Danny Shaw, professor of international affairs explains the importance of the state of California in the current U.S. elections.
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00:00Excellent. So, Professor, what can we say about California and its decision in this coming hours?
00:07California, with its 54 electoral college votes, is an extremely important state.
00:14It's almost a guarantee that it'll go blue, that it'll go Democrat.
00:19In 2020, Joe Biden almost doubled the votes over Donald Trump, roughly 12 million votes in California.
00:29For Biden, roughly six million. For Trump, four years ago.
00:34Cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, these are cities where there's a large number of Mexican families,
00:43Central American families, Filipino families.
00:46They're going to overwhelmingly vote based on economic issues, based on immigration issues.
00:52And they're going to vote for Count Kamala Harris.
00:54I think it's important to say that Kamala Harris, as a prosecutor, as a lawyer, rather, in California,
01:02had a long track record of criminalizing many different populations.
01:08In fact, tens of thousands of people went to jail over crimes of poverty, such as possessing marijuana.
01:16Of course, that's now legal in most states.
01:21But if you get into the suburbs of California, north of the Bay Area, south of Los Angeles and Orange County,
01:28there would be more of a Trump-like, xenophobic, anti-immigrant stance.
01:33So within each state, there's great variation.
01:37And from each state, the importance of the issues changes.
01:41They did a poll this morning with CNN, and for about 33 percent of Americans,
01:48according to the liberal wing of the ruling class, the issue of the U.S.'s democracy is the number one issue.
01:55But certainly in what's called Trump country in the Midwest, immigration looms large as one of the biggest issues.
02:04So from state to state, but even within different regions,
02:07we see great variation in terms of what the most important issues are for voters.