CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on why California Democrats should not treat recent Republican election overperformance as a sideshow, saying the state’s deeper problem is a “successful economy attached to a failing model of governance.”
Zakaria listed California’s high spending, housing shortage, homelessness crisis, weak school scores, population loss, and the decline of Hollywood as signs that one-party Democratic governance is failing ordinary residents despite the state’s enormous wealth and talent.
California Democrats will be tempted to dismiss all this as a sideshow, but the frustration is real and justified. California is one of the most dynamic places on the planet. It has Silicon Valley, Hollywood, world class universities, extraordinary agriculture, ports, talent and natural beauty. But it is a case study in how a rich society can spend more and more while producing less and less of what its ordinary citizens need.
The paradox of California today is a successful economy attached to a failing model of governance.
Consider the fiscal record. Since 2000, California’s population has grown by roughly 15 percent. But the state’s general expenditures have grown more than 200 percent, from $78 billion to about $248 billion. General spending per person has risen from about $2,300 to about $6,300. The number of state employees has grown by more than 50 percent by one count.
Does anyone think that California government and its benefits have gotten 200 percent better in the last 25 years?
Housing is the central failure. California has long spoken the language of compassion while building a system of exclusion. Alicia Finley writes in the “Wall Street Journal” that from 2021 to 2024, the L.A. metro area, with nearly 13 million people, issued only 118,000 building permits for new homes. Atlanta with about half that population issued 163,000.
California has made it too hard, slow and expensive to build. The result is predictable. Home prices soar, rents rise, workers commute farther, homelessness grows, young people leave. And people are leaving. Over the past seven years, the state has lost a net 1.9 million people through domestic migration.
For generations, people moved to California to pursue the future. Now, many middle class people are leaving because they can’t afford one. Or look at education. For years, California schools had a plausible excuse. They were underfunded. Total spending on education through 12th grade has more than doubled since the early 2010s, and per pupil spending by 2023 was well above the national average. Yet the results remain dismal.
In the 2024 nation’s report card, California was 43rd in fourth grade math, 39th in fourth grade reading, 36th in eighth grade math, and 38th in eighth grade reading. Homelessness tells the same story in a more painful register. A 2024 audit revealed California had spent $24 billion on the problem over a five-year span. Yet in 2024, California reached a record high in homelessness, almost 200,000.
Homelessness did decline by about 3 percent from 2024 to 2025. But the state’s expansive, expensive and elaborate homelessness aid complex has not proven to solve homelessness in any significant way. California’s headline prosperity, generated in good part by a few industries like high tech, masks weaknesses underneath. Job creation has been sluggish. In 2025, California essentially failed to add any new jobs on net.
Private industries outside government and government supported health care actually shed jobs, according to the Center for Jobs and the Economy. The state is using public spending to paper over private sector stagnation. Nowhere is this more vivid than Los Angeles, where Hollywood, the city’s defining industry, is in slow motion collapse. The effects are being felt not by celebrity actors and influencers, but the carpenters, costumers, sound engineers, camera operators, editors, drivers, caterers, dry cleaners, prop houses and small businesses that once formed one of the world’s great industrial clusters.
The numbers are stark. One report found L.A. shoot days fell from 36,792 in 2022 to just 19,694 in 2025. Another report estimates film, television and sound jobs fell by nearly 30 percent. Motion picture employment in L.A. County fell from about 142,000 at the end of 2022 to roughly 100,000 two years later.
Hollywood is still the symbol, the brand, the mythology, and it still houses the big studios that produced most of the world’s greatest entertainment for almost a century. But thanks largely to high taxes, costs, and regulations, the work has moved elsewhere to Georgia, New Jersey, Toronto, and London and Warsaw.
Michael Lynton, who ran Sony Entertainment, told me that the big studio lots looked like ghost towns now, with tens of acres of soundstages and recording studios where nothing is happening. He said, “Los Angeles is becoming a sunny version of Detroit.”
Consider this simple fact. According to “Fortune,” none of the 10 films nominated for Best Picture this year were primarily produced in Hollywood. Los Angeles still hosts the Oscars, but increasingly it does not actually make the movies being honored there.
For years, Democrats in California have governed without any real competition. The recent primary results suggest that even in deep blue territory, voters are restless. They’re not becoming Republicans. But they are asking a reasonable question. Why does a state with so much money, talent, and promise make life for ordinary people so hard?
