MERCED, Calif. - Here in the Central Valley of California, hard times have hit harder than just about anywhere. But this is also a stronghold of Republicans ready to shrink the safety net.

One in 5 Merced County adults is out of work, home foreclosures run rampant, and antipoverty programs are stretched to the limit. This is also a region represented in the State House budget brawl almost exclusively by antitax Republicans, whose push to downsize government collides with a sobering reality: A greater percentage of their constituents depend on health and welfare than do residents anywhere else in California.

One in 12 residents of Merced County has tapped CalWorks, the state’s welfare-to-work program, double the per capita use in Los Angeles County and five times the percentage in San Francisco.

But the region’s Republican lawmakers hold fast to a pledge to tame the tax-and-spend cycle of California’s Capitol and are backing Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plan to slash programs for the poor.

Other rural areas in California face the same situation, from the quiet timberlands of the north to the agricultural heartland of the San Joaquin Valley, where high per capita use of public health and welfare coexists with small-government GOP representation.

It is a paradox lingering in the background as the state grapples with a $24.3-billion budget deficit.

Schwarzenegger’s budget proposes slashing health and welfare spending by 26.5 percent. That means eliminating CalWorks, which serves 1.4 million people statewide.

It means killing off Healthy Families and slicing Medi-Cal, affecting more than 2 million people, most of them children. It means cutting home-care workers for elderly and disabled residents and carving deeply into programs for Alzheimer’s and HIV patients.

While about 4 percent of people in Los Angeles County fall back on CalWorks to help land a job, more than 8 percent use the program in the San Joaquin Valley counties of Tulare, Fresno, and Merced, which routinely send GOP lawmakers to Sacramento.

Although the rural demographics are shifting, old political habits die hard, and the GOP retains a political grip in wide swaths of the Central Valley and the far north, said Barbara O’Connor, director of the Institute for the Study of Politics and Media at Sacramento State University.

Antipoverty groups say the anomaly is no secret inside the Capitol. “We’ve shown [Republican lawmakers] time and time again: They’re voting in ways that are disproportionately more harmful to their own districts,’’ said Michael Herald of the Western Center on Law and Poverty.

Rural Republicans say the state’s mammoth deficit makes the cuts painful but necessary.

“The truth is it’s going to be one of the tougher votes we’ll have to do,’’ said Assemblyman Mike Villines of Clovis, who as GOP leader broke with Republicans in February to approve major tax increases, an act he vows not to repeat.

© Copyright 2009 Globe Newspaper Company.