I am a transplanted Washingtonian. I follow DC news online at the Washington Post and through a neighborhood blog that covers a lot of DC city politics.
In the ten years I’ve lived here, I can honestly say we’ve never had a slow year. The population around here is made up about equally of ornery mountain folks, crystal-gazing hippies, and rich halfbacks.* The resulting culture clashes keep things interesting.
*Halfback is the local term for people from New York/New Jersey who originally retired to Florida, but later moved to western North Carolina. They’ve gone half way back home.
I started following state and local politics by participating in it. The first thing I did was to sign up for an account at Care2, a website that lists assloads of progressive petitions for you to sign. You sign up for an account with an email address that you use for nothing but mailing lists, and when you sign a petition, check the box next to “Get email alerts from [insert organization here]”, if you like what that organization does. You’ll get emails from them that let you get involved in letter-writing campaigns, most of which go to Sen. Boxer, Sen. Feinstein, your representative in the House, or your representative in the California state Senate or Assembly. Pretty soon you’re getting emails and snail mails from the organizations you support philosophically and from your representatives in government. What’s really cool is when your Congressman sends you a well-reasoned personal counterpoint to your argument, an experience I had with Rep. Duncan Hunter recently. (He’s only my Congressman thanks to blatant gerrymandering, but we’ll ignore that for now.)
Then I started hearing about local campaigns for things I believed in and got involved. I’m now so in tune with politics that I was recently declared a “supervolunteer” by Equality for All and I have a second interview with the Obama campaign coming up this week. You may not want to get as involved as I am, but my point is that you “follow” state and local politics by getting involved at some level. In fact, if you’d like to get involved with the cause of marriage equality, you can send me a PM and I can hook you up.
If you’re more conservative, I’m sure there’s some kind of right-side equivalent to Care2 out there. Either way, reading CityBEAT and the Reader will at least help you keep your finger on the pulse of important local politics.
FTR, I know for a fact that there are blogs out there covering San Diego politics (since ours are more…interesting than others’, in the “May you live an interesting life” sense), but I couldn’t tell you what they are. I’m not the blogging type.
Trust me, you have no idea.
To be fair, the other 49 are pretty insignificant. 
I know it’s probably “old media”, but I like the California Report on NPR.
Canadian/Quebecer here, and though I’m naturally more preoccupied with federal politics (what with being on a federal political party’s federal council and all), you can hardly not follow provincial politics, especially this province, which I do, just not in the same amount of detail.
Heh, I personally follow provincial politics much more than federal politics. Of course, I’m not a member of any federal party (nor any provincial party, for that matter).