Northern California county is 'a Democratic bobbing alone in a sea of red,' writes political reporter who went to see why

Alpine County in California (Wikipedia)

Alpine County, California, pop. 1,200, "is as rural as rural California gets," writes Los Angeles Times political reporter Mark Z. Barabak. But it votes "along the same lines as Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco and other urbanized blue bastions," making it "a Democratic speck bobbing alone in sea of red."

To find out why, Barabak went to the county just before the recent primary election. He found several answers, including: It's a lightly populated place (California's least populous county) that became popular with "back to nature" migrants ("With so few people, it didn’t take much beyond word of mouth to help turn Alpine from red to blue"); it has a significant number of Native Americans; and perhaps "Democrats moving in and Republicans moving out as people seek to live among like-minded partisans," a phenomenon described in the 2008 book The Big Sort: Why the clustering of like-minded America is tearing us apart.

And what about the economy, often a determiner of a place's politics? "There is a bit of cattle ranching. There was once some logging. But that dried up long ago, just like the silver mines," Barabak reports. "So there was never the raging battle over natural resources that took place in other rural California counties, turning many residents against the Democratic Party and others foes derided as tree-huggers."