Politics: Meg Whitman's Claims about Businesses Leaving California

"You probably read that Northrop Grumman just left Long Beach to go to Virginia," said Whitman in a campaign appearance outside Sacramento last month. It wasn't the first time she's mentioned the major aerospace and defense contractor, which announced in January that its corporate headquarters was headed to northern Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C.

But while Northrop Grumman's top executives are moving, the company's not actually leaving the state of California. In a series of emails this week, company spokesman Dan McClain confirmed that some 30,000 employees -- one quarter of the company's worldwide staff -- are still here. That means that only slightly more than 1% of the total workforce was relocated.

Whitman also told her audience last month that the CEO of Northrop Grumman told her that no one from state government tried to stop them. Spokesman McClain says the company doesn't comment on whether conversations with folks like the GOP candidate take place. But contrary to Whitman's comment, McClain says state officials did talk to Northrop Grumman when the HQ relocation was announced. And he says that the company told those state officials that there could be a silver lining to the decision.

"We explained to them that the move was intended to bring us closer to our U.S. government customers," wrote spokesman McClain in an email, "and that one of our objectives in moving is to be able to better serve our customers' needs and hopefully win more business for our California operations."

The Whitman campaign, even when told of the company's comments, insisted this afternoon that geographic proximity to DC isn't the whole story. "Anyone who thinks Northrop Grumman moving their corporate headquarters to another state had nothing to do with California's terrible business climate is living in a fantasy world," wrote Whitman's spokesperson Sarah Pompei in an email.

The "bleeding of jobs" -- the notion that a large number of jobs are businesses are fleeing California -- is a familiar talking point in state politics these days, especially among Republicans. But in the only broad, longitudinal nonpartisan study out there, the numbers don't match the rhetoric.

Nonetheless, there is a sense that California's business climate needs a face lift, but that it requires broad policy changes, not special treatment (financial packages, etc.) for individual companies -- a process some have likened to 'ransom' demanded by those companies and willingly paid by other states.

For more, see Campaign Check: A Business Exodus? by John Myers, September 17, 2010, at KQED.