You also have to wonder how California moved from being a middle of the road and even slightly conservative state, as it was until the 1980s to the leftist bastion it has become. Were there forces at work there as what this article describes in Colorado? The loss of California placed the first and third most populous states in the Union into the hands of the Left. The Republican ascendancy in the South offset the electoral effect of the loss of California. But we are now seeing the Upper Southern states of Virginia and North Carolina beginning to fall away. Even the old GOP bulwark of Indiana was about 50-50 this time.
Neither the big government "conservatives" nor the Christian Right, the two ascendant factions of the 1990s and early 2000s, have effectively countered the leftist onslaught.