I told you I'd be back bright and early! Well, all in all, a pretty good night. So, let's get to some results:
Yes, Arnold won. But the only thing he proved is that the Democratic vision for this state is alive and well. By co-opting our platform, Arnold showed that the Republican vision for this state is just not one that we are prepared to deal with.
CA-11: Jerry won! Ding-dong the environmental witch is dead. Congratulations, this was really a victory for the netroots, a victory for ethics, and a victory for the environment.
Arnold's coattails were non-existent, well, unless you can add Poizner's $15million of his own money to those tails. The GOP took only the two statewide races, Gov and InsComm, and they were resoundigly defeated elsewhere.
CA-LtG: McClintock's name ID wasn't sufficient to propel him over the top and John Garamendi will be our next lite gov. I know this position is essentially powerless, but would you really want McClintock to have gubenatorial powers when Arnold leaves the state? Or to give him any further platform? Me neither.
CA-SoS: Woohoo! Debra Bowen won!!! Finally, somebody will address the issues of electoral integrity from the SoS office. Bowen will be a phenomenal SoS. You've done a good job, California.
CA-Controller: All that money that Intuit and the Indian gaming interests dumped into IEs for Strickland were completely unsuccessful. Chiang won this one going away. Again, he'll do a great job.
The less competitive races: As expected Jerry Brown defeated Pooch and Lockyer defeated the repo'd man. Both were far better than their scary competition.
CA-InsComm: Well, Poizner was right, we cruzed, we losed. Next time, we'll get some better candidates. However, in the interim, Poizner is now primed to run for governor, the position he wanted anyway. It's time to start branding him the way we want.
DiFi won. Oh look, we have our "independent" senator back. We missed our shot to push her back to the left by running a primary challenger, but I think we learned a lesson from CA-36, where Marcy Winograd forced Jane Harman to pay attention to her consitituents. Perhaps that's a lesson that some other Congress people should pay attention to
Right now it looks like Lynn Daucher(R) won by 13 votes in SD-34. Yes, thirteen. Currently the tally stands at 38,666 for Correa and 38,679 for Daucher. There will be a recount for sure and a thorough counting of all ballots and a check for provisionals. There was a lot of dirtiness in the OC's elections, so this one is far from over.
Props: Well paint me stupid. I thought that some of the bonds would go down, but it looks like they all came through easily. Hmm, well, I was wrong. It happens sometimes when you go out on a limb, but Arnold and the DemGang went all out in the last two weeks and that seems to have worked. However, Props 85 and 90 were both defeated. Yay! Maybe they will stop trying to put that stupid parental notification on the ballot again and again. But I doubt it. This time it was beaten more soundly receiving only 45.9%,as compared to 47.2 last year.
We barely squeaked by on Prop 90. Whew!! That was way too close for comfort at 47.4% Yes. We'll need to address paid signature gathering soon. I'm really sick of the Howie Rich's of the world coming here and trying to mess with our system.
Props 86-89 all failed. The forces against them, Big Tobacco, Big Oil, the monied special interests and well I don't know about 88, but they just got wiped out by the TV ads. They obfusicate the issue and hope people will just vote no. It worked this time. Next time we're going to work just as hard. Particularly, Clean Money and the Alternative Energy/Oil Tax were good ideas. You haven't heard the last of them.
