California Fights Back: The Golden State in the Age of Trump (Heyday)
Author Peter Schrag in conversation with Carla Marinucci, Senior Writer, POLITICO California Playbook

Journalist Peter Schrag argues that California’s role in the era of Trump is to act as a leader in the resistance to the current administration, and to be held up as an alternative to the course pursued in Washington. The Democratic Party’s grip on statewide elected offices and legislature has made California a beacon of progressivism. Schrag points to the state’s shifting demographics and the erosion of the Republican Party in the wake of Proposition 187 as two major reasons behind California’s move to the left. This book raises the possibility of this shift becoming the story of other states.

Co-sponsored by Heyday

Peter Schrag is a journalist, a scholar of Californian politics and political history, and the author of numerous books. His publications include When Europe Was a Prison Camp: Father and Son Memoirs, 1940-41 (Indiana University Press, 2015), Final Test: The Battle for Adequacy in America’s Schools (The New Press, 2005) and Paradise Lost: California’s Experience, America’s Future (The New Press, 1998), which was a New York Times notable book. Schrag served as a columnist and page editor at the Sacramento Bee for nineteen years, and was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies from 2011 to 2013.

Carla Marinucci, POLITICO California’s Senior Political Writer, produces POLITICO’s daily California Playbook. Marinucci, formerly of the San Francisco Chronicle, has covered presidential, state and local politics since 1996 in California, including seven gubernatorial elections in the state. She has consistently been named one of California’s best political writers and bloggers, is a regular political analyst on KQED, KPCC and radio and television stations around the state, and has appeared on MSNBC, CNN, Fox News and Al Jazeera.