As a longtime Californian, I was more than a little surprised to learn that my adopted state had been rated dead last in a poll on the popularity of the 50 states conducted by Public Policy Polling, a highly respected, Democratic-leaning pollster based in Raleigh. (See PP’s chart below.)

My reflex was to go on defense. We are, after all, the world’s seventh largest economy. We are home to the nation’s second-largest and most beautiful cities — Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively — as well as economic engines like Hollywood, the Silicon Valley, the Wine Country and our own self-contained agricultural breadbasket in the San Joaquin Valley. Our population is larger than Canada’s or Australia’s. There are few states with more scenic beauty, pound for pound, and few places in the world with better weather.

But my next impulse was, nah — really, haters, go ahead and hate. Enjoy yourselves in the top five most popular states, Hawaii, Colorado, Tennessee, South Dakota and Virginia.

Still, last? It prompts the question, what is the beef? According to PPP’s analysis, one reason California fared so poorly reflects one of the same reasons I love living here.

Republicans hate California:

Republicans love Alaska (65-3) and Texas (66-9), and absolutely hate California (12-68), followed distantly by Illinois (15-44) and Massachusetts (19-47). So the greatest partisan gap is for California, which Democrats like 91 points more than Republicans do, followed by Texas, which is favored more by Republicans by 82 points.

Democrats had a very different take, of course:

Democrats’ favorite states include Hawaii (62-7), Washington (50-10), Massachusetts (49-9), Oregon (46-6), Vermont (46-9), Colorado (45-8), and New York (51-15), and their least favorites are led by Texas (17-51), Alabama (13-45), and Mississippi (13-41).

Republicans should not only hate California, they should fear us. They should be scared that, as it has in the past, California today presages demographic and political trends for the United States of tomorrow. If so, in the not-too-distant future, the centuries-long Dixiefication of America will collide with a rising non-white population and the party’s current neo-Confederate iteration will find itself shunned and forced to the sidelines.

In the recent past, the GOP has become an increasingly marginalized minority in California. Over the past 30 years, the state was run by liberal Republicans, including Govs. George Deukmejian, Pete Wilson and Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Uber-liberal Los Angeles even elected a liberal Republican, Richard Riordan, as mayor in the 1990s.) Conversely, GOP nationwide moved increasingly to the right, becoming increasingly doctrinaire, intolerant and angry. During the Bush years, particularly, this led to a disconnect between mainstream California voters — who view themselves as less doctrinaire and quite tolerant — and the national party.

There is a small irony in the fact the national GOP leaders most responsible for opening the Party of Lincoln to the descendants of his Confederate enemies were Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, the only Californians ever elected to the presidency.

In 1968, just four years after Pres. Lyndon Johnson and progressive Democrats and liberal Republicans in Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, Richard Nixon secured his bid for the presidency by inviting millions of disgruntled racist Southern Democrats into the GOP fold. Had he not deployed his “Southern Strategy,” it is unlikely Nixon could have been elected.

In what had to have been the most dastardly and cynical move of his political career, Reagan did not even bother to use dog-whistle racism in his appeal for the Southern conservative vote in the 1980 campaign. He chose to launch his presidential run in Philadelphia, Miss., the site 16 years earlier of the murders of three young civil rights workers by the Klu Klux Klan.

Reagan, who had been a liberal Democrat early in his career, once said, “I did not leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me.” His biographers dispute this. They say that as his acting career faded, he fell under the sway of an anti-communist cabal in Hollywood — an assertion backed up by his then-wife, Jane Wyman.

Sill, a similar sentiment works here: California did not leave Republican Party, the party moved far to the right of the state’s mainstream voters. This reversal of fortunes began in 1994, when Gov. Wilson opted to veer hard to the right in his reelection campaign by running on a wedge issue — Proposition 187, a referendum that would have prevented undocumented immigrants from receiving public services, including attending public schools or receiving health care. The initiative passed overwhelmingly and Wilson won reelection in a landslide, but the party has suffered incremental declines in registration ever since.

Flash forward to 2010, a wave election for right-wing extreme Republicans nationwide. And yet, in California, every statewide Republican candidate but one was defeated by double digits. (The one exception was in the attorney general’s race, in which the Democrat, Kamala Harris, won by 1 point.) Republicans also lost seats in the state legislature.

The 2012 election looks just as bad. They could lose five or more seats in their U.S House delegation, and in the U.S. Senate race, no plausible candidate has announced a run against Sen. Dianne Feinstein, so far.

Check out this report from yesterday on meeting of the leadership of the California Republican Party:

California Republicans are bracing for what could be a brutal election year, but they’re also looking to the future.

With the party’s voter registration continuing to fall, Republicans face redrawn electoral districts this year that are likely to further weaken their status in the state Legislature and could lead to less clout in Congress.

Even so, the party is aiming to put on a positive face at its spring convention this weekend in Burlingame, where communicating its principles and reaching out to new voters will be the official focus. Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich is scheduled to be the headline attraction on Saturday, along with former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

Wow! Gingrich and Pawlenty? But wait, it gets better…

After losing the race for California governor and all other statewide offices in 2010, the Republican Party’s fortunes fell further in 2011 when an independent commission created new electoral maps that reduced the number of districts in which Republicans are favored in the state Senate, Assembly and Congress.

Party officials invested months of energy on a costly lawsuit asking the state Supreme Court to overturn the new maps that were drawn by a voter-approved commission that the party once backed. The state Republican party also has spent more than $2.3 million on an initiative campaign asking voters to overturn the maps, which is expected to qualify soon for the November ballot.

Critics within the party say that money would have been better spent helping candidates in districts expected to have close races or registering new voters.

That’s right. The nonpartisan redistricting commission Republicans pushed for for years — they had to float it twice on statewide ballots before voters agreed to it — took into account their dwindling registration numbers and reduced the number of districts. Now the California GOP, which has been on the brink of bankruptcy for years, is using it its precious resources to stop the plan in court. Now they are determined to put yet another initiative on the ballot to rescind the nonpartisan commission they demanded.

See what I mean? And here is the result of this and other craziness:

Republicans now make up just 30 percent of registered California voters, while Democrats have nearly 44 percent. More than 21 percent of voters now say they have no party preference — up 5 percentage points from 2003, when Republican registration was about 5 percentage points higher and Democrats were around the same as they are now.

So, yeah, given the state of affairs besetting the California GOP, and the harbinger it may well represent, who can blame Republicans nationwide for hating California.