When Gov. Gavin Newsom looks out over the state Legislature while giving his still unscheduled state of the state speech sometime in the next few weeks, he will see slightly reduced Democratic majorities in both the Senate and Assembly.
He may wonder why. The answer is much the same as it was in years like 2002 and 2012, when Democrats voted in far lower numbers than previous elections because many were disillusioned, maybe even uninterested, by state government.
Under Newsom, voters have authorized spending more than $15 billion in state and local taxes to solve the problem of homelessness. But California today has about 10,000 more homeless than a year ago, and possibly as many as 30,000 more than four years ago, when the total stood at about 150,000 and was already a crisis.
Under Newsom, the state went from sumptuous budget surpluses to vast deficits, much of it papered over by borrowing from the future.
Under Newsom, several major corporations, including Chevron and Toyota USA and Tesla have moved their headquarters out of state, even while leaving much of their California operations intact.
All this seeming decline has not toppled the state from its status as the world’s fifth leading economy. But it left ordinary citizens far less than impressed with government.
Many reacted just as past voters have. In a fiercely fought 2024 election, onetime voters in unprecedented numbers simply didn’t bother. Back in 2020, more than 17.12 million voters turned out or sent in their choices, giving Joe Biden a record 5 million vote margin in California. Just four years later, with population almost exactly at the same level, only 15.72 million voters cast ballots, 8 percent fewer. Donald Trump’s vote totals in California didn’t change much, steady at just above 6 million. This was far less a Republican surge than a Democratic plunge.
Democrat Kamala Harris won California in the presidential vote, but with 9.6 million votes, about 1.6 million fewer than Joe Biden rang up four years earlier.
Newsom was not on the ballot this year, so no one could directly express displeasure with his performance. Instead, well over a million Democrats made their point by not voting.
Just as California gave Democrats the margin needed to create national popular vote victories over Trump for both Biden and Hillary Clinton, this time their absence allowed Trump his first-ever national popular vote win, which he claims as a mandate for his entire agenda.
The last time California saw something similar came in 2002, when then-Gov. Gray Davis drew 1 million fewer votes than four years earlier, but still won. The voters’ clear displeasure set up the 2003 recall election that made muscleman actor Arnold Schwarzenegger governor for the next seven years.
Schwarzenegger remains the only California Republican since 1998 to win statewide office. Democratic margins are so strong here that even with 1.6 million of their previous voters staying out, their presidential candidate still carried the state by about 3.5 million votes.
Similarly, there has been a lot of talk, and reams of newspaper and Internet coverage, about Latinos supposedly turning more Republican. That’s not exactly what happened. The raw numbers suggest droves of Latinos who voted against Trump in 2000 (no one knows the precise number) did not bother last year, wanting neither candidate.
Just as Democrats needed a strong Latino voter turnout to stage their anti-Trump comeback during the 2018 mid-term elections that gave them congressional majorities, they now must draw back the Latino no-shows of 2024.
This may not be easy; once voters begin behaving a certain way, it can be difficult to get them to do something different.
But by 2026, at least in California, there will be fresh faces and names on the midterm ballot; some of them are bound to be Latinos. It’s highly possible a Latino like former state Attorney General Xavier Becerra, a proven California vote-getter who was Biden’s secretary of Health and Human Services through four scandal-free years, might be one of the two November finalists for governor.
That may be what it takes for Democrats to draw many 2024 non-voters back to the polls and mailboxes.
Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com.