California is a weird state. It’s a solidly blue (Democrat) state in every election. The Democratic Party has a supermajority in the state legislature, and a lot of historically Republican districts are voting Democrat, especially Orange County. However, if you look at some of the early results for ballot measures, the Democratic Party are big losers.
From the California Secretary of State website, results as of 10:40 am on 11/3/2020:
Two of the most contested propositions in terms of funding are 22 and 23. If you look at Ballotpedia, you can see that the Democratic Party were against 22 and supported 23.
Both these propositions have clear union positions, which is probably why it’s heavily partisan. Even worse, proposition 16 seems to be losing as well. Affirmative action is a bread-and-butter Democrat issue. The support list is huge with literally every Democrat politician supporting the overturn of proposition 209.
So what is going on? Why can’t a super-blue state pass ballot measures supported by the super-majority party? An even more fundamental questions is why can’t the state assembly pass these as laws? I guess they did for gig workers but proposition 22 overturns it. Maybe the voters just don’t like the Republican candidates but also don’t like the Democratic agenda.
Here is the Democratic Party endorsements for ballot measures in California. Compared to the partial results above, they’re not doing very well. Looks like it’s four out of eleven so far. Again, that seems weird to me since California is supposed to be a Democratic stronghold in politics.
Life with chronic diseases 