Join us for a post-election chat at 11 a.m. today on Substack with Josh Gohlke, who writes about national politics in his newsletter “Laughing Leads to Crying.” We’ll talk about the results trickling in from across California and the biggest news from the historic night.
Hot Election Takeaways
Party time for Raman: City Councilmember Nithya Raman started election night slightly trailing Mayor Karen Bass – but the early vibe at her election watch party at the Greek Theater couldn’t have been more upbeat. For good reason: By early Wednesday, she had pulled ahead of Bass by two percentage points.
There were a lot more suits and evening dresses at the upscale Hollywood hotel where Bass joined the L.A. County Democratic Party’s election night event. She spoke briefly around 10 p.m., as Raman was chipping away at her slim lead.
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Proposition 50 delivers: Even before the polls closed in California, a blue tsunami swept the nation turning formerly deep-red states blue. Texas, OMG!
But here in California, it was more like a blue high tide. Democrats have healthy leads in three competitive House districts redrawn by Proposition 50 – Mike McGuire in Northern California, Randy Villegas in the Central Valley and Marni von Wilpert in a district straddling San Diego and Riverside counties. Those leads are likely to hold, as we know from past experience, because later returns trend liberal.
And in a fourth newly drawn seat representing the Sacramento area, the race has already been called for Democrat Richard Pan over incumbent Rep. Kevin Kiley, a former Republican turned independent.
A victory for billionaires: Elon Musk might have wasted millions trying to keep Texas Republican, but California’s billionaires appear to have made a wise investment by spending more than $300 million to defeat a proposed wealth tax. Not only is Proposition 40 losing, one of their bespoke poison-pill measures, Proposition 42, is winning – thanks in part to support from Gov. Gavin Newsom and deceptive ads. Proposition 42 is an insurance policy of sorts because it bars the state from adopting wealth taxes in the future.
Maylin Tu
A good night for DSA-LA: All eyes may be on the mayor’s race, but Democrat Jimmy Gomez, who has represented an eastside Los Angeles U.S. House district since 2017, appears to be losing – badly – to a little-known challenger backed by the Democratic Socialist of America. As of this morning, Angela Gonzales-Torres, a former member of the Historic Highland Park Neighborhood Council, has 59% of the vote. It’s hard to tell how much of her success was the allure of democratic socialism or the sexual misconduct investigation launched this summer against Gomez.
Another DSA candidate is on track to become the next L.A. city attorney. Marissa Roy, a deputy state attorney general, so far has 66% of the vote in a contest with John McKinney, a deputy district attorney.
Noted, With Comment
How Prop. 13 doomed California: M. Nolan Gray, chief urban planner at the Metropolitan Abundance Project and a Californian, has a warning for the seven states voting on property tax-revolt measures this election: Watch what you wish for. In a Washington Post article, Gray notes that the 48-year-old law is the root of many of the Golden State’s current problems: “Perhaps the most pernicious result of Proposition 13 is that it allowed California voters who already owned their homes to stop caring about the housing shortage.”
San Francisco’s gilded age: As voters in other parts of the country look to be veering left, a city known for barefoot hippies and Pride parades is tacking to the center. At Mission Local, columnist Joe Eskenazi says moderate Democratic Mayor Daniel Lurie, in his push to pass anti-populist reforms, has “activated an entirely new donor class…. He’s got old money, he’s got new money, he’s got his own money. It’s a lot of money.”
Mariel Garza
How high can local sales taxes go? If Measure FD ends up passing, the sales tax rate in Los Angeles will be 10.75%. Other cities in L.A. County push it even higher with their own levies. Kenneth P. Miller and Keith Maben of Claremont McKenna College write in the Los Angeles Times that the fraction-of-a-point increases might be masking the true cost of higher sales taxes.
Democracy for all: Joe Mathews says California lawmakers should quickly move to allow non citizens to vote in state elections. In a column for Zócalo Public Square, Mathews heaps piles of scorn on people who say “this isn’t the right time” for this with Donald Trump in the White House: “As if the authoritarian right wing is going to ever embrace democracy! As if those targets weren’t on their backs already!”
Dolores Huerta as muse: To cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz, the pioneering farmworker activist who died at age 96 last week wasn’t just a subject, she was a friend. In a remembrance published by Alta magazine, he talks about getting to know Huerta and shares some of his portraits of her over the years.
In defense of Lineage: No question that the fire at a cold-storage warehouse in Boyle Heights in June was a disaster for the community. But was operator Lineage Logistics the bad actor that Mayor Karen Bass and other city officials made it out to be? Not quite, writes political strategist Jon Fleischman at his Substack newsletter: “Lineage helped fight the fire, funded cleanup without waiting for liability to be settled, brought in hundreds of workers, and assisted nearby families. There are things to criticize, but after examining its response, I find it hard to fault the overall effort.”
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