r/politics • u/sweatycat New York • 1d ago

California to Negotiate Trade With Other Countries to Bypass Trump Tariffs

https://www.newsweek.com/california-newsom-trade-trump-tariffs-2055414
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u/myadsound California 1d ago

CA is always the one leading

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u/pomonamike California 1d ago

It’s kinda crazy that we are a second-level political division when by ourselves we would be one of the economically biggest nations on the planet.

It really doesn’t make practical sense when we have to bend the knee to certain senators that were voted in by fewer people than live in say… Riverside.

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u/LordChunggis 1d ago

I think the founding fathers would have framed the senate a little differently if they had thought a state like California was even a possibility.

My brother and I have heated arguments on the senate. He says the senate is functioning as intended, "protection of the minority," I call it tyranny of the minority when California and New York have the same Senate representation as South Dakota and Wyoming.

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u/boo_jum Washington 1d ago

Or Alaska.

It’s bizarre to me how red Alaska is just on the fact that the government literally subsidises people to live there. (I get and very much support the Native population living in their ancestral lands; I don’t get white folks with deep red politics getting paid to live there but being deep red in their politics.)

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u/EitherSpite4545 1d ago

Hi Alaskan here let me give some context on why. So native population tends to as a whole lean Blue not wildly but by enough. Now let's move onto why white people made Alaska as a whole red despite constantly whining for more socialism but also cutting government services (our current red governor only won because he literally bribed the people saying he'd increase our pfd even though there's no money to and then over 6 years never did).

Back when Alaska first became a state in 59 we trended very very purple and would've been a swing state in a modern election. Even then the red we had in us would be what would eventually become the upcoming libertarian movement type of red and not the current christofascist red.

That all changed however when oil and gas was found in the 70s. Before that point Alaska's industry was basically all logging and fishing which would get a diverse group of people from all over the states and other countries (the state has a very large population of southeast asians because of fishing industry). When oil was discovered however the various drilling companies saw that the state was a gold mine and that the population was so low it was actually feasible to overwrite the dominant culture in the state with transplants. So the drilling companies started exclusively posting job openings for the slope in East Texas and the Deep South, almost no other state (though in the 90s East Washington and Idaho would be brought in). This in turn started a shift in our demographics as a state that caused us to go rapidly more and more red and even the nature of what kind of red it was started turning towards the puritan christian red. edit: I didn't include the reason even though it's probably obvious, oil companies realized they could get these new Alaskans to basically give them free reign over resource extraction, 0 tax, ect.

By about the mid 00's I would say was the tipping point where they took full control of the Republican party in our state and we are basically now in 2025 a deep south state that's cold.

I fucking hate it here, I hate these people so much.

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u/LordChunggis 1d ago

Thank you for the information, I've always been curious why Alaska is so firmly red.

I live in Iowa. I remember most of my early life we were considered Purple. I've gotten to see the real time decline into Red over the past 10 years.

The decline started on the state level, and federal followed. Dems local and state level ground game has got to improve, or we're going to keep getting waxxed in the long run.

I hope to see a Purple Iowa again some day.

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u/boo_jum Washington 1d ago

Thank you for the context! It's good information for people to have (I was vaugely aware of everything you just laid out, but couldn't speak so articulately to it without having invested some research).

And yeah, Alaska definitely aligns with E. Washington and Idaho, so it makes sense that they'd draw folks from there as well.

One of my besties here in Seattle is originally from Alaska (went to university in Oregon, settled in Seattle after school), and they and their spouse are leftist as fuck, but their parents (especially their father) is right-wing as fuck and it drive them up the wall because in HIS mind, their father 'pulled himself up by his bootstraps,' to make a successful life for him and his family in Alaska. But he's also the first person to start screaming bloody murder if someone even considers touching the subsidy he gets to live there. My friend has been unable to get him to see the absolute hypocrisy of that stance in 30 years of being aware of it and trying to ask him how it makes any sense.