Is California Turning Purple?
By Issues & Insights Editorial Board | November 18, 2024
Two days after Donald Trump won the election, Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a special legislative session to “safeguard California values and fundamental rights in the face of an incoming Trump administration.”
But Newsom could have a fight on his hands with Californians who are clearly tired of Newsom’s and his fellow leftists’ “values.”
Almost across the board, California voters rejected leftist ballot initiatives, often by wide margins. “State voters took a hammer to the most progressive propositions,” noted I&I contributor Thomas Buckley.
Examples:
- After watching previous minimum wage increases devastate local businesses and do little to improve the welfare of unskilled workers, a ballot initiative to hike the state’s minimum wage to $18 lost by a 51% to 49% margin.
- Even after Bidenflation drove up housing costs, voters rejected an initiative that would have let cities and counties impose strict rent control laws. Back in 1995, the state approved the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, which blocked cities and counties from imposing rent control on certain types of housing or when units become vacant. By a whopping 60%-40% margin, Californians voted to keep that 1995 law in place.
- A proposal to lower the threshold for local bond measures from a two-thirds supermajorty to a 55% majority went down in flames, with 55% of Californians voting against it.
- By a 69% to 31% margin, voters who’ve watched their cities get ripped apart by crime said “enough,” and approved a tough-on-crime measure that would “increase penalties for certain drug crimes and theft convictions and allow a new class of crime to be called treatment-mandated felony.”
Even in bluer-than-blue Los Angeles, voters overwhelmingly ousted soft-on-crime Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, replacing him with Nathan Hochman, who got widespread backing from law enforcement. In other local elections, voters in crime-infested Oakland recalled Oakland’s mayor and Alameda County’s district attorney, and San Francisco voters elected a moderate-ish mayor.
Then there’s the presidential election.
Trump got more than 5.7 million votes this year – which is 1.2 million more than he won in 2016. Kamala Harris managed to get only 103,000 more than Hillary Clinton captured in 2016.
Trump’s vote share, meanwhile, has climbed in both his reelection efforts. It went from 31.5% in 2016, to 34.3% in 2020, to 38% this year.
Trump made big gains among Hispanics in the state. In fact, he definitively won three of the four counties with the biggest share of Hispanics — Tulare (by a 59%-43% margin), Merced (52%-46%), and Colusa (63%-34%). And Harris barely carried Imperial, which has the highest percentage of Latino residents in the state, winning by a 50%-47% margin.
“Today, California remains a bastion of blue, but that’s changing,” writes Edward Ring in a piece in American Greatness titled “Stirrings of Realignment Even in California.”
So what California “values,” exactly, does Newsom intend to protect?
As is often the case these days, the satire site Babylon Bee hit the nail on the head with its headline:
“Newsom Assures Californians They Will Be Safe From All The Trump Administration’s Prosperity, Safety, Lower Prices.”
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