ABSTRACT
While Knowland took a pummeling at the polls in 1958, he garnered 54 percent of the vote in Orange County, where Proposition 18 passed as well. Those results reflected the county's longstanding conservative tradition. Achieving its independence from Los Angeles County in 1889, Orange County did not vote for a Democrat for president until1932, but even then Franklin Roosevelt won by only 1,200 votes. Though he triumphed again in 1936, no other Democratic presidential candidate has won there since. With the exception of the brief Democratic ascendancy during the Roosevelt years, the Republican Party has dominated the county's politics. Orange County Republicans, however, were not uniformly conservative. In fact, during World War II and the decade after, county Republicans did not stand out as being conspicuously right-wing when compared to county party members in the 1960s. Sparked by the revolt against Modem Republicanism, the shift to an overwhelmingly conservative trend began in the latter half of the 1950s, as the county changed rapidly from a rural orange grove and farming region to an urban industrial center.1
