It’s no wonder that the West Coast and several mountain states cannot recognize the America that elected Donald Trump and gave Republicans a congressional majority. By many social and political metrics, it’s not the America they live in.

The West, led by California, has long seen itself as the destination for progressive ideals, from personal reinvention to expansive multiculturalism to technological innovations. Add in social policies championing wide acceptance and inclusion, and the political vision this region embraced on Election Day looks nothing like Trump’s America.

That backdrop has not just given rise to mounting protests, with thousands of students walking out of high school classes in San Francisco and colleges in Los Angeles, and peaceful demonstrations by thousands more in Oakland, Calif. this past weekend. It is also suggesting that forceful lines of resistance to Trump administration policies are now taking shape. Already, the police department in Los Angeles has said the city will not cooperate with federal immigration roundup and deportation, a declaration that was also made by top police officers in Denver, Colorado and nearby Aurora. In Portland, Oregon, like Oakland, there are efforts to potentially block those ports from exporting carbon fuel to Asia, drawing another line against an administration that believes climate change is a hoax.



“California has long set an example for other states to follow, said Kevin de Leon, president pro tem of the California Senate, whose staff is now conducting a review of all federal programs that impact the state and could see reduced subsidies if the state does not cooperate with a Trump administration. “We are not going to allow one election to reverse generations of progress.”

Defiantly Blue States

This estrangement from Trump’s America goes beyond last week’s top-of-the-ticket results, in which the most Californians voted for the Democratic candidate, 61.5 percent for Hillary Clinton, since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1936 re-election. Trump voters were few and far between.

Landslide numbers were the norm. San Francisco County voted 85.3 to 9.9 percent for Clinton over Trump. Alameda County, home to Oakland, went 79 to 15 percent for Clinton over Trump. Silicon Valley counties San Mateo (76-19) and Santa Clara (73-21) were firmly anti-Trump. Even Orange County, the state’s longtime bastion of conservatism, saw him lose by 5 percent.



But it’s not just California. Majorities of voters along the West Coast and in Colorado and Nevada, embraced many policies that are built on progressive governmental roles that is the antipathy of the incoming Republican Congress. They backed numerous measures on statewide ballots to raise taxes, spend billions on schools and infrastructure, expand gun control laws, legalize marijuana, increase tobacco taxes, embrace bilingual education, and reform prison sentences.

Of course, not all liberal proposals passed. Californians didn’t abolish capital punishment, and a competing ballot question to significantly speed up the death penalty process got more votes—50.9 percent—which now becomes law and will likely be tied up in lawsuits. And the pharmaceutical industry’s investment of more than $100 million in fear-based advertising stopped a measure to lower the price the state pays for drugs for the poor. The industry’s shameless threat was those savings would cause everyone else’s costs to rise.

Northern California’s economic hub, the San Francisco Bay Area is a far different landscape from the state’s interior agricultural Central Valley, which resembles midwestern states with vast stretches of fruit trees and livestock farms and where Trump did slightly better. Three Bay Area cities rejected threats from the soda industry and raised taxes on sugary drinks to fund health programs, following Berkeley’s lead a few years ago. Local daily newspapers, such as the San Francisco Chronicle, exulted in these differences with red-state America and tried to reassure readers there's nothing wrong with the bubble they live in.

“Perhaps the United States is out of step with us… Perhaps that’s because we really are different,” the Chronicle editors wrote. “You can see this for yourself. Don’t just go to some familiar restaurant or park in your neighborhood. Go to the Embarcadero or Montgomery BART [subway] stations in San Francisco. Stand at the foot of the escalator and look at who is riding: whites, Asians, Latinos, black folks, straights, gays, everybody, going to work. Just look. These people don’t resemble the vision of the America Trump sees, or even what Clinton saw. This place is different. You could go to Walnut Creek or Fremont and see nearly the same variety of people. The Bay Area has become a huge diverse mix of people, maybe unique in the world.”

Or maybe it’s not as unique as the Chronicle believes. If you look at election results in Oregon, Washington, Colorado and Nevada, the majority of voters are expressing the same values and policy choices. What emerges in blue stretches of America is a vision of a more inclusive, more tolerant, more solution-oriented governmental roles that was rejected in the states that won the Electoral College’s majority for Trump, even as Clinton won the popular vote.

While there already are predictable calls for California and Oregon to attempt to leave the union, and snarky comments by ambitious politicians such as California Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom that the state needs to remain to educate the rest of America, the Bay Area’s electoral preferences aren’t unique. In Washington state’s King County, which is the most populous county in that state and includes Seattle, Clinton got a higher percentage of the vote than President Obama received in 2012; she received nearly three-quarters while Obama got 69 percent.

There, too, early lines of resistance are being drawn. Seattle Mayor Ed Murray, who is openly gay, pledged, like many West Coast officials to fight the “outright misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, nationalism, racism and authoritarian tendencies” Trump displayed during the campaign. Washington state also raised its minimum wage, as did Colorado, where politicians are proud of locally buzzing economies. That’s not saying that there aren’t plenty of local problems in these progressive epicenters, starting with the legions of homeless people and lack of affordable housing options. They have also seen an increase in hate crimes during the election.

Like California, Colorado has its conservative streak. It rejected a statewide ballot measure to create a single-payer healthcare system that was championed by Bernie Sanders. But it did pass a law allowing medical assistance in dying for the terminally ill. And states where most western movies are situated—California, Nevada and Washington—also passed a series of expanded gun controls.

The emerging picture is these states are going to become bastions of fierce resistance, starting with Trump’s pledge to deport millions of “criminal” migrants early in his administration. Police chiefs in some of the biggest cities are drawing the lines. California Attorney General Kamala Harris, who was just elected to the U.S. Senate, championed immigration reform at her first post-election event and pledged to forcefully oppose Trump's plans for a Mexican border wall.

Portland Oregon mayor Charlie Hales, who called Trump’s election a “national catastrophe,” met last week with officials and environmentalists who want to restrict fossil fuel exports from their port. There are similar efforts underway in Oakland, where activists want to stop the delivery pipeline for carbon-rich coal and fuel exports to China.

“We woke up strangers in a strange land,” said de Leon and California Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon—both Latinos—in a widely quoted joint statement after Election Day. “We will lead the resistance to any effort that would shred our social fabric or our Constitution.”