In what could be a sign of California’s growing partisan tilt, high-profile Republican candidates are fleeing the state’s Democrat-heavy political landscape after losing campaigns.

When Orange County’s Neel Kashkari, who lost the 2014 governor’s race to Democrat Jerry Brown, said last month he was heading to Minneapolis to take a top job with the Federal Reserve, he joined a list of Republicans who packed their bags rather than making another run for office in California.

Carly Fiorina, who was beaten badly by incumbent Democrat Barbara Boxer in the 2010 Senate race, moved to Virginia, the home base for her current presidential run. Former Orange County Assemblyman Chuck DeVore, who lost to Fiorina in the 2010 primary, is now with a conservative think tank in Texas.

It’s not a brand-new phenomenon. After former Insurance Commissioner Chuck Quackenbush, one of the last Republicans elected statewide, resigned amid allegations of abusing his position in 2000, he moved to Hawaii and then to Florida, where he is now a sheriff’s detective. Going back further, former GOP Lt. Gov. Mike Curb lost the 1982 primary for governor, was beaten for lieutenant governor in 1986 and then moved his music business to Nashville.

California is no longer the Golden State for Republicans, particularly conservatives looking for a statewide office.

“If you’re an ambitious young Republican in California, run for Congress,” said Tony Quinn, a former GOP consultant turned political analyst. As long as Republicans control the House, “the 14 California Republicans have more power than the 39 Democrats.”

But statewide, the numbers tell a very different tale. In 2006, 42 percent of California’s registered voters were Democrats and 34 percent were Republicans. Today, the percentage of Democrats has risen slightly to 43 percent, while only 28 percent of voters register as Republican.

Discouraging prospect

In 1994, when Gov. Pete Wilson was re-elected, Republicans held five of California’s seven statewide constitutional offices. But since 2002, only two Republicans, former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and one-term Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, have been elected by the entire state.

It’s a discouraging prospect for a conservative Republican, DeVore admitted.

“I have a passion for free markets and liberty,” said DeVore, who is a vice president for the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “The philosophy I hold is considered mainstream in Texas and extreme in California. In California, I’m an outlier.”

As a think tank executive in Texas, “I can have a bigger impact on public policy in the nation’s second-largest state than I ever had in the California Legislature.”

Many of the Republican candidates, especially those who, like Fiorina and Kashkari, can afford to pump millions of their own money into their campaigns, have career options other than politics, said Harmeet Dhillon, a San Francisco trial lawyer and vice chairwoman of the state Republican Party.

“To run for office as a Republican in California is an act of courage,” she said. “I’m proud we have candidates who are accomplished people who ... have a lot of choices.”

Even when those choice include politics, they might not include California politics.

While Fiorina is a Stanford graduate who made her mark as CEO of Silicon Valley pioneer Hewlett-Packard, she wasted little time heading east after her 2010 loss. In 2011, she bought a $6.1 million estate in Virginia and, in 2012, was appointed to the Board of Visitors at the state’s James Madison University as “Mrs. Carly Fiorina of Lorton, Va.”

It was a tactical decision to move, Dhillon said, “probably to help with this (presidential) race,” where a candidate from a swing state like Virginia might have more clout in a GOP primary than one from a Democratic bastion like California.

Boost for Kashkari

While Kashkari, a former investment banker and Treasury official, left the state to take one of the country’s top financial jobs, he received a visibility boost from his first — and possibly only — venture into politics.

“It probably helped that he ran for governor,” said Quinn, the GOP political analyst. “He made sense during the campaign and ran as well as could be expected, which likely helped his long-term career goals.”

Kashkari made it clear early on that he had little desire to jump right back into politics. When Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer announced in January that she wouldn’t run for re-election, the Ohio-born Kashkari said he wasn’t interested.

“He was ready to go back back into the private sector,” said Aaron McLear, a Republican consultant who worked with Kashkari on the governor’s race. With a long-running interest in using the financial system to lift people out of poverty, “this was the best way he could fight that fight. He’s excited.”

Not every top GOP candidate is eager to leave California.

Meg Whitman, who spent $144 million of her own money to lose to Brown, is still living in Atherton and is CEO of Hewlett-Packard. New Jersey-born Bill Simon, who was beaten by Gray Davis the the 2002 governor’s race, still has his home in Southern California. And Tom Campbell, a former Silicon Valley congressman who lost the 2000 Senate race to Democrat Dianne Feinstein and was beaten by Fiorina in the 2010 GOP Senate primary, is dean of the Fowler School of Law at Chapman University in Orange County.

“I love California. My wife, Susanne, and I moved to California in 1983, and it’s home, not Chicago,” he said.

Stay or go

While there are academic jobs that could tempt him to leave California, Campbell said even after losing the 2010 Senate primary, “I did want to stay in the state.”

In a state that’s becoming increasingly Democratic and even less hospitable to conservatives, Republicans looking toward their political future are going to have to make that decision to stay or go.

“It’s a lot to ask someone to run for office and, sure, we’ve had some talented people move out,” said Dhillon, the state GOP official. “But I don’t think it’s a trend. We’ve still got a lot of good candidates ... we’re hoping will run again.”

John Wildermuth is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. E-mail: jwildermuth@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jfwildermuth