This does seem to be the case.
If you look at the voting statistics for cities where Californians are fleeing -- Boise, Las Vegas, Reno, Salt Lake City, etc -- those cities are rapidly turning blue.
But I don't know if they continue voting Democrat "to bring back" their old laws and lifestyle so much as they're just used to voting a particular way and continue to do so.
There don't seem to be a lot of people who put effort into making informed voting choices on a candidate-by-candidate basis and just go for whatever party they voted for last time.
I think the way people vote tends to reflect their beliefs. And generally, beliefs don't change often or drastically.
I see a lot of people who vote based on how they've always voted, rather than based on their actual beliefs. It's part of the tribalism of it all.
Three data points:
In West Virginia there is an expression called Yellow Dog Democrat, which means that the person would vote for a yellow dog before he voted for a Republican.
In Chicago, for the better part of the last century, the policies and positions a lot of the so-called Democratic Party politicians would be considered to be very Republican in other states.
One set of my in-laws lives what would be considered by many to be a redneck lifestyle, deep in the woods, surrounded by guns and beer and American flags, and cobbled-together vehicles, and talking smack about Bernie Sanders being a Communist and such. But guess what? When they go to vote, they vote Democrat simply because they always have.
It's the reason in some elections in some places you have the option (or sometimes the requirement) of pushing one button and voting for everyone on that party's ticket, rather than being forced to choose each candidate on their own merits.
Your neighbors in SF might think you're Newt Gingrich but relative to your new neighbors in Boise you may as well be Bernie Sanders.
It's all been positive with anecdotes like inviting "the new neighbors" to real TX bbq's and things like that but it's definitely real.
https://www.star-telegram.com/news/politics-government/elect...
it is not Tongue-in-cheek , democrats fail to make the connection to the policies they support and the effects of those policies.
See the polices are suppose to "fix" those problems and when they inevitably fail because socialism is not workable, they do not blame socialism they blame the execution, it just was not done "correctly", so if the just vote in the correct democrat this time socialism will work
>>but CA was Republican leaning until fairly recently (remember Arnold Schwarzenegger?).
Arnold Schwarzenegger was a RINO, Around here we would call him a Democrat, California Democrats are the extreme of the extreme Left. So anyone Right of Stalin is a Republican in California.
Further since 1978 (as far back as I could find data) the CA legislature has been Democrat Controlled, so sure they may have had a couple of "republican" Governors, that does not make them a Republican state or mean any free market policies where passed, the Democrats have had a tight grip on the state for as long as most people have been alive
