Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP Photo
California voters approved Proposition 36 on the November ballot, with 68 percent of the vote.
America’s largest and generally most liberal state didn’t perform as expected in last month’s election. To be sure, it gave its electoral votes to Kamala Harris, sent Adam Schiff to the Senate, and turned two, and probably three, House seats from Republican to Democratic control. Only nine of the state’s 52 congressional districts will be held by Republicans, assuming the Democrat maintains his narrow lead in the last undecided race. (And that’s not, as an innumerate Wall Street Journal editorial Saturday asserted, due to gerrymandering: A nonpartisan commission draws California’s district lines, and with Republicans only amounting to a quarter of the state’s registered voters, any pro-Democratic gerrymandering would be superfluous.)
But Harris’s margin of victory over Donald Trump was five percentage points lower than Joe Biden’s had been in 2020, and she ended up with a raw vote total that was 1.8 million lower than Biden’s. Californians also voted overwhelmingly to re-felonize some offenses that had only recently been downgraded to misdemeanors, even as its most liberal counties voted to oust progressive district attorneys. Perhaps most stunningly, voters defeated a proposal to raise the state’s minimum wage from its current (roughly) $16 to $18, even as voters in heavily Republican states elected to raise theirs.
How to explain this rightward shift? To begin with, much of the Democratic base stayed home. A pre-election article by my colleague Gabrielle Gurley, on the challenge the Harris campaign faced in turning out unenthused Black voters in Philadelphia, noted that if Harris lost the state, it wouldn’t be so much to Trump as it would be to “the couch”: voters who stayed home.
The couch played a similarly large role in California. Turnout fell by a little more than 10 percent compared to the turnout in 2020, and virtually all of it among Democrats. While Harris underperformed Biden by 1.8 million votes, Trump’s vote actually increased by just under 60,000. Some of the most Democratic counties experienced the greatest drop in turnout, with the state’s mega-county—Los Angeles, home to ten million Californians—experiencing the largest, with a 14 percent drop.
That, I would argue, goes some of the way to explaining how the minimum-wage ballot measure came up a percentage point short (it won 49 percent of the vote). As my colleague David Dayen has explained, the measure was something of an orphan. Generally, California’s economic equity ballot measures are conceived and backed by a coalition of unions and liberal groups, who invest heavily in the campaigns to get them enacted. In this case, the proposal was put on the ballot by one wealthy liberal, even as unions and progressive groups opted to invest in other contests—partly because the raise was small, partly because state action had already been taken to raise the pay of fast-food workers and the service workers in hospitals to levels in excess of $18. And partly because there were other, hugely important elections nearby.
Save in the handful of the state’s swing congressional districts—none of which were in or near the working-class core of Los Angeles—there was absolutely no effort to turn out the vote this year, nor any visible campaign for the $18 ballot measure. Los Angeles unions, as usual, turned out thousands of volunteers to walk largely working-class precincts, but those precincts were in the swing states of Nevada and Arizona, to which the unions bused their volunteers. They ended up playing a key role in those states sending Democrats to the U.S. Senate. But no one was working to turn out voters in South or East Los Angeles, who, had they been motivated to go to the polls, would doubtless have pushed the minimum-wage hike to victory.
No such “if onlys” can be invoked to explain how the progressive district attorneys of Los Angeles and Alameda Counties were ousted in favor of more conventional DAs. (Alameda County centers on Oakland and Berkeley.) The heavily Democratic electorates of both counties followed the lead of heavily Democratic San Francisco, which had unseated progressive DA Chesa Boudin in 2022. Statewide, Proposition 36, which reclassified as felonies retail shoplifting and fentanyl possession—offenses that voters had reduced to misdemeanors in the previous decade—passed with 68 percent of the vote.
The motivating factor behind this dramatic turn away from decriminalization, particularly in the state’s (and the nation’s) most liberal jurisdictions, was a widespread perception of urban disorder out of control. San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and Los Angeles are all home to widespread homeless encampments. Even as there’s widespread recognition of the role that housing unaffordability plays in the spread of homelessness, there’s also fear and anger at the taking of public space by the homeless, a share of whom do pose dangers to the public, and a greater share of whom appear to pose dangers to the public. Working-class communities, which experience much higher rates of crime than upper-middle-class communities do, customarily favor law-and-order policies (even when also fearing the ineradicable racism of a portion of every police force) more than those upper-middle-class communities do. The California election makes clear that the semi-ubiquity of the homeless in California cities has now propelled many upper-middle-class liberals, too, to embrace policies intended to limit urban disorder.
The takeaway from California is that much of the Democratic base saw no reason to get up from the couch, and much of the Democratic base that did bestir itself voted to limit what it saw as a danger to the safety and vibrancy of its cities.
