Ronald Reagan, the Governor of California from 1967 to 1975, won the Presidency in 1980 and 1984.  He was California's favorite son in 1968 -- hoping that a deadlocked convention might turn to him.  (Did you know that in '68, Reagan received 1,696,270 primary votes -- more than any other candidate, including Richard Nixon?)  In 1976, he challenged Gerald Ford in the GOP primaries, and won 46% of the primary votes.

Herbert Hoover became a Californian when he started at Stanford University in 1891.  He ran for President in 1920, losing the California Republican primary to Sen. Hiram Johnson by a 64%-36% margin.  After serving as Secretary of Commerce in the Harding and Coolidge administrations, he was elected President in 1928.  He lost his bid for a second term to Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt.

William Gibbs McAdoo grew up in Georgia and Tennessee and was a New York City lawyer when Woodrow Wilson named him Secretary of the Treasury.  By 1920 he was the President's son-in-law and the front runner for the Democratic presidential nomination.  He had the most delegates for most of the balloting, but lost on the 44th ballot to Ohio Governor James Cox.  McAdoo also had the most delegates going into the 1924 Democratic National Convention, but lost on the 103rd ballot to John W. Davis.  McAdoo later moved to California, and won a U.S. Senate seat in 1932.  He lost the Democratic primary six years later to Sheridan Downey.

Pete McCloskey, a GOP Congressman from California from 1969 to 1983, makes this list because his quixotic but memorable challenge to President Richard Nixon in the 1972 primaries.   As an anti-war candidate, McCloskey won 11% against Nixon in New Hampshire, and captured one delegate nationwide.  He lost a 1982 GOP primary for U.S. Senate, and became a Democrat in April 2007.

Sam Yorty was an icon of old California politics: elected to the State Assembly in 1936, at age 27, was elected to Congress in 1950 and won 46% as the Democratic U.S. Senate candidate in 1954, and served as Mayor of Los Angles from 1961 to 1973. He endorsed Richard Nixon over John Kennedy in 1960, challenged Gov. Pat Brown in the 1966 primary, and in 1972 mounted a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.  He won just 6% in New Hampshire (3rd behind George McGovern and Ed Muskie) and dropped out before California, endorsing Hubert Humphrey. 

If Jerry Brown was the Barack Obama of 1976, then Alan Cranston was the Joe Biden of 1984.  The Democratic U.S. Senator since 1968, Cranston won just 2.1% of the vote in the 1984 New Hampshire primary, finishing seventh in a field of eight candidates. 

The Democratic Governor of California from 1959 to 1967 was never really a presidential candidate, though he hoped a deadlocked convention might turn to him in 1960, when he won the California primary as a favorite son.

The California businessman, not Bill Richardson, was the first Hispanic presidential candidate.  A former special U.S. Ambassador to Paraguay, he ran in 1980 and won 23,423 votes nationally -- about three times as many as Bob Dole won that year.