I agree that California is a mess. However, California would be an extremely expensive place to live regardless of who was running it because of its climate and natural features. However, I don't consider California a model of progressive government in action. I consider California to be a model of what happens with you take a progressive government to its absolute extreme with little regard to pragmatism.
I know you are a Texan, so you may disagree, but when I think of a model conservative state - I don't think of Texas. Yes, there are lots of jobs to be had in Texas and in most of the state you can by a big house in the burbs pretty cheap, but outside of the Austin area, the over all quality of life in Texas is not that great. For example, my wife is from Houston. We go down to Houston every year to visit her family. Economically Houston is booming. We have talked before about moving down there before given how cheap you can buy a home down there and how good the job market is. However, when we compare it to Kansas City in terms of overall quality of life, from our perspective the area is quite lacking. For example, some of the suburban school districts in Houston are good, but they still don't compare to the better school districts here. There are some parks and green space in Houston, and a couple of the communities there do a good job of it like The Woodlands, but all and all the place makes Kansas City look like Portland. From any community in Kansas City you could bike to downtown and have designated bike routes and lanes the whole way in. Unless you happened to live right on the Buffalo Bayou trail, I can't imagine how you could ever pull that off in Houston. Within an hour of my house there is hundreds of miles of cumulative mtb trails and single track. There is some in the Houston area, but very little in comparison. I could not even begin to tell you how many miles of paved bike trails there are in the area, or in JoCo alone, but I can tell you its a good bit more than you will find in the Houston area despite it being a much larger metro. A lot of developments down there don't even have sidewalks. I can go for a run on a 15 degree day here and still encounter lots of runners. I can go for a run on a 60 degree day down there and seldom ever encounter any other runners. The same is true when I carry my road bike down there. I know there are runners and cyclists in Houston, but as a percentage of the population it has to be one of the lowest in the nation.
All of what I have just said about Houston could easily be applied to DFW as well in comparison to most other cities. Austin in this regard is by far the exception down there, and you can thank all the greenies in the Austin area for that. The state of Texas as a whole is like this. Sure there are some state parks, Big Bend National Park, and some small National Forests in East Texas, but there are small states with far more public land than the whole state of Texas has. Hell Missouri has millions of acres thanks to an 1/8th cent statewide sales to tax that goes to the Department of Conservation. As a result there are millions of acres in Missouri to fish, swim, hike, hunt, bike and so on in the state available to anyone. Arkansas is the same way and for the same reason. In fact, growing up in Arkansas we thought it was like the Adirondacks for Texans in that it was where Texans went for actual wildlands.
My point is that yes, Texas is a place with jobs and comparatively cheap cost of living, but in terms of overall quality of life I would not consider it a model for conservative policies at all. In fact, its a perfect example of how things can go wrong when such policies are taken to the extreme. If I were looking for a model state for conservatism, I would think of a place like Utah. It is a deeply red state. Has lower taxes. Is socially conservative as well. Yet, it also has a very high quality of life thanks to excellent schools, loads of green space and public land, smart development and so on.
