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Can an entire Congressional district suffer from Stockholm Syndrome? In the case of CA-10, it certainly seems like it. Let's take a peek at the chart for CA-10 and see if helps us to assess the mental state of its voters.
Case History
Throughout the '80s, CA-10 was actually located in the South Bay and represented by longtime Democratic Congressman Don Edwards. What we know today as the Contra Costa and Alameda County portions of CA-10 were pretty evenly split up amongst three Congressional districts - CA-07, CA-08, and CA-09 (represented at the time by George Miller, Ron Dellums, and Pete Stark respectively). The Solano County portion of CA-10 was in CA-04, which was represented by Democrat Vic Fazio.
Meanwhile, throughout the '80s, the population in the East Bay exploded. After the '91 census and subsequent redistricting, the physical areas covered by CA-07, CA-08, and CA-09 were reconfigured, downsized, and renamed as CA-07, CA-09, and CA-13 respectively. The appellation of CA-10 was given to the new district created from the excess portions of those three districts (much of Contra Costa County, a smaller portion of Alameda County). Fairfield was added to CA-07, and Dixon was put in CA-03. (As a side note, the '91 redistricting put Edwards into CA-16, where he won reelection. When Edwards retired in 1995, he was replaced by Zoe Lofgren.)
 
 
Then, after the '01 Census, the districts were once again redrawn. The Contra Costa/Alameda cities of Danville, San Ramon, Dublin, and Pleasanton were subtracted from CA-10 and added to CA-11 (McNerney), and the Solano County communities of Dixon and Fairfield were taken from CA-07 and added to CA-10, leaving CA-10 in its current awkward and unlovely configuration.
So what does all this have to do with Stockholm Syndrome, the psychological phenomenon that leads victims to identify and sympathize with their captors? Well, here's the story of CA-10 in a nutshell.
 Up until the election of 1992, residents of Alameda and Contra Costa Counties had been represented by either George Miller (CA-07), Ron Dellums (CA-08), or Pete Stark (CA-09). I think we can agree that's a pretty progressive set of Congress members.
Suddenly, in 1992, with a newly redrawn district, voters in CA-10 elected the execrable Bill Baker to Congress. Then, in the Republican Revolution of '94, he was easily re-elected. Democrats in the district (which was pretty evenly drawn, registration-wise -- see the 1999 registration statistics, the farthest back the SoS site goes) were in shock. They had gone from being represented by some of the most progressive voices in the country to being represented by a social and economic arch-conservative wacko.
What had happened? Well, the most obvious answer to that question (though not the right one) was that the newly-minted Congressional district was deeply conservative. Democrats were spooked and didn't quite know how to react to this new state of affairs. Instead of analyzing the demographics and registration of the district and questioning the efficacy of their local party apparatus or its apparent lack of leadership, they rushed to the conclusion that the Democratic message was wrong for this new district and that if they were to ever regain the seat, they needed to triangulate madly (these were the Clinton years, after all).
The rest of the patient's chart is on the flip...
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