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Last weekend, as the federal government was shutting down amid partisan squabbles over immigration, President Trump’s re-election campaign released an ad featuring an undocumented immigrant from Mexico accused of murdering two Sacramento police officers.

Democrats, the ad stated, are “complicit in every murder committed by illegal immigrants.”

On the same day, a group of California Republicans put out their own ad about immigration. It featured the sunny disposition of Ronald Reagan, and words he spoke form the Oval Office in 1989, as he prepared to leave office. In the address, President Reagan defined what he meant when described, as he often did, America as a “shining city.”

It is a country, he said, “teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace.”

The contrasting tone of the two ads — one dark and ominous, the other bright and optimistic — say a lot about the divergence between the national Republican Party and the party in California. In California, the party is fighting for relevance in a state whose diversity — Latinos are a plurality in the state — and progressive values have placed it at the forefront of opposition to the Trump administration.

“In California we have a problem,” said Chad Mayes, a former Republican leader in the California State Assembly, who was pushed out of his leadership position last year after a backlash within his party because he negotiated with Democrats on climate change.