Originally from Iran, Shiva Bagheri has spent most of her life around the entertainment industry in California.
She started gymnastics and dance classes at 9 years old, became a professional dancer and actress at 15 and has owned her own dance and fitness studio in Beverly Hills for over 10 years.
Politics weren’t on her radar.
The first time she voted in a U.S. presidential election, she was in her 30s living in the Los Angeles area. She was a registered Democrat and cast her ballot for Barack Obama.
Now, she is a passionate supporter of Donald Trump and the organizer of political rallies that drew thousands of conservatives to the center of Beverly Hills.
"Everything that the Democrats do is deceptive," Bagheri said. "So now I don’t see myself as a Democrat at all, I see myself as a conservative."
Her conservative identity, she says, comes from a belief in "freedom for everyone." For her, that includes the freedom to own guns, freedom for the unborn and freedom from communism in the U.S., which she considers "systemically Marxist."
But for Bagheri, going from voting for Obama in 2008 to believing "pro-choice should be called pro-murder" wasn’t a dramatic shift in ideology. She says the explanation is much simpler: her Democratic Party affiliation was just a product of living in California.
"It’s kind of like a bubble, you don’t hear any other thing," she said. "You hear who your friends in the entertainment industry are going to pick and you just kind of take who they’re picking."
She set out to burst that bubble when she started Beverly Hills Freedom Rallies last summer. Every Saturday for six months, thousands gathered in a city known more for designer stores and exclusive restaurants than conservatism. With many sporting MAGA hats and Trump 2020 flags, it was a parade of red surrounded by a sea of blue politics.
California has not voted for a Republican presidential nominee since 1988. For decades its Electoral College votes—the most sizable prize in the country—have been almost guaranteed for Democratic presidential nominees.
Its state office holders are all Democrats, and the party has a super majority in the Legislature. But don’t simplify it as a deep blue stronghold. Below the surface is a state with increasingly fervent voices on each end of the political spectrum and more residents getting drawn into the partisan political climate entirely.
"California is one of, if not the single, most left-leaning states politically in the country, but that has as much to do with lack of options as it does to do with ideological thrust," said Dan Schnur, a one-time California Republican who became an independent. Schnur, who teaches at USC Annenberg, served as a top official in the state Republican Party and was a national director of communications for John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign.
FEARING FASCISM
Rafa Lombardino grew up in Brazil and was 4 when the country’s 21-year military dictatorship ended.
"I have a very early memory of my parents popping the champagne when they had this big announcement on TV," she said. "[I was] just thinking of how they were in their late 20s and they had never been able to vote for president because they had been in a dictatorship pretty much all their lives."
In 2002, Lombardino married a man from San Diego and moved to California. While she paid attention to politics, she wasn’t registered to vote for her first 18 years in the U.S. Lombardino wasn’t a citizen and said she was comfortable just renewing her green card every 10 years.
"It sounds horrible," she said, "but because my husband and I agree on everything politically, it was almost like he was representing me on the ballot."
Then came the 2016 presidential election.
"Coming from a country where you see how fascism can really take over, I was really worried about what if this happens here," she said. "So, I do need to have that one more vote in our household to help fight that."
Fearing Trump in power could lead to fascism, she decided she couldn’t put off applying for citizenship any longer. In June 2020 at the age of 39, Lombardino officially became a U.S. citizen and cast her first ballot in the 2020 election.
"Voting here was that sense of relief, I can finally do it now, why did I wait so long?" she said. "But also, I hope this works, I hope that there are enough of us to put an end to this road that really looks like it's going to take us down to fascism."
The percentage of eligible voters registered in California increased from 79.09% in 2019 to 88.03% in 2021. According to a report from the secretary of state’s office, the percentage of eligible voters registered increased more in the last two years than it did in total from 2011 to 2019.
Schnur said the increase in registration is not surprising because California has made it easier to register to vote over the last couple years. "But the number is worth paying attention to going forward," he said, "particularly on ballots in which Donald Trump is not a candidate [to see] whether the percentages of those Californians who actually vote continues to increase."
The same report found the percentage of voters in California registered with no party preference decreased for the first time in any of the state’s odd-year reports since 1991. Schnur said this is a reflection of political polarization.
That’s exactly why the USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future was formed. The aim, according to the website, is to advance political discourse in a bipartisan manner and examine solutions to pressing issues.
"We are at a historically high level of polarization in our country's history," Executive Director of the Center for the Political Future Kamy Akhavan said. "If it feels like we've never been more divided, that's because it's true."
Akhavan said, based on polls, about a quarter of Democrats and over a third of Republicans see the opposite political party as a threat to the nation’s well-being. "You don’t invite a threat over for dinner or for a barbecue or to play with your kids," he said. "They’re the enemy."
In California, Schnur said, although the polarization isn’t as apparent because the Democratic Party is so dominant, it’s still present.
"If you look at the ideological distance between the left and the right and set aside the population imbalance between those two extremes, the distance is just as great, if not greater," he said. "The loudest voices on the left and the right are both gaining influence."
PURPLE IS THE NEW ORANGE COUNTY
Consider Orange County, the third largest county in the state known for Disneyland and sprawling beach cities. "We might not think there are white supremacists who live in Orange County. They are there," Akhavan said. "We might not think that there are hugely staunchly progressive union advocates who live in Orange County. And they are there."
Before 2016, the county had not voted for a Democrat for president since 1936. In the last two presidential elections, Orange County voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
Benjamin Vazquez is a teacher at Valley High School and lives in the county’s city of Santa Ana.
Vazquez was among over 200 people who gathered to support the opening of a campaign office for Sen. Bernie Sanders in his second bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. It was Sanders’ ideas of free education through university level, universal healthcare and police reform that attracted Vazquez.
"I’ve done a lot of work on the environment, immigrants’ rights, investing in youth, divesting in police but this Bernie thing was different," he said. "I’ve seen Santa Ana left, but I’ve never seen Orange County come together left and it was very impactful."
Vazquez ran for mayor of Santa Ana himself in 2016 on a progressive platform that he called "a Bernie-type campaign." That platform included greater police accountability, increased affordable housing and strengthened renter’s rights in the city.
One of the issues Vazquez is most passionate about is immigration. As mayor he hoped to break U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement away from Santa Ana’s city jails and create a sanctuary city, which is a jurisdiction that seeks to protect immigrants from deportation by limiting collaboration with the federal government’s enforcement of immigration laws.
He lost the mayoral election but started a volunteer group of political activists called Cooperative Campaigns. Its goal is getting progressive Democrats elected to office and ultimately, create a pipeline of progressives in Orange County.
"We have to go not only after mayor, but we have to go after state-level Assembly, state senator and representatives, Congress representatives," he said. "And we have to be a mover and shaker within our county and support each other to create that pipeline."
In 2020, Orange County re-elected progressive members of Congress, Reps. Linda Sánchez and Katie Porter, while Irvine elected Farrah Khan, who was endorsed by Progressive Change Campaign Committee, as mayor.
Schnur said dedicated conservatives in Orange County make up a smaller percentage than they did 20 years ago. Many of them, he said, moved to Riverside or San Bernardino. "But the numbers that are remaining there are just as fervent in their beliefs," said Schnur.
Leandra Blades was a police officer in Los Angeles for 13 years. Now, she lives in Orange County, is an alternate on the Orange County Republican Party Central Committee and considers herself a "conservative and a Republican."
Like Vazquez, Blades thinks grassroots groups are important to making political change at the local level. But for Blades, that change is very different from the one Cooperative Campaigns seeks.
"I've just really been seeing a lot of grassroots organizations and a lot of people trying to return to the conservative ideas," she said.
Over the last few years, Blades participated in Back the Blue rallies, which aim to gather support among communities for local police officers, and recently volunteered to help collect signatures to recall California Gov. Gavin Newsom.
In 2020, she decided to run for the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District Board. Her campaign was largely based on her idea of "traditional education."
"I came out against the teacher’s union and I came out against Black Lives Matter curriculum," she said. She won with 38.7% of the vote.
Blades also considers herself an ardent supporter of Trump. On Jan. 6, she attended the Trump rally in Washington that preceded a violent insurrection at the Capitol.
She said she had always wanted to go to one of Trump’s rallies and fearing this could be his last one, she and some friends decided to make it a "girl’s trip" to Washington. Blades, who said she did not enter the Capitol when others breached security entrances, said she doesn’t condone the violent riot, but it was not her experience.
"When we left, there were food trucks lined up around the Capitol and tables set up with people selling all kinds of stuff," she said. "Usually if you’re saying there’s a riot, there’s not like food trucks and tables set out during a riot, so we were just really surprised."
Following Blades’ attendance at the rally and Capitol, constituents in Orange County started a petition to oust her from the school board, saying her participation on Jan. 6 "shows bad judgment and calls into question her ability to evaluate information and make decisions regarding the district."
While the petition has not garnered enough signatures for a recall to qualify for the ballot, thousands have signed it. But Blades said she doesn’t regret going.
"Would I go to the Capitol again? You know what I would," she said. "Because I didn't do anything wrong, my intentions and the intentions of my friends were good."
CROSSTOWN TRAFFIC
At the same time Bagheri’s Freedom Rallies saw thousands gather in Beverly Hills, voters in neighboring Los Angeles supported a slate of progressive candidates and measures.
Among those candidates were George Gascón, who beat the incumbent to become the LA district attorney, and Nithya Raman, who was endorsed by Sanders and secured a spot on LA City Council.
Bri Arey was inspired to get involved with Raman’s campaign when she heard Raman’s support of a measure that sought to reallocate money going toward building new jails.
Arey, who grew up in rural North Carolina and now lives in Raman’s district in Hollywood, said she has always considered herself liberal. But when she moved to LA and started volunteering for White People 4 Black Lives, she became more aware of the social injustices and inequities in the city.
"That really changed my perspective on the world and definitely moved me much farther to the left on the spectrum," she said.
Wanting to be involved with Raman’s ideas of addressing the city’s homelessness crisis and reforming the approach to public safety, Arey volunteered for her campaign. "When you care about issues so much and you're able to see the concrete outcomes," she said, "it felt like if Nithya loses this election, this is what's at stake."
Meanwhile, Bagheri’s political shift started after Obama was elected. She didn’t like that the Obama administration gave money to Iran because it is "an evil regime that is sponsoring terrorism around the world," she said.
The money Bagheri is referring to is sanctions that were lifted on Iran, which gave the country access to its frozen assets, in exchange for repressing its nuclear development.
From there, Bagheri started to pay closer attention to politics. She said the Obama administration was stopping investigations into terrorist groups and she couldn’t understand why.
"And then it popped in my head, they're going after our Second Amendment," she said. "They want to take away our guns, so if there's a lot of shootings and stuff then they can say guns are bad, we can take away your guns."
After that, Bagheri felt like the government was "pushing communism." That fear was heightened by the pandemic. Lockdowns and mask mandates, she said, are unconstitutional and just "a control tactic" similar to women in Iran having to wear hijabs.
Her frustration with pandemic restrictions was part of what motivated her to start the rallies, but the 2020 election propelled her desire for protesting even further. She believes there was cheating in the election and California voted red.
However, Biden won California with 63.5% percent of the vote to Trump’s 34.3%.
Trump has repeatedly claimed there was fraud in the 2020 election, however multiple investigations, including one by the Trump administration's Attorney General William Barr, found no evidence of widespread cheating.
In 2021, Bagheri said members of the Beverly Hills City Council complained to the police department about her gatherings. She was given three citations for unlawful assembly before she officially stopped the rallies.
But Bagheri has no intention of ending her involvement in California politics. She plans to run for Beverly Hills City Council herself in the next few years.
"I love California because I have family here, my friends are here, I love the weather here," she said. "So I fight for what I love."
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