Trump’s message — and primed to vote against Harris, a former California senator and attorney general. Trump has been unstinting in his criticism of California’s governance, frequently attacking California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom and validating the newcomers’ decisions to flee California’s high state income taxes for a state with none, and its liberal state government for one headed by a Republican governor.

All of it dovetails with national Republican messaging attacking Harris specifically for her “California-ness,” calling her a “California radical” and a “San Francisco liberal.”

“I think the theme of the message is, do you want to ‘California’ the United States? It’s the way cancer metastasizes,” says Stone. “People were tired of it, and so they're coming here, and they're telling their neighbors why they moved here. And I think it's having an effect on people that don't have firsthand knowledge of what Kamala Harris has stood for and what she's done in the past to decline the quality of life of people that live in California.”

That’s a message that the Republican Party and the Trump campaign in Nevada are hitting as well. In mailers, they’ve singled out policies from her time as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general in an attempt to prove just how liberal she is, including her opposition to concealed carry permits and her “shield[ing] of convicted crack dealers.”

“I truly believe that the people that are moving from California can help turn the state [red],” says Erica Neely, who grew up in south central Los Angeles but is now a Nevada resident running for the state Assembly.

Her campaign for office highlights how Nevada is beginning to look more like the troubled, high-cost-of-living state she fled. On her campaign website, Neely features an article that speaks directly to her message: “Escaped from California: I'm Running to Save Nevada from the Same Fate.”

Stone insists Harris is inextricably tied to her home state in local voters’ minds, despite winning election as vice president four years ago.

“[Crime in San Francisco] is a shining example of one of California’s failures, and it’s got Kamala Harris’s name written all over it,” he told me. “And so there’s a deep association with the failures of San Francisco and Kamala Harris, and I think those are going to be used against her as she runs for president of the United States.”

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