I'd really like to see stats on resident traffic to and from California to see if your extremely plausible theory stacks up. (Anecdotally, I know liberal Texans who have moved to California - or moved to Austin.) But, wouldn't the same thinking apply to Florida? There was some discussion somewhere today that Latinos in Florida have different perspectives to Latinos in other Us states, which, frankly, I don't understand (I'm not sure i have ever actually met a Latino person - Australians are generally culturally blind to ethnic US surnames).
I'll try to give you an answer on those.
California has an exodus out of the state of about 200,000 a year, mostly moving to neigboring Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, Texas, and smaller numbers to Utah and Idaho. They are mostly white and middle or upper class, and they are largely doing so because they are being taxed more heavily in California, and yet have no say in how those burdensome increased taxes are spent, on things like welfare for illegal immigrants, and policies that encourage homeless people setting up tents and pooping in streets of their cities, and the California they grew up in is gone. They feel unsafe, and don't like what their children are being exposed to.
Latinos in Florida at least up until the most recent waves of hispanic immigrants over the last 15 or 20 years, were mostly from Cuba. So they tend to be more conservative, Cubans who fled after Castro seized power in1959 tended to be doctors and lawyers, business owners and other highly paid professionals, among the most educated immigrants to enter the U.S., deeply anti-communist and resistant to anything socialist. From 1961 on, after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion (where an operation prepared under Eisenhower, where the CIA trained thousands of Cuban exiles to invade their own island and depose Castro, let them be the ground troops and the U.S. would provide military air support) JFK once he became president was timid, and with-held the air support for the invasion. So without air support, the Cuban exiles were easily routed, slaughtered or captured. The Cubans in Florida deeply hated JFK and distrusted the Democrats for decades after this.
In recent years, a younger generation of Cuban Americans who never experienced communism, tend to think more like other hispanics, and are more supportive of liberal/socialist/globalist policy. But other large hispanic immigrant groups in the U.S. from places like Venezuela, Nicaragua and other socialist governments they fled in Latin America, are like the old-guard Cuban immigrants, far more resistant to the leftist/socialist policy they fled. Brazilians and Colombians also tend to be business owners and are very entrepreneurial.
Mexicans, and Central Americans tend to come from poverty, and like Democrat-socialist policies much more (Mexicans are about 60% of U.S. hispanics, Central Americans abut 15%, the two largest immigrant groups). They tend to be concentrated in the U.S. Southwest, and in the states around the Washington DC area.
Hispanics as a whole support liberal/socialist policy, and in most electionss hover around 65% Democrat, and about 35% Republican (as do asians, for reasons I don't understand). A rare exception was George W. Bush, who courted the Hispanic vote, and got about 45% of the hispanic vote in his 2004 re-election. Not a majority, but a large enough hispanic minority to win with 51% of the total popular vote. McCain and Romney both saw a large decrease in hispanic support.
Trump did slightly better in 2016, and is anticipated to make huge gains in both hispanic and black support in the 2020 election. I'm beginning to see that hispanics have historically not voted Republican because the Republican party wrote them off as impossible to win over, and never even reached out for the hispanic vote. But Trump has made great overtures, in 2016 and even more so in 2020. If Trump were to raise black and hispanic support each by 5 or 10%, combined with the Republican white vote, that alone would create a formidable obstacle to Democrats winning future elections. We'll see what happens.
I was surprised the more I interacted with hispanics in the late 1980's and 1990's and 2000's, that even though hispanics all speak the same language, they're not all one big happy hispanic family. There are a lot of resentments between nationalities. Brazil and Argentina for example, they hate each other, comparable to France and Germany, or between French Quebec and English Canada. South Americans tend to be more university-educated and professional class, whereas Mexicans and Central Americans tend to be less educated and working class. A friend of mine who was an accountant from Bolivia was working a dead-end job, frustrated that all the accounting firms in the South Florida area tended to be Cuban, and wouldn't hire him because of his nationality, despite his being highly qualiied. A Brazilian friend of mine (a gorgeuos gorgeous girl and very sweet, but alas, married!) worked in computer information systems for Direct TV (a Mexican-owned company) and told me for years she was frustrated because they discriminated and didn't promote her because she is Brazilian. She would actually train Mexican men, who would then be promoted and become her supervisors. She eventually had to leave Direct TV to advance her career, and became a private consultant.
Hispanics are about 19% of the U.S. population. And there is some resentment by blacks (who are 13%) because the Democrats increasingly give greater attention to hispanics, as they are the larger up and coming minority in the U.S. Last I looked, asians were about 6%. About 81% of U.S. immigration is from Latin America and the Caribbean, so it will only become even more so a majority minority, expected to be about 25% of U.S. population by 2040. Whites (currently about 67% of U.S. population) will drop below 50% of U.S. population by 2040, perhaps even sooner.
I always found it interesting that a majority of hispanics in the U.S. are "white hispanic" (essentially European racially, but culturally spanish-speaking hispanic). That many I interact with are as white as I am, and yet identify as hispanic. If you were to visit New Jersey or Kansas or most northern U.S. states, you might never meet a hispanic. But Florida is very international, and I meet people from everywhere.
Brazil and Argentina, as two examples, are very much like the U.S., in that over 100 years or so they had huge waves of immigrants from places you don't think of as "Latin America" I had an Argentinian female co-worker with the last name Kowalski, which I found very amusing because that doesn't sound hispanic at all. She even joked about it. These nations have a huge mix of ancestors from Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland, France, and eastern European nations. As much a "melting pot" as the U.S.
