The combination of California’s political makeup and terrible governance has led to coastal Democrats forcing the Central Valley to bear the brunt of every poor policy decision.

California has a population of just over 39 million people, according to 2024 estimates. Roughly 27 million of those people live in a county on the coast, including over 9 million in Los Angeles County. California’s Central Valley has a population of 7.2 million, according to the 2020 census. That number drops to about 4.7 million if you exclude Sacramento, the liberal-haven state capital.

Recommended Stories

• Trump betrays MAGA with his Greenland obsession
• Progressives hate what makes us human
• Hakeem Jeffries struggles to be the ‘man of the moment’ for leaderless Democrats

A population of 4.7 million people is more than half of the states in the United States, just ahead of Kentucky and Oregon. Most of that is nestled in the agriculture-heavy San Joaquin Valley, the southern half of the Central Valley that, despite its population of over 4 million people, is politically powerless in the trajectory of the state. The San Joaquin Valley is almost invisible in state politics, save for the occasional token trips to Fresno that prominent state Democratic politicians make to pretend they care about the Hispanic voters they pander to in the area.

(The Central Valley and San Joaquin Valley are mostly interchangeable names here, so for the purposes of this piece, it will be referred to as the Central Valley. Sacramento is part of the Central Valley in geography only and won’t be included in that group unless specified).

As a result, the Central Valley has to shoulder the burdens of California Democrats’ ill-thought-out policies and the “solutions” that follow. The most recent is the gas tax, which California has ratcheted up in recent years to the point that it is the highest in the country.

California’s forced transition to electric vehicles paints a bleak picture for gas tax revenue, though, and so the state must look for a “solution.” That appears to be coming in the form of the “California Road Charge,” which will tax drivers based on the number of miles they drive. That burden will mostly fall on Central Valley drivers, who rely on their cars more and face longer commutes than coastal Californians.

California’s energy and transportation policies have used Central California as a dumping ground in recent years. Farmland being deprived of water by the state has been converted into solar farms at the urging of state energy policy. As of 2019, at least 13,000 acres in the Central Valley had been converted into solar farms. Despite this presumably being good for a state so obsessed with carbon-free, nonnuclear energy, California officials have not helped the Central Valley keep up on the infrastructure side. According to Politico, “Existing solar farms in the region have struggled to expand because of a shortage of power lines and substations,” while Democratic bureaucrats have slow-rolled permits for projects that would allow these solar farms to bring energy to other parts of the state.

Central California has been subjected to a similar problem with high-speed rail. A perpetually delayed project with a budget that skyrockets with each passing year, California’s high-speed rail was always a fantasy. To justify the existence of the project and the massive waste of taxpayer funds, California Democrats wanted to get any functioning line built as quickly as possible to show that the project was worth the time and money.

That is how the project shifted from a San Francisco to a Los Angeles line to the much smaller focus of a line from Merced to Bakersfield, cutting right through the heart of the Central Valley. Building in the Central Valley first was supposed to be cheaper, and thus easier, with California Democrats hoping to create enthusiasm for the project and that the momentum would carry into building the much longer version in the original plan.

About 5,000 acres of farmland were expected to be confiscated by the state so that the high-speed rail could cut through the valley. The state government slow-rolled the compensation payments to farmers, who had to pay out of pocket to relocate wells, redo irrigation systems, build roads to reconnect their properties that were split in half by the rail construction, and other expenses. The result is a 2030 completion deadline that keeps creeping further into the future, while fields are littered with rail support structures for the foreseeable future.

All the while, the Central Valley’s fertile farmland is being dried out by state water policy. The valley is responsible for a quarter of U.S. food while making up just 1% of the country’s farmland. Despite this, California Democrats, guided by environmentalist thinking, allow water from the north to flow out to the Pacific Ocean instead of pumping it south to keep the nation’s breadbasket healthy. Directing water south would mean turning on pumps that disturb endangered fish such as the Delta smelt, so the pumps stay off and the water gets flushed out to sea.

California farmers have resorted to leaning heavily on groundwater to make up for these losses, but California Democrats have cracked down on groundwater usage. With farmers unable to use water from up north and groundwater being heavily restricted, more and more acres go unplanted every year. As a result, between 2017 and 2022, California lost 10.5% of its farms, part of a 23% decline going back to 1982.

None of this seems likely to end any time soon. The Central Valley has no real influence over state politics, with what few Central Valley Democratic legislators there are being afterthoughts to the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay Area Democrats who call the shots in the state party. The valley’s biggest boon was former House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, but he is no longer in office. McCarthy and former Rep. Devin Nunes had the ear of President Donald Trump going back to 2016, but Trump will soon exit the national stage, and possibly take the Central Valley’s influence on the national stage along with him.

The situation is so bleak that the most unrealistic solution has been the best one so far. “Jefferson,” a proposed state combining the less populated conservative counties in northern California with southwestern Oregon counties that want to be free from a similar coastal dominance, has offered a model.

MAKE CALIFORNIA DREAMING GREAT AGAIN

Failed ballot propositions that would benefit the Central Valley have offered similar models. “Cal 3” would have given the Central Valley a state stretching down to San Diego while excluding Los Angeles. The measure actually qualified for the ballot in 2018 but was spiked by the California Supreme Court. This followed a similar measure that would cut California into sixths that failed to qualify for the ballot two years prior.

The Central Valley has been shut out of the political arena. While coastal Democrats try to turn their progressive fever dream into a reality, they saddle the Central Valley with all of their failures and the destructive “solutions” to the problems they have made, to the detriment of both the state and the country.