Then Bernie Sanders, in a desperate attempt to catch front-runner Biden, packs a bong with legally grown California cannabis—and tries to smoke it while riding in a hot-air balloon over Sonoma, creating a meme that breaks the internet.

For now, these scenes are merely the product of one California columnist’s imagination. But in the next 10 months, don’t be surprised if they become scenes in the reality TV show we call the presidential race.

For decades, California has had little say in picking presidents—a peculiar lack of choice for the state that possesses decision-making power over which technologies other Americans will use, what entertainment they will watch, and which fruits, nuts, and dairy products they will consume. American presidential campaigns have long puzzled us: Why does the biggest, richest, and best-looking state have so little say in the political scramble that occurs every four years?

The answer to that question has been tradition and continuity. Other Americans—out of a commitment to electing presidents who were steady to the point of being boring—preferred to allow some of the country’s dullest states—Iowa and New Hampshire—to shape the process.

But Americans no longer are attached to sober-minded presidents. That major cultural shift—in combination with the huge number of candidates for 2020, a much earlier California primary (March 3), and a deeply unpopular Republican president—means that the Golden State’s choice for president is likely to be determinative next year.

Suddenly, Californians face a new question: Now that we get to pick the president, what kind of president do we want?

I had occasion to think through the possibilities while moderating a recent Zócalo Public Square event about next year’s California primary. Opinions differed over how California may evaluate potential presidents, but there was consensus among the panel of scholars and political pros that the state’s power in the 2020 race is both profound and multifaceted: California will not only shape the next president, but the campaign will also shape us.

Geographically, the primary contest involves the entire state. This is the result of a decision the Democrats made to allocate delegates to anyone who wins at least 15 percent of the vote in any California congressional district. While more delegates are allocated to districts with more Democrats—which will push candidates to spend more time in Democratic-heavy coastal districts—lesser-known contenders are likely to make hay by going into the state’s interior to pick up delegates, in districts where there may be less competition.

The race will not be easy for anyone, even our home-state candidate, California’s own U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris. She may struggle to meet sky-high expectations that she should win her own state, particularly with the better-known Biden and Sanders leading her in statewide polls.

And while California has been represented in the Senate exclusively by women since 1992, it remains to be seen whether it is favorable turf for women seeking the presidency. Yes, Hillary Clinton won the 2008 and 2016 presidential primaries here, but, as a state, we’ve been less inclined to elect women to executive positions. California has never had a female governor, and its largest city, Los Angeles, has never had a female mayor.

The state may provide a more open field for nonwhite candidates, given that so many of our voters aren’t white. This could be a boon for lesser-known male candidates like Julián Castro, the former San Antonio mayor and federal housing secretary, and U.S. Sen. Cory Booker.

California is also not fertile ground for a Republican challenger to the president. Republicans here like Trump nearly as much as Republicans nationally.

But it’s not just about the candidates, California is likely to shape the issues of the presidential campaign. Previous presidential races have focused on the economy, health care, and national security, but housing and homelessness, as the top priorities of many Californians, will become national issues next year. Other lower-profile issues that divide Californians—like water and high-speed rail—also should become big points of contention as presidential candidates spend more time here. And California teachers unions have been asking candidates to back federal regulations to curtail the growth of charter schools as a condition of their support.

Climate change debates—over the state’s policies to curtail it through cap and trade, and growing anxiety over disasters like the fire that destroyed Paradise—also could move from California to the national arena. And our state’s commitment to protecting immigrants and their families, regardless of legal status, should shape the race. In California, perhaps more than anywhere else, Biden is likely to face potent attacks from rivals who point to his service in an Obama administration that engaged in massive deportation of immigrants.

But our votes are not the only way that Californians will impact the selection of the president. Despite new methods of online fundraising from small donors, the state’s richest people will have even more power and influence than usual, as candidates grow desperate for funding in such a large field. The struggle for attention also could make the backing of Hollywood figures even more important. Look for next year’s Oscars, which will take place just three weeks before the California primary, to be the most political in history, with perhaps some candidates walking the red carpet to boost their name recognition.

But it is through technology that Californians are likely to have the most impact on the identity of the next president. This cuts many ways. The decisions made by Menlo Park-based Facebook in handling political content will affect Americans’ very perceptions of the contest. And of course, the other California titans of the internet, including Google and Twitter, could potentially be harnessed by those who mean American democracy harm. At the same time, Facebook and other tech giants are becoming a major issue in the race. Should they be broken up? How do we defend our privacy from them?

There are reasons to worry about a president picked by California. This is a wonderful place of beaches and innovation, but it is also the volatile, crazy state that gave us Proposition 13 and the Kardashians. If we Californians give America a president who reflects our state’s true preferences and character, the whole world may feel as though it has smoked something.

The post California Should Pick the Next President appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Clinton ad imitated an offering from Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential campaign. That year, a Johnson ad featured quotes from three prominent Republican governors—Nelson Rockefeller of New York, William Scranton of Pennsylvania, and George Romney of Michigan—denouncing their party’s nominee, U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. The ad concluded, “Even if you’re a Republican with serious doubts about Barry Goldwater, you’re in good company.”

Much like Trump in 2016, Goldwater ran an outsider’s campaign, far more popular with the party’s grassroots than its establishment. Goldwater’s uncompromising anti-communism and vote against the 1964 Civil Rights Act (which he considered an unconstitutional federal intrusion on states’ rights) attracted support from conservative Democrats, especially from the South. But his campaign’s high-profile defenders of segregation, most notably U.S. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, repelled moderate Northern Republicans. So did the candidate’s intemperate statements on the campaign trail, as when Goldwater mused about lobbing nuclear weapons into the “men’s room at the Kremlin.”

President Johnson effectively served as his own chief strategist. During the summer of 1964, he lamented the media’s excessive interest in the backlash—Southern Democrats who were abandoning the party because of its support for civil rights legislation. “They talk about all the South quitting me, and they talk about everybody quitting me,” Johnson complained to one aide in August. But polls indicated that the greater number of partisan defections had come from Republicans, who distanced themselves from Goldwater. It was time, Johnson believed, to focus on “the Republican backlash—all these extreme statements [by Goldwater], and Ku Klux Klan, and all this other stuff.”

Johnson eventually deemed the phenomenon “the frontlash” (a term he thought would appeal to journalists). Upper middle-class independents and moderate Republicans normally didn’t vote Democratic in national elections, but they could be wooed through a relentlessly negative campaign that portrayed Goldwater as a dangerous extremist. Talk “about the danger of a woman having a two-headed baby, and men becoming sterile, and drinking contaminated milk, and these things,” Johnson privately explained, and “they’ll know who they ought to be scared of without our ever saying so.”

This strategy reached its most aggressive point on Sept. 7, 1964. A Johnson commercial featured a little girl, plucking the petals off a daisy, counting one to ten as she did so. Her voice, then image faded, eventually replaced by a bomb countdown and a mushroom cloud. Finally, Johnson’s voice emerged: “These are the stakes. To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.”

The daisy ad, the most famous attack ad in any presidential campaign, generated furious protests from Republicans, who argued it unfairly demonized their nominee. The commercial, which appeared only once but received massive media attention, helped firm up the connection between Goldwater and nuclear war.

While Johnson’s strategy was tactically brilliant, it came with a drawback: the President struggled to articulate a positive agenda. Instead, he fell back on clichés about patriotism and biblical values, generic themes that would alienate neither the union activists who then formed the Democratic Party’s base nor the traditionally Republican suburbanites, mostly women, who he hoped to attract to his coalition.

Clinton has run her version of a frontlash campaign in 2016. But the problem that Johnson confronted has, if anything, become even more pronounced. Bridging the enormous ideological gap between millennials who backed Clinton’s primary rival, Bernie Sanders, and “never Trump” Republicans would challenge even the most talented politician. As a substitute for Johnson’s paeans to patriotism, Clinton has relied on appeals to identity politics, but, like Johnson in 1964, her approach has primarily been negative, focused on convincing voters that electing her opponent could have catastrophic consequences for the republic.

On Election Day 1964, Johnson carried 44 states and won 61 percent of the popular vote. The next day, however, the President worried that his enemies would present the outcome as the voters having voted against Goldwater without embracing the specifics of his program. Journalists, he lamented, would ignore the “love and affection” voters had shown him. Instead, they would present him as “the lesser of two evils. Corn pone. Southern.”

Even a Johnson victory lacking a meaningful ideological mandate yielded significant congressional gains for his party. In the 1964 House contests, Democrats picked up 37 seats, giving them a more than 2-to-1 advantage for the 1965-1966 session. And despite holding 26 of the 35 Senate seats up for election, Democrats gained two additional Senate seats in 1964. But the surge was temporary; Democrats suffered major losses in the 1966 midterm elections. And the party’s popular vote came in almost 20 points below Johnson’s 1964 level in 1968, when Richard Nixon’s victory returned Republicans to the White House.

Although Clinton has never enjoyed a polling lead comparable to LBJ’s in 1964, the lessons of the past would suggest that her updated frontlash strategy should produce a victory this November. But it seems unlikely a Democratic Congress will accompany any victory. For the party to secure even a one-seat majority in the House, Democratic incumbents would have to go undefeated and Democratic challengers would need to win 27 of the 29 seats the non-partisan Cook Political Report currently lists as either toss-ups or leaning toward Republicans. The party’s Senate chances initially looked more promising, but in recent weeks, declining fortunes in Ohio and Florida mean that the Democrats might need to win on unfavorable terrain in either Missouri or North Carolina to retake the Senate.

In our vastly more polarized era, it might well be that only a positive message from the top of the ticket—such as that offered by Ronald Reagan for Republicans in 1980 or Barack Obama for Democrats in 2008—will meaningfully affect down-ballot races. But at the presidential level, Johnson’s frontlash model has been revived more than 50 years later, with the Democrats once again facing a Republican whose political and personal positions render him particularly vulnerable to the tactic.

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