http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/12/us/california-today-latino-population.html 2016-10-12 15:01:48 California Today: A State’s New Face Wednesday: Santa Ana stands as the future of a new California, the season ends for the San Francisco Giants, and early election voting kicks off. === Good morning. (Want to get California Today by email? Let’s turn it over the Adam Nagourney, our Los Angeles bureau chief. Santa Ana is a quick eight miles from Disneyland and 40 miles from Los Angeles City Hall — in the heart of Orange County, once a symbol of white, suburban, Republican California. If you want to understand how California is changing, indeed, how the nation is changing, this city of 334,000 people is a good place to start. And Santa Ana is the anchor for It’s worth remembering that three decades ago, Republicans posted uniformed guards at polling places to keep Latino voters away. By contrast, most of the signs in this city’s handsome downtown are in Spanish, and the sounds of Spanish can be heard on the street. “There’s no attempt to whitewash the city anymore,” Aurelia Rivas, 26, a student, told us. And Santa Ana may well be the future of California — not to mention much of the United States. Across California 40 percent of the population is now Latino, a number that keeps growing. Both leaders of the State Legislature are Latino, as is the mayor of Los Angeles and secretary of state. There is a reason Donald J. Trump, who has attacked Mexicans in denouncing illegal immigration, isn’t even in the running in California. “We are well past the tipping point — everywhere,” the mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, told us when we visited him at his official residence. “The shift within 20 years from being the most anti-immigrant state to being the most embracing state for the integration of immigrants has been pretty breathtaking.” In “Latino political power is not the panacea nor does it equate to instant gains overall or lifting people out of poverty,” he told our Jenny Medina. “The fact that we have political power I think means we’ve started that journey.” See reporting in The Times on the Nov. 8 ballot initiatives: And dig into analyses of all 17 statewide measures by the • • The Cubs will now face either the Dodgers or the Nationals, whose division series was • • The Los Angeles Police Commission approved a sweeping set of proposals aimed at • For more than a decade, • So little water is flowing from the rivers that feed San Francisco’s estuary that its • Two ruptures in an • • “Miss You Like Hell,” set to begin at • If your mind is already made up, you don’t have to wait till Election Day on Nov. 8. Early voting kicked off this week in California, as a limited number of polling places opened and the state began sending out millions of mail-in ballots to voters who requested them. Elections officials have encouraged people to take advantage of the mail option. For one thing, it helps keep lines shorter on Election Day, a heightened concern with a record It also allows voters plenty of time to make their way through the ballot’s thicket of choices. (The ballot must be returned with a postmark on or before Nov. 8). California has been a pioneer in the use of vote-by-mail option. Michael McDonald, an associate professor at the University of Florida whose research focuses on elections, said that in 1980 California became the first state to lift the requirement that voters provide an excuse — such as travel or illness — to get an absentee ballot. Other states took similar steps and the proportion of Americans who vote early rose steadily — from less than a tenth in the early 1990s to roughly a third in 2012, Today, 27 states and the District of Columbia allow early, no-excuse voting by mail, In states that continue to require a justification, in part because of concerns over potential voter fraud, early voting tends to hover in the single digits, said Mr. McDonald. By contrast, he said, more than half of California’s votes in the November election are expected to be cast by mail. Voters have until Nov. 1 to request a mail ballot. California’s California Today goes live at 6 a.m. Pacific time weekdays. Tell us what you want to see: The California Today columnist, Mike McPhate, is a third-generation Californian — born outside Sacramento and raised in San Juan Capistrano. He lives in Davis. California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and attended U.C. Berkeley.