By Prime Time presenter Mark Little
If you've been paying any attention to the US presidential horse-race, you'll know that California is the glittering prize on Super-Duper Tuesday. But all that talk of poll numbers and delegates shouldn't obscure California's deeper significance in this landmark election.
In some ways, California is exceptional. Even Americans tend to look on it as another country, a place where life is even bigger and brasher and people are more laid-back and liberal. But look closer and you see California is the source of many of the changes and trends that are re-shaping the United States - for better or worse.
It's not so much California as the wider Sunbelt, that vast arc of arid desert and suburban sprawl, stretching from the edge of Los Angeles all the way to the Texas metropolis of Houston. The states of the Sunbelt are increasingly influential in American politics (including New Mexico and Arizona, which also vote on Super Tuesday) but what's more important are the changes they are bringing to the American way of life.
The Sunbelt is the focus of what's been called the 'great dispersal', a stunning movement of people who have decided to swap life in big old cramped cities for the limitless horizons of the American South-West
According to the last US census, America's population center is moving south and west at a rate of three feet an hour, five miles a year. By 2030, two out of every three Americans will live in the Sun Belt.
When people come to this new frontier they tend to gravitate towards the boom-burbs; what used to be mere suburbs of bigger cities have been transformed into vast, independent metropolises. For example, Los Angeles has been emptying in out in recent years, with people migrating down the freeway into Orange County boom-burbs like Santa Ana and Anaheim. Some fleeing LA migrate across states lines to boomburbs around Las Vegas and Pheonix, making them the fastest growing cities in America.
These boom-burbs are also among the youngest and most diverse cities in America, places where recent waves of immigrants go to bed down their American dream. In the generic clutter of these cities you will come across pockets of ethnic influence from the four corners of the globe. If you like Afghan, Ethopian, Korean, Vietnamese, Iranian or Lebanese food then come to the boomburbs. As one close observer of the Sunbelt put it: every time America fights a war it seems to gain another restaurant.
By far the biggest ethnic influences in the Sunbelt melting pot are immigrants from South and Central America. Across the United States, Latinos now make up 13% of the population and by 2030, this will rise to 30%. In the Sunbelt, certain cities are already majority Latino.
In so many ways, California and the rest of the Sunbelt are the cutting edge of American life but this is also a place of doubt and confusion right now. Top of everybody's agenda here is the collapse of the property market and the threat of economic recession that has followed in it wake. The damage done by the Subprime crisis is sharpest on the Sunbelt and its still working its way to the surface, with more than 2 million homeowners facing a sharp rise in subprime payments in the coming 12 months.
There are other issues sowing the seeds of doubt here. States like California and Arizona have been rocked by an angry debate over immigration. The Sunbelt also faces increasingly difficult environmental problems; in states like Nevada and Arizona, the shortage of water is one of the most bitterly contested political questions, pitting state versus state.
Add to all of this the persisting shock of 9/11 and the failings exposed by the war in Iraq and you begin to understand why even the most dynamic parts of America are struggling with doubt. In the sprawling suburbs of the Sunbelt, the polls show an overwhelming majority of people are still fairly optimistic about their own lives but an equal proportion believe their country is on the wrong track. People here also seem to want a more isolationist foreign policy: one recent poll showed just 42% of Americans want their country to play an active role in the world.
This confusion, doubt and caution are feeding two very strong impulses in this presidential election, and they are becoming more apparent as we near Super Tuesday. The first is a demand for security at a time of great uncertainty. That helps explain why Hillary Clinton did so well in the Sunbelt state of Nevada: she is seen as the safest pair of hands by people with the most to lose. But the second impulse among people you meet here is a demand for change, for a different type of politics, for an end to the culture wars that have dominated American life for a generation. And that may help explain why Barack Obama has narrowed the gap in recent weeks.
Super Tuesday will help us understand which impulse American are giving in to as they choose a new president. Either way, those impulses are strongest and most raw on America's new frontier, a vast stretch of suburb and desert which starts here in California.
