Conservatives are cool again.

And you can thank the liberals.

The rise in homelessness, food prices, energy costs, the housing crisis and poor academic achievement in schools are among the problems that have sparked a wave of conservatism in California, said Dan Walters, syndicated columnist for CalMatters.

“Housing and energy costs were up 41-and-a-half percent in California over the last four years,” Walters said. “‘I can’t take my kids to McDonald’s anymore, I can’t afford to buy a house, I can’t even afford the house we got because all the other costs have gone up,’ and they voted accordingly.”

Walters spoke to about 100 people at the Santa Barbara Club in an event sponsored by the UCSB Economic Forecast Project on Thursday night.

Peter Rupert, executive director of the Forecast Project, kicked off the event with a presentation on the economics of the country before Walters spoke and broke down the reasons why he believes Donald Trump won the presidency.

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris did not speak enough to the everyday concerns of Americans, he said. And even in California, where Democrats have controlled the state legislature, her popularity was weak compared to President Joe Biden.

Even though Harris won California, she got substantially less share of the vote in California than Biden did in 2020. Biden won about 64% of the vote in California in 2020, and Harris won about 59%.

“Ten counties in California that had voted for Biden four years ago flipped over to Trump in this last election,” Walters said.

Walters talked about the political “fish hook.” He said in the 1980s Republicans were dominating rural counties through the inland empire and counties such as Riverside, San Bernardino and into Orange and San Diego counties. Those voting trends disappeared in the 1990s and 2000s but are back now.

“Basically Trump won virtually everything east of the coast, except for a couple tiny little counties east side of the Sierra and Imperial County,” Walters said. “Everything east of the coast went to Trump, plus Orange County, which they voted for Biden four years ago.”

Statewide, several of the conservative-backed measures passed and liberal-backed failed.

“There was a decidedly conservative trend in this election, even in deep blue California,” Walters said.

And it doesn’t look any different nationally.

People are leaving California and moving to swing states, which will only help conservatives in future elections, Walters said.

“The situation in public schools with children learning how to read and doing all the other sorts of things people need to know how to do is awful, it’s just awful,” Walters said. “We are way down there with Louisiana and Mississippi and places like that in national academic performance, and that is going to bite us in the future.”

COVID-19, and the remote learning that went along with it, made the situation worse, he said.

“If we don’t do something about just creating a better educated workforce, we’re going to have serious problems,” Walters said.

The high cost of housing in California is driving everything, he said.

“If we don’t get a handle on the housing situation, if that is at all possible, we’re going to have problems,” Walters said. “We’re losing population in California, and we’re losing it to places like Texas and Arizona and Florida where you can buy a house for $250,000 and have a reasonable level of house payments, unlike California.”

If people are serious about buying homes, they will leave California, he said, which means California will lose electoral college votes and red states will gain them.

“In a sense, the Democratic Party is killing itself by forcing people out of places like California into places like Texas and Florida because their populations are going up; and over time that is going to mean fewer electoral votes in these blue states and more electoral votes in these red states, and it’s going to be harder and harder and harder for Democrats to elect a president.”

Of California’s 40 million people about 15 million are on the state’s Medi-Cal program for poor families.

“That tells you that we have a huge poverty problem in California and that it is getting worse because of the ever-increasing cost of living, in particular for housing, in particular for the utility costs. That is going to drive more people out, it is going to increase poverty, it is going to increase homelessness and it is going to affect the whole state for years and decades to come. This is serious business.”

There’s another problem brewing, he said. Southern California is dependent on the logistics industry, incoming cargo through the ports, cargo handling in the inland empire. It is the biggest thing in the area and employs people who are not well-educated, he said.

“We’re killing that industry by putting more and more restrictions on it,” Walters said. “Logistics are a competitive, global industry, and if we raise the price of cargo by a nickel a ton, it will go someplace else.”

Some people don’t like it because it brings traffic and smog, but it employs tens of thousands of people who might not otherwise be employed.

“If this trend continues, we are going to see this logistics industry go bye-bye,” Walters said.