By any measure, California is a failed state — and a national embarrassment.

What happened to the nation’s most richly naturally endowed, and once best-governed, state?

The left took total control — after millions of the embattled middle class fled.

Millions more impoverished immigrants, legal and illegal, took their place.

Left-wing Silicon Valley spawned some of the wealthiest elite liberal enclaves in the world.

The result was a neo-feudal society that’s hardly democratic.

As upper-bracket taxpayers fled, taxes rose on those who remained to fund expanding entitlements for newly arrived poor would-be residents.

In turn, even more of the middle class left.

The remaining pyramidal economic structure ensured a Democratic monopoly — further entrenched by changing balloting laws, gerrymandering voting districts, vote harvesting and ignoring or undermining popular referenda.

For example, in 2014, Californians voted for Proposition 1, a $7.5 billion water bond designed to solve the state’s chronic water storage deficit.

Included was $2.7 billion specifically designated for new reservoirs: The last major reservoir had been built in 1980, when California had roughly half its current population.

But bureaucracies, elected officials and green activists blocked all new reservoir construction.

Adding insult to injury, Gov. Gavin Newsom used $250 million from the Proposition 1 fund to blow up four Klamath River dams that had once provided storage, electrical generation, recreation and flood control.

Californians have twice voted in referenda (for Proposition 209 and against Proposition 16) to bar the use of racial preferences for contracting, admissions and promotion in public institutions.

Most public universities simply ignored the law and continued their “diversity” quotas under new names, against the will of the people.

California voters in 2008 passed Proposition 11 to stop political gerrymandering via a supposedly nonpartisan state redistricting commission.

But Democratic lobbyists and lawyers sabotaged the goal of disinterested redistricting.

Although Republicans usually achieved nearly 40% of the California vote in national elections, two decades later there were only seven Republicans in the 52-person congressional delegation, a mere 13% of the state’s representatives.

Even that tiny contingent was considered too generous by the left: The 2026 redistricting will likely push the GOP down to four or five seats.

The balloting mess in the recent Los Angeles mayoral race shows just how dysfunctional and anti-democratic California has become.

Democrats warp elections in a “legal” manner by passing insane laws that ensure fraud and Democratic victories.

Winners in the strange jungle primaries — usually both Democrats — weren’t announced until a week after the polls closed.

One of the eventual winners in the mayoral race, the socialist Nithya Raman, gave a teary concession speech on Election Night.

Republican Spencer Pratt was comfortably ahead of her in second place then — only to lose when large numbers of late ballots that broke roughly 90% Democratic arrived.

Remember, every registered voter is sent a mail-in ballot. If it’s postmarked on Election Day, it can arrive at vote centers up to seven days after the election.

No one really knows whether the ballots are mailed to the dead, to former or nonexistent addresses, or to legally eligible voters — by design.

Anyone can register and receive a provisional ballot on the same day.

Campaign operatives can round up voters, gather their ballots and deliver them en masse to a voting center.

They can register anyone to vote, provide a ballot, and then deposit it immediately.

There’s no requirement to provide proof of US citizenship; a credit card without a picture suffices.

It gets worse: If the potential voter has no license, no Social Security number, no proof of US citizenship and no credit card he still will be registered — once harvesters provide him with a “unique identifier” number.

If all that doesn’t work, ballot “curers” can be called in to help remedy rejected partisan ballots post facto.

Democrats now rely on this system to ensure supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature.

The more Democrats control the state, the more socialist, anti-democratic and autocratic California becomes.

Their gift to the nation is a third-world failed state, now in danger of societal collapse.

Fires rage — given ideologically driven prohibitions on brush and forest management  and sheer bureaucratic incompetence.

Multibillion-dollar boondoggle rail projects rust.

Billions of welfare dollars are stolen with impunity.

Illegal aliens who cannot speak or read English are given passes to obtain commercial trucking licenses.

Since 2020, over 100,000 criminals have been released early from state prisons.

Half the state’s births are paid for through state-supplied welfare coverage.

And now the homeless without addresses or IDs can determine elections.

In sum, import poverty; romanticize illegal immigration; demonize the middle class; drive out private-sector capital; and exempt elites from the consequences of their own ideology  — and you’re left with a state where democracy dies.

Along with everything else.

Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness.