> Here's a town, Cambria, where building a pipeline to the ocean was stopped by environmental nazi's. The fanatics think they are doing earth good and feel self-righteous about opposing such a thing.
More like a NIMBY / special interest. There are plenty of them for any political topic you can come up with (environmental, industry, labor, guns, religion, civil liberties, etc). These groups have power enshrined in the 1st Amendment. Welcome to US politics, you are late to the game.
The California Coastal Commission is not entirely about environmental protection at the expense of development; it's also about preserving the look of the coastline, the interests of tourism, and the ocean water off the coast (which the city of Cambria doesn't own, the state of California does).
Grammar fix: Nazis. It's capitalized because it is a proper noun (even though the Nazis were despicable) and there is no apostrophe because the word is pluralized and not a contraction.

There is no feasible way that a desal plant will be built before the end of the drought (if the drought ends soon) or that a hastily built desalination plant will be a sufficient supply for the population.

And FWIW, if every tiny town like Cambria tried to deSal their way out of the drought, the entire coastline would be mutilated with the brackish desal byproduct and residents would continue to use water like there was no drought. Santa Barbara's desalination plant is only expected to be able to supply the city with 30% of the water needs. SB is 1/400th the population of California, so there would need to be about 1,200 desalination plants the size of Santa Barbara's (which has cost about $75million so far). A larger reservoir system is needed to sustain the current population of California and it won't matter until after rain replenishes the existing one.

> He has voted Democrat all his life.
So he's so pissed off at the result of tens of millions like him (both Republican and Democrat) voting for the same party for a lifetime that he is finally pissed off enough to vote for someone that is politically centrist. AMAZING! He probably doesn't even see the cognitive dissonance and blames everyone but himself. You reap what you sew.

People should be angry at the 2-party pendulum system that offers voters a false choice. It's mostly created by state-level politics (the state level political parties get to choose whether people of other party affiliations are allowed to vote in their primary), but is heavily reinforced at the federal level by the winner take all effect of the Electoral College[1][2]. Political parties have destroyed most of the choice of representation at the federal level and what is left has been destroyed by the dirty nature of a hyper-polarized electorate. The parties are the problem and your parents are part of them.

Voting for Trump doesn't fix anything. It is a vote of frustration, nothing more. It doesn't address:

* the electoral college,
* the hyper-partisan electorate,
* the fact that Congress will still be nearly 50/50 Republican and Democrat,
* the majority party in the Senate will be unable to break a fillibuster,
* voters won't magically more rational or more interested in long-term investments as opposed to stopgaps
* Congress won't suddenly give up pork-barrel spending
* the 60% of apathetic and disaffected US voters don't magically show up to the ballots
* fix the US Government's procurement systems
* fix labor contracts and pension costs
* reduce the 300,000 criminal penalties for federal laws on the books including mandatory minimums which prevent judges and prosecutors from seeking and arriving at rational punishments
* improve mental illness treatments so the penal system isn't burdened by people who can't possibly control their own actions
* illegal immigration (even if you think it's a major problem)
* ISIS won't be intimidated by a loudmouth who tries and comically fails to hide the fact that he is old and losing hair on his head

It might make your parents feel good for a few months, but then it will sink in that the two major parties will re-absorb most of the Trump voters by moving their platforms only the minimum amount needed to appease most of them (a la Republican party after 2009-2010 Tea Party movement).

And Trump, as a hypothetical president, would still be president without allies in Congress. And I honestly worry about a guy who can't express a thought accurately and precisely as the head diplomat and a man who tweetstorms insults at a woman who asked completely legitimate questions of him as Commander in Chief of the country with the most advanced military, a nuclear weapons arsenal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ross_Perot#1992_presidential_c...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_ele...

For the record, I have serious criticisms of California politics, also, but the Coastal Commission is low on my list. {CEQA, and Prop 13, and the inability of the California legislature to raise taxes if needed} are high on the list.
Anyone who lives within sight of the coast already knows about the Coastal Commission.