California Democrats are poised to have a clean sweep of the statewide elected offices, depending on whether Kamala Harris can maintain a razor-thin margin of victory over Steve Cooley. (Seriously, who the hell votes a Brown-Boxer-Newsom-Cooley ticket? WTF is wrong with those people?)
Here are the results as we know them, with 96.6% reporting across California. Note that the Secretary of State’s site appears to be back up. It’s not her fault the site crashed – they apparently got screwed by a vendor that made promises they could not keep.
Governor: Brown 54, Whitman 41
US Senate: Boxer 52, Fiorina 42
Lt. Gov: Newsom 50, Maldonado 39
Sec State: Bowen 53, Dunn 38
Controller: Chiang 55, Strickland 36
Treasurer: Lockyer 56, Walters 36
Attorney General: Harris 46.1%, Cooley 45.6%
Insurance Commissioner: Jones 50, Villines 38
Supt. of Public Instruction: Torlakson 55, Aceves 45
Ballot props:
Prop 19: 46 yes, 54 no
Prop 20: 61 yes, 39 no
Prop 21: 42 yes, 58 no
Prop 22: 61 yes, 39 no
Prop 23: 39 yes, 61 no
Prop 24: 42 yes, 58 no
Prop 25: 55 yes, 45 no
Prop 26: 53 yes, 47 no
Prop 20: 40 yes, 60 no
Other selected races around the state:
CA-3: Lungren 51, Bera 43
CA-11: McNerney 82,124, Harmer 82,003 (wow)
CA-20: Vidak 51.5, Costa 48.5
CA-47: Sanchez 51, Tran 42
SD-12: Cannella 53, Caballero 47
SD-28: Oropeza 58, Stammreich 35
AD-5: Pan 49.1, Pugno 46.1
AD-10: Huber 51, Sieglock 43
AD-15: Buchanan 53, Wilson 47
AD-53: Butler 50, Mintz 43
AD-68: Mansoor 56, Nguyen 44
AD-70: Wagner 58, Fox 37
So. What all does this mean?
First, that Californians want to be governed by Democrats, and certainly not by wealthy CEOs. The Whitman bust is one of the most laughable and epic political failures we’ve ever seen. She spent $160 million to lose by double digits. Ultimately she and Fiorina could not overcome the basic contradiction of Republican politics: their base hates Latinos, but California’s elections are increasingly decided by Latinos.
More importantly, Californians rejected right-wing economics. They rejected Whitman and Fiorina’s attack on government and public spending to produce economic recovery.
The loss of the House stings – California will feel that painfully, not only because the first Speaker from California has lost her majority, but because the new House majority is deeply hostile to the values Californians just showed.
The propositions could have gone better. The defeat of Prop 19 was not surprising, and while I wish it had passed, it turned in a better showing than some had projected. Prop 21’s failure just sucks; are people really skittish about spending $18 a year to save state parks? Prop 26’s passage is going to cause a lot of problems. We won a huge victory in passing Prop 25 and defeating Prop 23, of course. And in what should come as no big surprise, voters overwhelmingly said they want redistricting done by an independent commission.
Looking at the legislative races, Democrats basically treaded water. With a more 2008-like turnout we could have flipped some of these seats, such as AD-68 or AD-70. But we’ve built a strong base for the future.
Overall, Californians rejected the right-wing and showed they want a Democratic future. But progressives still have our work cut out for us, both nationally and here in California.
and all the Dems who won. I worked hard to keep Jerry (McN) in office and so today’s news was a real lift after a bad day nationally.
Robert
Thanks for the excellent, succinct analysis of the election results. Brown, Boxer and Newsom, in the final vote tallies, won by big margins.
Dan
1) Californians continue to believe that everything they want should be free, and that they’re only overtaxed to pay for things that other people want. I mean, they refused to return the tax rates on corporate PROFITS to where they were 2 years ago, and made it impossible to actually impose fees on polluters commensurate with the damage they cause.
2) The passage of Prop 25 means that now the Dems are going to be 100% responsible for every budget. And Prop 13 and its descendants (including newly-passed Prop 26) means that there will be no ability to find additional revenue. So the Dems will be hung for the sins of the Republican minority — even more so than before, because Prop 25 had an inherent promise that it would somehow “fix” things. I wonder how people will feel when that promise collapses in the face of no-more-money.
3) But that’s all OK, because we’ve fixed the real electoral problem of theoretical gerrymandering by handing over more power in that process to the Republicans than the Republicans can actually get at the ballot box.
All you can do is quote, and requote, and re-requote Mencken:
Thanks for keeping the good fight alive out there.
…but I’m thrilled that 25 passed.
The 2/3 vote requirement for the budget placed too much power in too few hands. It let the minority party extort concessions that had nothing to do with spending, and made them the easy targets of corporate lobbyists and campaign money.
I hope that 25 will also help disentangle the budget vote from revenue vote. If the ‘Pubs want to prevent tax increases, let them be 100% responsible for it. The new Governor can do a lot to shape public perception about this.
Hell, if the ‘Pubs want to use their 33% veto to stop fines for industrial polluters, they can be 100% responsible for that too.
Perhaps it’s time we stop using wrist-slap financial penalties altogether and start threatening senior managers with arrest and prosecution when their pipelines leak. We need to give these guys a reason to complain louder when Corporate cuts their maintenance budget.
Can’t find it anywhere.
People make some big deals out of passing Prop 26. Okay I didn’t see much media pushed around it, deserved likely.
Whatever that’s not that important. Neither is redistricting, which to me smacks of making sure Dems keep seats they likely don’t deserve for a variety of reasons beyond Left and Right.
Screw the National Democrats that AREN’T from California. The only thing Sherman, Waxman et-al should be making sure is that when the Right does Transportation, you make sure they don’t try to screw us over so we can break ground in 2012 to build our HSR.
To be honest, that’s all we need from the captured Federal Government.
The rest we can do ourselves and that should be our focus. They hate us anyway (jealousy?), so we should give them reasons to be jealous besides the weather.
“Seriously, who the hell votes a Brown-Boxer-Newsom-Cooley ticket? WTF is wrong with those people?”
Ha! Exactly want I was thinking looking at those results.
Well, glad to keep Boxer and Jerry. Everything else, well, gonna need some Advil today and some ice cream or something.
Are there any reliable turnout figures available yet?
because of her corporate ties, then why the heck did they so resoundingly defeat Prop 24 that rewards big corporations?
And why did Bowen not get at least as high a percentage of votes as Brown when Bowen salvaged the state’s electoral system from being taken over by fraudulent voting machine manufacturers?
on why 21 failed from a local Democrat involved in some social justice groups. Basically, since public transit is so awful in most of the state, families in the suburbs end up owning a lot of cars- usually one per driver. Poor multi-generational households also manage to have a whole fleet parked outside. (Probably the origin of the Latino cars-on-the-lawn stereotype.) Since the $18/year is per car, these sorts of folks realized they’d end up paying $80 or $100 a year- and thought that they’d rather just pay for the state parks when they use them.
so long as they don’t have anything to be in charge of.
Prop 25 means Dems have to pass a budget and take all the blame. But 26 means there is no way to raise money.
They should cut out all spending in Republican districts till the budget is balanced.
21 failed cause a lot of Dems thought it was the wrong way to fund the parks … legislating a fee through the initiative process stuck them as un-ideal (well, the small sample I heard from anyway, but an influential sample.) In fact, we are now a state that is run by annual popular votes.
Do people just not understand how budgets work? There’s a significant block of voters who want the budget to move from 2/3 to a simple majority, but also want to go from a majority to 2/3 on fees. That makes no logical sense.
Futher frustrating is 26 passed with 53%. So 53% decide that the new normal is 67%, when not a single stewide race got even close to that. You shouldn’t be able to set a supermajority bar if there’s not a supermajority willing to vote for it in the first place. Heck, you couldn’t get CA voters to 67% of the vote on a measure congratulating the Giants for winning the WS. A’s, Dodgers, and Padres fans would vote no, and non baseball fan conservatives would vote no because they don’t want to support “San Francisco values.”
I got mailers here in orange county from “COPS: a guide to voting”. it told me to vote yes on 19, yes on jerry brown, yes on chiang, yes on boxer…
and yes on Cooley.
I’m dead serious. there’s probably other weird mailers out there like that , which candidates have to pay $ to get endorsed on. so it’s not really from law enforcement, it’s just a COP themed ad put out by who knows. a marketing company I guess that wanted to give a psuedo “law enforcement” feel to the mailer.
the one that showed Brown and Boxer winning big, that many people (even Robert) said was an outlier? Turns out they almost nailed it, and actually UNDERESTIMATED Brown and Boxer’s final percentages. 🙂
As for worst pollster… that honor again goes to Rasmussen, whose final poll had it at only Brown +4. 2nd worst was actually PPP, which gave Whitman her largest share of the vote of ANY pollster, including Rasmussen.
BTW, WTF? 100 degree weather in L.A. … in NOVEMBER??? Bleh.
Let’s face it, the sort of person who reads Calitics or its right-wing equivalent makes up a very small percentage of the voting public. The average voter makes up their mind based on such cues as TV ads, slate mailers, and the media narrative. Very few of these are substantive policy-wise. In a sense, we got lucky in that “Queen Meg tries to buy election” was the dominant media message instead of “goofy Governor Moonbeam tries for comeback”.
I voted against Prop 21 because of my opposition to ballot-box budgeting. I voted against Prop 22 and 26 for much the same reason — any move that constrains the legislature’s ability to raise revenue or determine spending priorities just adds to our fiscal catastrophe. That is increasingly my position even on progressive ballot measures.
One of my good friends is fond of saying, “Voters want three things: high services, low taxes, and a balanced budget. They can have any two.” It looks like California voters continue to favor Choices A & B, while complaining about the gimmicks to paper over Choice C.