Reflections on results (minus the big one)

I’ll get to that in a separate post.

I am, still, tired, worn out, zonked. A lot went down. And, frankly, not all of it happily. But having gone through all my choices for the ballot, I figure a catchall post noting what the results were can’t hurt.

First and foremost — Prop 8 passed, narrowly but not razor-thin. I am outraged if not surprised, but also convinced this was a rear-guard action at best, as the tide of history changes. A friend put it best in a private note, with his version of my ‘you couldn’t even have imagined something like this being an issue in the recent past’ take:

Yet there’s a part of me which is still pleased and amazed the issue has even limited viability that it does. Less than ten years ago it was nothing more than a few gayocons and a few rebels with lawyers being reasonable and demanding the impossible. It’s not revolutionary speed but it’s not baby steps, either–that’s fucking fast.

True indeed. We will see what happens next — as I said elsewhere, gains are often conditional and asynchronous.

Regarding the rest of the propositions — the results are here, and it’s a reasonable grab-bag. 2 passing was good, 3 I think unneeded in the end but still passed. 4, thankfully, went down, as did 5 and 6. 7 and 10 both bit the dust as well — I did vote for 10 but I can’t say I’m all worried about that. 9 passed, which is overkill on the matter but oh well. 11 is passing by a hair, which I think will be very problematic when implemented in two years time. 12 is coasting, unsurprisingly.

That leaves 1A, and while my support for it was conditional given it was a bond issue, the passage of it as well as Measure R up in LA, which required a 2/3 vote that just made it over that limit, shows what I hope will be a new and conscious engagement on what will prove to be important steps in mass transit in the 21st century. Essentially these moves are green lights to take things further, but they needed to be done in some form or another, and I look forward to the next developments.

Turning to the results as posted via the OCvote.com site — on the federal and state representative front, no surprises, regrettably — Rohrbacher held off Cook in CA-46 for Congress quite easily in the end, while Harman and Tran will return to Sacramento (though Tran’s margin was honestly much closer than I would have expected, which might be a sign for a future candidate). Essentially, a reconfirmation of the status quo.

On the county level, Measure J passed overwhelmingly, unfortunate but again no surprise, while Carrillo happily trounced Marsh for the Superior Court spot. In the Coast Community College District races, Patterson and Prinsky won handily — very good to hear especially in Prinsky’s case — while Hornbuckle beat Pirch in the one seat I was essentially neutral about.

That leaves the Costa Mesa races — in the Sanitation District contests, Ferryman got the top votes while Perry just beat Worthington. Would have been nice if Ferryman and Worthington’s places were swapped, but oh well. As for the City Council, Foley held on but regrettably, if all too unsurprisingly, Monahan and Bever are back. More thoughts about many of these races over at A Bubbling Cauldron.

So that just leaves, as mentioned, the big one. More on that tonight — if I’m not totally wiped out.

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Into the final local votes — looking at judges and school districts

Okay…I don’t know about you but I’m tired.

WAY tired. I suspect we all are, and would like nothing better than to sleep. In lieu of that, though, there’s a batch of local races I’m looking at, and I admit I feel a bit down because of waiting for so long.

As they say, all politics is local, but it’s also true that I tend to look at the broader picture — international, national, state — rather than truly local. Costa Mesa is kind of a good city for that, for better or worse — affluent enough in enough spots to make you feel like everything’s going reasonably well. It’s easy to cocoon oneself away as a result, which isn’t always a good thing, however good the impulse might be. Similarly with larger county issues and positions as well, even though the problems are more overt and noticeable there just because of the size of the place.

So with that in mind, these final thoughts and decisions are driven by general judgments rather than in-depth reflections. (This will be the first of two or three collective posts.) Maybe next time I’ll work from the bottom of the ballot up!

First, there’s two main candidates for the Judge of the Superior Court here in OC, Office. 12 — Debra Carrillo, a deputy DA, and Kermit Marsh, a Westminster city council member. Unsurprisingly, what we’ve essentially got here is a battle between a generally libertarian candidate, Carrillo, versus an old-school GOP type in the form of Marsh. Over at the Orange Juice Blog, Art Pedroza comments on some of the bizarre infighting at work, noting that the Libertarian Party has endorsed Marsh, for no very good reason from the sound of it. In looking that over, I note that apparently Marsh supports Prop 8 while Carrillo, in line with the Libertarian Party, opposes it. If that’s the kind of thing to expect from both of them then no question of it on my end — CARRILLO gets my vote.

Meanwhile I also get to vote on three different positions for the Coast Community College District, which covers three local community colleges. For Trustee Area 2, the choice is between Jerry Patterson, whose brief statement in the voter guide I got struck me as a reasonable series of accomplishments to tout, and one Joseph Dovinh, who has his own list of activities but also says things like “We should all be very, very wary of influence from communist countries– especially as it pertains to the field of education.” Uh? I’m with this blog entry I found on that front, but I think I’ll vote PATTERSON here.

For Trustee Area 3, the choices are Armando R. Ruiz, Don “Coach Doc” Apodaca and Lorraine Prinsky. Ruiz, to put it mildly, is not exactly doing himself any favors lately (for more, read here, here and here), while Apodaca has decided to throw his support behind Prinsky. And Prinsky herself? Well, based on this back and forth (read through the comments as well), she’s pretty easily got my vote. PRINSKY.

That leaves Trustee Area 4, with Mary L. Hornbuckle, Charlotte Pirch and David L. Boyd in the mix. Frankly I can’t make heads or tails of this one — there’s some rumblings about Hornbuckle accidentally (?) being linked to Ruiz due to the mailer talked about in the Prinsky link just above, while Pirch supposedly got questioned over where she got her degree, and from what I can tell Boyd’s a bit of a cipher. I think I’ll err on the side of caution and go NO VOTE here.

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You’ve figured out your presidential vote. Start thinking locally.

Seriously.

This isn’t a new theme or suggestion of mine, admittedly. And right now there’s a lot of chasing around of undecided voters, but I’m going to go with Ezra Klein on this one:

Swing voters can be measured in various ways, but there are no solid numbers on undecided voters — in part because the numbers change with every election and, within every election, with every successive month and event and even poll. Right now, if you look at the three main tracking polls — Gallup, Hotline and Rasmussen — they show that between 5% and 12% of the electorate is undecided.

Worse, many of those who claim to be undecided are not. Some don’t want to admit their preference. In their paper, “Swing Voters? Hah!” political scientists Adam Clymer and Ken Winneg amassed substantial data suggesting that very few undecided voters are truly indecisive. Examining the 2004 election, Clymer and Winneg found that even the most hard-core of undecided voters were fairly predictable.

They asked the 4% of their sample that claimed to be undecided to rate the two candidates in early October. When they went back to the same people after the election, more than 80% had in fact voted for whichever candidate they’d rated most highly a month earlier.

There’s still arguments to be made and energy to harness and put to good use — energy which still so ridiculously favors the Obama campaign that there just needs to be more honesty regarding that on the part of the McCain team, thanks. (Though good luck at any of that in the next three weeks, I suspect.) The competitions in states like Florida and Ohio and Indiana will go down to the wire, and there are other examples at work.

But it’s likely you’ve long since settled on your vote — the other real trend I’ve noticed anecdotally are GOP voters either switching to Obama or refusing to vote for McCain. The classic example of the latter right now, first brought to my attention at Balloon Juice, was Joshua Treviño’s vote — all the more so because he was a cofounder of RedState. However, Treviño’s followup post to that explaining his decision makes an important point at the start — as he says:

This would not have happened in an actual battleground state. Rest assured that were I not in California, where the Republican ticket will struggle to break 40%, I would not be casting a protest vote of any sort.

Regardless of whether you are in a battleground state or not, though, it’s important to note what else Treviño did — namely, vote on everything else too. And that can’t be underscored enough.

I live in the same non-battleground state as Treviño, and over a year ago I wrote this post detailing my situation. Here’s key parts of what I said then:

Yet due to a combination of factors along with general historical accident, here’s what the likely situation is going to be come November 2008, barring something radically unusual (hopefully not tragically so):

* The presidency — the big one, of course. However, a GOP candidate has not won in California since the elder Bush in 1988. Even in 2004, with antipathy towards the younger Bush running high but not as high as it would later and Kerry proving to be a terribly uncharismatic figure, the latter still carried California 55 to 45 percent. This is absolutely no guarantee that whoever wins in the GOP primaries will not end up carrying the state — the writers on this polling geek site suggest that the issue of illegal immigration could complicate things, though I have my strong doubts about that. At this point I’ve no reason to doubt a Democratic candidate will win the state by a comfortable margin, while my local precinct in OC will go for the GOP candidate equally comfortably if not more so.
* The senatorial seats — out of contention, barring personal misfortune on the part of the current officeholders. Senator Feinstein was reelected in 2006, Senator Boxer runs again in 2010.
* My local representative in the House — again, assuming no personal misfortune, that would be Dana Rohrabacher in the 46th district, who won in 2006 59 to 36 percent, and who I will vote against as I have always done since moving to the district. The likelihood of an upset is incredibly slim.

Meantime there’s no gubernatorial race, as Arnie won reelection last year. So the presidency and the House aside, this leaves me having to decide on state and local issues for the most part, even while the political campaigning for next year has already long been in overdrive, while still being months away from whatever the first contests that elect delegates for the conventions will be.

It’s fun reading in retrospect, seeing what came true and what didn’t. To my surprise and delight there IS a real race on for Rohrabacher’s seat — Debbie Cook, Huntington Beach’s Democratic mayor, has taken it to him head-on, and while I won’t hold my breath, Rohrabacher’s been sufficiently spooked to start flooding folks with mail more thoroughly than I’ve seen in years. As for the presidential race, I think we all know about that by now, and immigration is essentially a non-issue in this election unless I’ve completely missed something.

But everything else is as it was. Therefore, while I’m going to be posting occasional thoughts on the wider election here and there, for the next three weeks political posting will be to focus on those local races — which will include statewide propositions as well — instead of longer speculation about the Big One. For me that’s done and dusted, and for a citizen to think, act and vote to the full, that means not short-changing your downticket decisions. In ways, this is what matters most when you vote, with the most immediate results.

The power of local focus should never be underrated — and local focus sometimes is exactly what is needed when something goes from local to international. Two classic examples have been the go-to blogs ever since Sarah Palin’s nomination — Andrew Halcro and Mudflats. Their differing political perspectives, combined with their in-depth knowledge of Alaska and Alaskan politics, as well as a shared disdain for Palin’s antics, have produced more details, more on-the-ground perspective and knowledge, that any number of op-ed pieces or random commentaries out there.

My own blog lays no such claim when it comes to California politics in general or Orange County and/or Costa Mesa politics in specific, but hopefully I’ll be able to provide something of a model for others who want to engage and reflect on their own local races and issues. The conscious citizen commits completely. Never forget it — and here’s to the next twenty-two days.

First posts on this to begin tonight or tomorrow.

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