This week, just as the two sides were prepared to go to war, Molly Munger, the backer of Proposition 38, decided to pull statewide ads attacking Proposition 30.
Proposition 30 is on life support, with recent polls showing it passing with barely 50 percent, what pundits are calling “a precarious position for a tax hike initiative with three weeks to go until Election Day.”
While many are focusing on the Presidential Election or the local school board and parcel tax elections, Proposition 30 may have the single greatest impact locally, not just on K-12 education but also higher education.
A complication is a competing tax measure from Molly Munger. Most analysts downplayed the impact when polls showed that the wealthy attorney Molly Munger, who has spent more than $30 million on her campaign, was only getting in the low 40s in support as opposed to 51 percent for Proposition 30.
It has been a long time since California has been on the forefront of anything in this nation. However, as many other states have moved to making voting more difficult, enacting draconian if not disenfranchising laws, California in the past week has moved in the other direction, enacting same-day voter laws, online registration, and other innovations.
In a press release, the ACLU announced, “California leads the nation in promoting voter access.” They applaud a third voter access law which enables voter registration through the implementation of the Affordable Care Act.
A new survey conducted jointly by The Institute of Governmental Studies (IGS) at UC Berkeley and The Field Poll finds the initiative backed by Governor Jerry Brown, Proposition 30, continuing to lead but with support marginally lower than in early July and the undecided proportion increasing.
While much of the focus locally will be on the school parcel tax, Measure E, and the School Board races, one of the most critical election battles outside of Yolo County that will affect us locally is Proposition 30, the Governor’s Tax.
There have been past efforts to increase voter participation. In my first election as an adult, my generation launched “Rock the Vote,” aimed at getting the participation of youth. Later there was the Motor Voter Law that allowed people to register as they renewed their driver’s license.
Now, Secretary of State Debra Bowen, Senator Leland Yee and San Mateo County Chief Elections Officer Mark Church and the other 57 county elections officials have launched an effort that could be equally revolutionary, as it allows people to register to vote online.
One of the organizers of the event, Steven Payan of Occupy Woodland, said in a release late Sunday, “This is about hundreds of thousands of lives lost, deformed from chemicals and mass pollution to [the] environment and a company allowed to get away with it because of government ties, and massive lobbying dollars.”
Jose Granda, the oft-times critic of the Davis School District, tried to take his fight to the legislature on Tuesday. His target this time was legislation sponsored by Assemblymember Mariko Yamada, which would close loopholes that became evident during March’s parcel tax election.
AB 1626 has already unanimously passed in the Assembly, but it encountered some opposition on Tuesday in the Senate Elections & Constitutional Amendments Committee as it passed on a party-line, 3-2 vote.
It has been a fascinating week in California politics. We have a field poll release giving us interesting information about the state’s political landscape, and news at the end of the week suggesting Republicans are in denial while the Democrats are likely to eat themselves… again.
A few years ago, Republicans, believing that legislative districts had been unfairly drawn, joined with the “good government” folks who believe that partisanship is bad to create a citizens redistricting committee to replace what they saw as partisan cronyism.
The problem was that the lines shockingly still gave the Democrats an advantage, in fact, perhaps an even greater advantage than they had previously.
The Sacramento Bee and other media outlets are reporting this morning that Republicans have announced that they will support a signature drive to overturn the newly-drawn Senate Districts, prior to their taking effect.
In May, the Davis School District held an all-mail election for the parcel tax. For all of the acrimony generated mainly by one columnist for a local paper, the election came off without a hitch, as it has in numerous other communities and, indeed, in entire states.
There has been a lot of talk about the new California districts; the consensus is that while there may be a limited case to be made for racial disparity and the disadvantaging of minority voters, California is likely stuck with what it has created.
The weekend, the “Citizens Redistricting Commission” announced they decided to skip the publication of a second draft of redistricting maps.
One Commissioner, Cynthia Dai, told the media, “We were running up against the clock. There’s a certain amount of time it takes to produce a map.”
There is an old adage in politics that I rarely subscribe to which is to be careful what you ask for. After all you would be paralyzed if you adhered to that principle, unable to act.
Nevertheless, Republicans and some “good government” Democrats and Independents have been pushing the notion of the California redistricting panel hoping that perhaps there will be more competitive Congressional and Legislative districts in California.
While much of the focus on Monday remained at the top with the swearing in of new Governor Jerry Brown, one of the biggest offices will undoubtedly be the California Office of the Attorney General where San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris was sworn in, “vowing to ensure that state law is on the side of the people.”
What that means will be the question of the next four years, but Ms. Harris represents the last best hope for real reform in the criminal justice in California – a system bogged down with an expensive and over-capacity prison system, recidivism and ridiculous sentences for minor crimes.
The first time I saw Kamala Harris was in San Jose back in 2008 at the California Democratic Convention. It was during the heat of the primary battle, and both of the top Democrat contenders sent representatives to speak on their behalf.
Hillary Clinton sent Former President Bill Clinton. Barack Obama sent a little known District Attorney from San Francisco, Kamala Harris. She lightened the mood by poking fun of the disparity, pitting herself as the David to Bill Clinton’s Galliath.
The caveat, of course, is that things change in politics very quickly. In 1994, California was not a blue state. Pete Wilson had just been re-elected Governor by a wide margin, despite having extremely low opinion ratings. Dianne Feinstein needed everything she had to hold off what was then a record spending by Michael Huffington.
The Republicans for the first time won the Assembly, although Willie Brown would nullify that advantage. They won all but two of the partisan constitutional offices. And they rode the coattails of Three Strikes and Prop 187 to victory.
Accusations Fly As Ballots Continue to be Counted – Steve Cooley may also be inclined to join other AG’s across the nation in suing on Obama’s health care reform. Kamala Harris, for all her flaws (and there are many), is a strong opponent of the death penalty and has been pushing for sentencing and recidivism reform.
As the campaigns in California were nearing an end, I ran a story on the Field Poll showing both Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer moving from close races to a big leads. I pay particular attention to the Field Poll because it has long been regarded as the best of the statewide polls.
I spent a good amount of time in graduate school studying polling and following the debates over the proper way to poll. I recall in the middle part of the decade there was a long debate among pollsters about what factors should be weighed and what factors should be measured. In particular was the question of party indentification.
For much of the last decade, California has been ungovernable – beset by partisan polarization and hamstrung by a political system designed in another era. The state was led by an inexperienced and at times temperamental Governor, and legislative leaders apparently never quite knew what they were going to get.
The result was not necessarily the record deficits we have seen, as those came more naturally from a collapsed economy. The political stalemate, however, meant there was never a real or workable solution.