The Golden State’s perpetual susceptibility to imminent disaster has also helped prepare it to meet this one, Newsom said. California’s political and governmental infrastructure is conditioned to confront earthquakes, wildfires, mudslides, drought, floods, and every other manner of pestilence, natural and man-made—and largely in a way that ignores partisan politics. “We sort of transcend during times of crisis,” Newsom said. “And you look at what the state’s been through in 2015, with the fires, and in ’17 and ’18 and last year—not only the combination of wildfires but the blackouts that really reinforced those relationships … and I think that, perhaps more than anything else, has really proven to be key in this moment.”

That’s not to say political pushback has been nonexistent. One challenge is that Newsom has to manage a political and demographic constituency as diverse as the nation’s, and almost as divided. Representative Devin Nunes, a fervent Trump ally from the Central Valley, harshly criticized social distancing and school closures as overkill. And Newsom faced criticism from some fellow Democrats for issuing his statewide stay-at-home order only after the mayors of the state’s two principal cities—London Breed in San Francisco and Eric Garcetti in Los Angeles—had already done the same. One of Newsom’s aides told me the governor had wanted localities to take the lead in social-distancing measures, to ensure broad buy-in when he took statewide action.

Unlike officials in some other states, Newsom has largely avoided vocal public criticism of the Trump administration, partly because large swaths of inland and rural California are as politically red as it gets. For much of the past half century, national conservatives have scorned California as a dystopian failed state of chronic problems and social permissiveness. Despite the state’s severe homelessness crisis and yawning gap between wealth and poverty, that kind of caricature no longer cuts as much ice with respect to the state that has given the world Apple and Tesla and Netflix. Still, the conservative residents of central and inland California could not be more politically different from their liberal counterparts on the coast. “About 40 percent of the state is more likely to listen to Trump than to him,” the Newsom aide told me, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to be candid. “Part of his rhetoric was not alienating those folks—knowing that they would have to take real sacrifice—in order to build trust with that part of the state, so that they would pay attention to him when it came time to take mandatory action.”

Read: How Los Angeles is preparing for a worst-case scenario

Newsom told me that he attributes part of the state’s early awareness of the threat’s gravity to its acceptance, beginning in late January, of flights of Americans returning from China, many of whom were then quarantined at military bases. “A number of states, as you recall, were not interested in taking those repatriated flights from China,” he said. “And as a consequence, we started to have those direct conversations, not only at the White House, but at CDC and HHS, and that really allowed us to develop a two-way line of communication.”