A Long Beach polling location. Photo by Sarah Bennett.
Understandably, Tuesday’s re-election of President Barack Obama grabbed most of the political headlines. But if you want to learn something about your fellow Californians, you’re better off looking at what happened in the state and local races. Because while we already knew that California was a Blue state, we may have just learned aren’t quite as progressive as we tend to think of ourselves, and that money speaks as loudly here as it does anywhere else.
Money Can’t Buy You Love…But It Can Win an Election
Very few people are actually against food labeling. And even though most people who looked closely at Proposition 37 were willing to admit that it had problems, it lost for one simple reason: the No campaign outspent the Yes side by a 6-to-1 ratio. And if you don’t think that made all the difference, consider a recent L.A. Times/USC poll that found a 17-percent drop in support for Prop. 37 between September and late October. These people didn’t suddenly come to feel that food ingredients ought to be secret; it’s just that advertising works.
The Whiff of Corruption Certainly Does Not Help
Rep. Laura Richardson has been part of Long Beach politics for the entire millennium, but the margin of victory by which Rep. Janice Hahn defeated her in the race for the 44th Congressional District has a lot to do with Richardson being named one of the “most corrupt” members of Congress four of the last five years. (that she still managed to get 40 percent of the vote may tell us something else about ourselves.)
We Watch Out for the Little Guy
I voted No on the school-funding initiative that was Proposition 38 because I did the math and found out that people making as little as $17,500 annually would be paying $400 more per year in taxes—a big hit for someone making that little. I don’t know whether that’s the same “look out for the little guy” logic that motivated three out of every four voters to join me, but when you consider that we passed Proposition 30 (which generates funding for schools from a tax increase on individuals making over $250,000/year) and Measure N (which establishes a minimum “living wage” for hotel workers), while defeating Proposition 32 (which would have curtailed the ability of unions to take part in the political process), it seems that—at least in 2012—Californians are interested in protecting those with little individual power, be they children or low-wage earners.
A Large Percentage of the Populace Will Vote Opposite You, No Matter What
In light of a recent State Supreme Court ruling, the “No on 40” campaign closed up shop. “[W]e have suspended our campaign and no longer seek a NO vote,” they wrote in the sample ballot. That didn’t stop nearly 2.5 million people—over one-quarter of all votes cast—from voting No. When the “No” side was no longer asking for their votes. Go figure.
We Get that “Three Strikes,” as Originally Conceived, Has Failed Us
In the early 1990s, it sounded good to Californians to institute a better way to keep repeat felony offenders off the streets. But what the majority of voters didn’t understand in 1994 was that the “Three Strikes” law they approved would often lead to persons with no violence on their record being jailed for a mandatory minimum of 25 years. And California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office has noted that “the decisions permitting the application of the Three Strikes law to nonserious, nonviolent offenses has allowed many offenders to be sentenced to prison for extended periods, costing the state hundreds of millions of dollars.” Tuesday was the second time voters have approved measures to emend “Three Strikes,” hoping now it may finally do more good than harm.
We Still Love Our Death Penalty
{loadposition latestnews}Look, I’m with you: in theory I’m okay with the death penalty. And for me it’s not about vengeance: on a pragmatic level we’re simply better off without certain persons polluting our world. But the current system is badly flawed, clearly favoring whites over non-whites and the rich over the poor. But setting that aside, when you consider that since 1978—i.e., when the death penalty was reestablished in California—we’ve executed only 13 people (even though we have over 700 on Death Row), on a pragmatic level it doesn’t seem worth the cost. Well, doesn’t seem worth it to me, anyway, because I voted Yes on Proposition 34, which would have abolished the death penalty—and allocated $100 million of the money saved for the investigation of homicides and rapes—but most of us voted No. I was only a kid when the California Supreme Court repealed the death penalty, but I remember how enraged people got. So do many of my fellow Californians, apparently.
Maybe California Isn’t the Country’s Most Progressive State, After All
In 2008, Californians passed Proposition 8, which not only amended the State Constitution not only to ban same-sex marriage, but in the process removed a right that had already been bestowed by the courts. In 2010, Californians voted No on Proposition 19, which would have legalized marijuana for recreational use. It’s been clear for a while now that that marriage equality and marijuana legalization will one day reign in these United States. What seemed clear, too, was that California would be the trailblazer on these issues. But it turns out history will record Maine and Maryland as the first states whose voters extended marriage rights to all, while Colorado and Washington were the first to legalize marijuana use for non-medical purposes. Although Tuesdays votes made Maine and Maryland the seventh and eighth states to allow same-sex marriage, the history-making element is that these are the first states extend the right via the ballot box. But the marijuana-legalization measures are even more dramatic, since these are the first states truly to decriminalize marijuana—never mind legalize it for sale, which these measures do—thus freeing up local law enforcement to focus on more important issues, as opposed to what we find in a place like Long Beach, CA, where, even amidst a spike in violent crime, an underfunded, understaffed police force continues to expend resources on the doomed policy of marijuana prohibition. Now it’s left for us to play catch-up.