In Orange County, a Divided District Reflects a Divided Country

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n a Sunday evening in early October, dozens of people mingled in a backyard overlooking a canyon in the posh Turtle Rock neighborhood of Irvine for a local Democratic club fundraiser.

Irvine is the largest city in the 47th Congressional District, one of the House swing seats in California that could decide control of Congress in November. But on this balmy evening, conversation over wine and hors d’oeuvres drifted to the topic of the district’s second-largest city, just up the 405: Huntington Beach.

One local school board member told of a recent trip to a Huntington Beach pickleball court, where she was alarmed to find a vendor selling Make America Great Again hats. Democratic elected officials warned those gathered of the conservative policies gaining traction in Huntington Beach: flag bans, voter ID law and lawsuits over transgender identity.

“We’re lucky to live in Irvine, where we don’t have the craziness,” Dave Min, the Democrat running for Congress in the 47th District, told the crowd.

While Democrats and Republicans are evenly registered in the 47th District, a stark political divide exists between its two largest cities. In the 2022 election, incumbent Democrat Katie Porter carried Irvine by a margin of 63% to 37% on her way to victory over Republican Scott Baugh, a former state legislator. But in Huntington Beach, Baugh won 55% to 45%.

To win the district this year, Min and Baugh will need to find a way to bridge the gap — or increase their margins in the polarized communities.

Irvine, like Orange County as a whole, has moved leftward since the emergence of Donald Trump as the Republican Party’s standard bearer — reflecting suburban opposition to the former president and the GOP’s rightward move on issues like abortion. Huntington Beach appears to be moving in the opposite direction: the city is a hub for conservative activism and local voters have recently backed conservative councilmembers and ballot measures.

‘This tale of two cities’

The split between the two cities could be explained by a gap in educational attainment, which Jon Gould, dean of the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine, called the most important demarcation in OC politics. Over 72% of Irvine residents hold college degrees, compared to around 44% in Huntington Beach.

“What we’re seeing happening here in Orange County is the real divide of left to right, Democrat to Republican, is college education versus non-college education,” said Gould, who heads the UC Irvine poll.

The so-called “diploma divide” has helped shift Orange County from a GOP stronghold to a political battleground.

“It used to be that the college-educated would typically be more Republican,” Gould added. “What we’re seeing right now in the Trump era is the college-educated are much more strongly Democratic.”

Polling conducted by Gould shows the education trend beginning to extend across racial and ethnic groups in a county where just 37% of residents are white. A UC Irvine poll of county voters in April found support for President Joe Biden’s reelection stood at 41% with both white and non-white voters without a college degree. Meanwhile, support for Biden among white and non-white voters with a diploma stood at 55% and 54%, respectively.

“We’re seeing this diploma divide actually overtake, in many instances, race and ethnicity as driving behavior,” said Mike Madrid, a longtime California political consultant.

This education gap, along with divergent trends in population growth and housing policy, has left Irvine and Huntington Beach at loggerheads: two communities embodying a larger divide in national politics.

“That’s why you’ve got this tale of two cities,” said Tammy Kim, an Irvine city council member.

With growth, Irvine moves to the left

Irvine’s story is one of rapid growth. A master-planned community built on the Irvine Company Ranch, the city wasn’t officially incorporated until 1971. Since 1990, the city’s population has nearly tripled as city leaders have approved ambitious developments to house new residents, including many arriving from Asia.

“We are building the most, not in terms of just market priced homes, but we are actually the regional leader in affordable housing,” said Kim, a native of Korea who is running to be Irvine’s next mayor.

“As we are growing, we’re growing to be more diverse and more progressive,” Kim added. “We have the largest Persian community anywhere in Orange County. We have the largest Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean communities here in Irvine.”

According to the Los Angeles Times, Irvine has added more residents than any other California city in the past three years.

One of those new arrivals is Ren Kondo, who moved from Austin this summer to a house just down the street from the Turtle Rock fundraiser.

“I chose Irvine because I think Irvine is a very advanced and chill community for Asians,” said Kondo, who met the hosts of the Democratic gathering at his own housewarming party the week before.

According to Kim, what unites Irvine’s diverse residents is their shared emphasis on education.

“We have very highly educated people that make their way to Irvine,” she added. “They choose to have their home in Irvine, and they come here because of the education system so their children can also have access to the best education system.”

UC Irvine is the political heart of the congressional district for Democrats. Both Porter and Min were UC Irvine professors before launching campaigns for office. And Democratic success in the area can often hinge on whether candidates are able to drive a large enough turnout among student voters on campus.

“Irvine is this hot spot of youth voters who are really, really passionate about politics,” said Khushi Patel, activism director for the Orange County Young Democrats. “A lot of the voter percentage here is Democratic, so it’s really important that we’re making sure not only that everyone is registered to vote, but they’re educated on where to vote and also how to vote and all the issues.”

Republicans see Huntington Beach as their counterweight to Irvine in the 47th District.

“Our goal is to offset the votes that go against Scott Baugh in Irvine, that we make sure we win dramatically here in Huntington Beach to get him across the finish line,” said Tony Strickland, a Huntington Beach city councilmember.

A working-class beach community

Before Huntington Beach was Surf City, it was Oil City.

A century ago, oil derricks lined the coastline and drew workers from petroleum states like Texas and Oklahoma.

The city’s working-class roots are still visible, from the oil drilling platforms on the horizon to the city’s high school mascot: the Oilers.

“It’s definitely a working-class community,” Strickland said. “It’s different than any other beach community, especially here in Orange County. It’s not Newport Beach. It’s not overwhelmingly wealthy.”

Huntington Beach was once one of the fastest-growing cities in California. In the 1960s, it expanded from 11,492 to 115,962 residents after the city annexed surrounding farmland and greenlit housing projects in seaside wetlands.

Mike Ali arrived in town in the late ’60s. He came with “a few thousand dollars and a ‘65 Impala and a young wife,” and for years has run a beachside concession stand.

“When I moved to Huntington Beach, 95% of the population were middle-class working white people,” Ali said. “A lot of the people who came down here and bought houses in the ‘60s and the ‘70s are dying or selling their home, and [they] go somewhere else, and the kids take over.”

While more recent population growth has brought racial diversity to cities like Irvine, white residents still make up a majority in Huntington Beach.

As Huntington Beach’s population growth has leveled off, city leaders have vehemently resisted efforts to plan for new housing. That has resulted in a series of legal clashes with Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has called the city “Exhibit A” among municipalities failing to address housing affordability.

“It’s almost like a small town where people know each other, they watch for each other, there’s Neighborhood Watch,” Strickland said. “And even though we have 200,000 people, it has a suburban coastal community and kind of a neighborhood feel, unlike Irvine, which is…a lot of high-rise, high-density apartment buildings.”

A hub for conservative activism

Decades ago, Huntington Beach developed a reputation for right-wing extremism. A 1993 Los Angeles Times headline asked whether it was the “Skinhead Capital of the County” and described the city as a gathering place for groups of white supremacists. Just last month, a man accused of leading a white supremacist group in the city pled guilty to a charge of inciting a riot during a political rally in the city in 2017.

Many locals point to the pandemic as an inflection point for its role as a hub for conservative activism. The Huntington Beach waterfront and pier became a gathering spot for protests against beach and business closures and curfews that often doubled as rallies in support of Trump.

“As opposed to, say, Newport Beach, where the Republicans there are what we would have previously called the ‘business Republicans’ or the ‘country club Republicans,’ there is a larger percentage of the Republicans in Huntington Beach who would be the Trump true believers who want to own the libs, who want to focus on particular social issues,” Gould said.

Cecilia Garcia joined the protests in Huntington Beach after losing her job as a cook during the pandemic.

After four months of waiting for the restaurant to reopen, she gathered her savings and started something new: a Trump merchandise stand with homemade hats and T-shirts.

Her stand now is a fixture at local rallies and Republican meetings — where she sells shirts like “MAGA Fight Club,” “Felon and Hillbilly 2024,” and her favorite, which depicts the biblical angel Gabriel draped over Trump during this year’s assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania.

“My values are family, marriage between a woman and a man, having kids, no abortion,” she said. “And I believe in God, so [Trump] represents everything that I believe.”

That spirit of MAGA activism has infused the Huntington Beach city council. In 2022, conservatives won a majority on the local board and made headlines for laws banning local vaccine and mask requirements — and more recently a “notification” ordinance requiring city staff to alert parents about a child’s sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression.

Competing for the 47th District

Many local Democrats believe the rightward swing in Huntington Beach is more fleeting than the consolidation of liberal strength in Irvine. They point to the close divide on the Huntington Beach city council (split four to three in favor of conservatives) and the Republican turnout edge in the 2022 midterms.

But Strickland is confident the council majority has the backing of Surf City residents. After all, when proposals to restrict flags such as the Pride flag from city buildings and enact a local requirement for voter ID were put before voters in March, they both were approved.

“When people said we were out of step with our city, we put it to the vote,” Strickland said. “And overwhelmingly, the flag ordinance passed, I believe, by 14%. And even after all the money and everything was spent on the other side, voter ID passed by, I think, a healthy 7%.”

Madrid predicts the diploma divide between communities like Irvine and Huntington Beach will continue to push cultural issues to the forefront of political campaigns, intensifying fights over changing gender and identity norms that “Democrats, in large part because of a function of the college education, are more comfortable with.”

In 2024 and beyond, Madrid said he is watching to see if these education dividing lines begin to chip away at the longstanding ethnic, partisan loyalties that have defined politics in the county.

“This becomes the existential battle that you’re seeing in the 47th District or Orange County more broadly,” Madrid said. “And the country.”