Florida is winning the political battle with California as Trump takes office

WASHINGTON —  The rivalry between California and Florida reached a high mark in November 2023 when Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, faced off against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, on Fox News over which state held a better model for the country.

Thirteen months later, DeSantis has left the national stage after an aborted presidential run. But his state is winning the political war.

The nation under President-elect Donald Trump will look far more like Trump’s adopted home state of Florida, after he defeated Vice President Kamala Harris by painting her as an out-of-touch California liberal.

Trump is stocking his Cabinet with Floridians. And his plans to reverse California’s policies on the environment, crime, homelessness and education are facing far less pushback than they did during his first term, thanks to the state’s diminishing clout in Congress and a system of checks on Trump’s power that has eroded.

“These are all folks born and raised in our state and are going to show America our type of leadership,” said Brian Ballard, a powerful Florida lobbyist and Republican fundraiser whose firm previously employed Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and still employs his nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, Florida’s former attorney general. (Ballard’s expanded footprint now includes offices in Washington and West Los Angeles, opened two years ago, another sign of his state’s incursion.)

Other high-level Floridians likely to be in Trump’s inner circle include Sen. Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick for secretary of State, and Rep. Mike Waltz, his choice as national security advisor.

Two prominent people in Trump’s orbit with California ties, advisors Elon Musk and Stephen Miller, are sharp critics of the state’s business and immigration policies, which they have pledged to help Trump reverse.

Their unified efforts are expected to unleash a continuation of fights that began eight years ago during Trump’s first term, when he sought to halt California’s policies providing sanctuary for immigrants who came to the country illegally, slash its authority to set environmental policies such as automobile fuel standards, alter water policy to benefit farmers and suspend aid after wildfires.

He was thwarted in many of those efforts by regulators, advisors who found ways to change his mind, courts and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat who proved his most formidable adversary.

Democratic attorneys general filed a record 155 lawsuits against the first Trump administration, winning 83% of cases, according to a tally by Paul Nolette, a political science professor at Marquette University. California was involved in more than 100 such lawsuits.

But Trump has picked staffers for his second term who are less likely to push back against his wishes. The Supreme Court has grown more deferential to Trump, who appointed three of its nine members. And Pelosi is no longer leading her party, while Republicans won control of both the House and Senate in last month’s election.

California Democrats’ best defense appears to be Republican dysfunction, as demonstrated by the party’s struggles last week to pass a bill in the GOP-controlled House that would avoid a government shutdown.

Trump, meanwhile, has vowed to fight the state this time on a variety of fronts, including its homeless policies, its resistance to a border wall, its electric car mandate and his plans to begin mass deportations that would disproportionately affect California, a border state with the nation’s largest Latino population.

Newsom, who declined an interview request, has vowed to continue the fight against Trump’s policies but without what he called “a resistance brand” that defined his earlier clashes. Other Democrats have approached Trump’s second term with more conciliatory rhetoric as the party struggles to coalesce around strategy.

Former Sen. Barbara Boxer, a Democrat who helped define the party’s liberal wing for decades, argues that Trump will incite his own backlash by overreaching.

“Bring it on,” she said.

“People just decided they weren’t feeling happy about things,” she added. “They didn’t vote on the issues that are now going to hit them in the face,” she said, citing a list of policies from Trump’s allies that could lead to workers losing overtime and residents losing breathable air.

But even if Trump’s policies help Democrats politically, they may have a deep impact on Californians.

Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, who began preparing potential lawsuits months before the election, said he expects to battle the incoming administration over immigration, climate, reproductive rights, gun safety, democracy-related issues and civil rights. He acknowledged the Supreme Court’s rightward turn but pointed out that most decisions are made by trial and circuit court judges.

“We can and will prevail, and we have prevailed in front of the U.S. Supreme Court,” he said.

Bonta, who is considering a run for governor in 2026, argued that voters were choosing Trump the man — narrowly — rather than a single state’s governing model.

“The Florida model? You mean Matt Gaetz or DeSantis or Pam Bondi?” he said, referring to the former House member who withdrew from consideration as attorney general over allegations of sexual misconduct with minors, along with the governor and current attorney general nominee. “I don’t think they’re a model for the future of our country. What else is the Florida model? ‘Don’t say gay’ — just absolutely exclusionary and discriminatory? A formal program sending immigrants across the country as political pawns?”

But Bonta and other Democrats concede the party just lost an election and that Trump, even as he lost California by 20 percentage points, gained about 10 percentage points over his 2016 and 2020 margins in the state.

Much of that growth came among the state’s Latino population, which makes up a large proportion of Democrats’ traditional working-class base.

“It’s all centered around affordability. California is the least affordable state when you factor in housing costs,” said Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump Republican pollster who conducted surveys of Latino voters after the election and has focused on their evolving views for decades. “The idea of California values is specific to cultural issues. It is essentially ignoring economic issues.”

Madrid pointed to policies like Newsom’s plan to phase out sales of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035 as an example of a policy that does not speak to working-class voters.

Most Latinos in the state have to live farther from their jobs, because of the high cost of housing, and pay more for gas, but they cannot afford a new EV or benefit from a Biden administration rebate. The majority of their income is spent on housing costs, which have grown in part because of costly building regulations.

New census estimates released Thursday show California gaining 232,570 residents between 2023 and 2024 after pandemic-era declines. But the state lost more residents (239,575) to other parts of the country than any other state, and saw an increase only because of immigrants from other countries, according to the estimates.

Florida’s population gain was among the largest: 467,347 residents, comprising both immigrants and domestic migrants.

California’s long-beleaguered Republicans are gloating as they promise to work with Trump to dismantle Democratic-led projects and environmental regulations.

Rep. Vince Fong, a Bakersfield Republican who won an election to succeed former Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy earlier this year, said he will file legislation to halt funding on California’s high-speed rail project and work with Trump to build a border wall in the state, blaming a porous border for allowing fentanyl-smuggling from China.

In an interview, he praised Florida effusively as a better model for business, regulation, environmental policy and housing costs and welcomed the state’s influence at the national level.

“It’s ironic to me that Gov. Newsom and the Democrats in the state Legislature are now concerned about affordability,” he said. “You hear them talking about it, but it’s their policies.”

He accused Newsom of waging war with Florida and the Trump administration for his own personal gain.

“He is trying to elevate himself for his own political purposes and at the expense of Californians,” he said.

Newsom’s office said the state maintains the world’s fifth-largest economy and ranks first in new business starts and private sector jobs. Brandon Richards, a spokesman, said Newsom is traveling the state to expand economic opportunity.

But many of the nation’s biggest business titans are making their own pilgrimages — to visit Trump at his home in Florida.