Talk Elections

     "Party of Yes" sounds weird, but it's still a positive branding move. I suspect that standing for negation doesn't exactly excite voters. :)

As the first paragraph of the article explains, this was a deliberate effort to counter their labeling by the CA Democrats as the 'Party of No'.  The problem is that their very first act as the 'Party of Yes' is to ask voters to say 'no' to Jerry Brown's tax proposition.

And the major reason Jerry wants more revenue is because he caved to the Dem legislature on doing much about public employee pensions, unlike Cuomo in NY.  No!

Is he even getting his 8 or 12 point plan through or did he cave on that? I have a feeling this might fail.

Tax cuts are typically very popular among the public and perform very well at the ballot box.  These tax hikes can be avoided simply by reducing the number of excess public sector employees and other forms of government spending.

I also wonder whether the GOP missed a trick by not putting a change to 401k pension plans on the ballot. Though I'm not sure if that would be legal. I don't mind the rich paying more but this is a bit much and the background of what happened is infuriating as well.

Polling shows that Jerry Brown's tax hike for the rich is in good shape. The Munger tax hike will fail, but that's not Jerry Brown's.

Jerry Brown's Prop does raise sales tax by 0.5%, but that doesn't affect rich people so the Republican party doesn't give a crap about that.

I thought the sales tax hike was reduced to 0.25% in the compromise. I liked his original plan where the top rate only went up by 2%. I would have voted for that. This might be counterproductive and with no real pension reforms it is just wrong.

OK, you're right. This is the one that had the signatures submitted.

YES, we will vote NO on that bill. :P

Both "Party of No" and "Party of Yes" are stupid rhetoric. Both implicitly assume the golden mean fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation), that compromising is necessarily good, or even just occasionally voting for something the other side produces regardless of whether it represents a compromise.

Agreed, compromising for compromises sakes doesn't work so well. For example the Catholic Centrist party and Chamberlain look pretty stupid in retrospect for compromising with Hitler.

     Addressing the self-evident does not interest me. Commenting on the surprising competence of the CAGOP's strategy (even if it is really rather hypocritical) does.

The California GOP is basically a troll party. They wanted redistricting by a special commission. We got redistricting by that commission. And now they got this piece of crap on the ballot.

http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Referendum_on_the_State_Senate_Redistricting_Plan_%282012%29

So if it gets rejected what happens? They just have to draw another map? I think the Republicans are realizing they could have bitched and moaned and got a map passed that was a bipartisan gerrymander. Especially with only 40 seats, many become marginal and that reduces the margin of error the Republicans have.

Contradicting their brand new slogan at its press launch doesn't really strike me as very competent, tbh.

Once the 2/3 supermajority requirement for tax increases is eliminated/reduced or Democrats get 2/3 of the seats in the state legislature (this is a possibility with the new maps as I understand it which is why they petitioned to overturn the state senate map), it will really be over for the CA-GOP.

They will have to move to the left.

     It's pretty good for them; at least they recognized the problem & attacked it. In general, their operations have been a strategic trainwreck for years. They've struggled to maintain what little power they've had, while eliminating any future opportunities for growth in the process.

The CA GOP's problem is that they are a bunch of extreme lunatics. They probably wouldn't be so dead if they took a page from the Rhode Island Republicans and stopped being extreme right-wingers in a liberal state.

()

     Yeah, they need to nominate better candidates who are better suited to the politics of the state. When you choose Carly Fiorina over Tom Campbell, something is very wrong.

Well, the state legislature in particular.  For some reason Abel Maldonado was seen as some sort of liberal because he extracted a very high price from the Democrats for his vote for the budget while every other Republican voted against it. Of course they don't have their own budget. They're just the party of no, trying to obstruct. Good think voters scrapped that stupid 2/3rds majority to pass a simple budget. 2/3rds is still needed to raise taxes, though.

Why are the ideologies for the Rhode Island parties so similar?

my question is why has the state shifted to the democrats so much at the presidential level? In my 1974 Almanac of American Politics, a full 56% of the voters were registered democrats. Now its down to 44%. The number of DTS voters has also increased from 7% in the 1970s to the current 26%.

One thing someone on redracinghorses said was that California democrats are much more partisan now then they were back then and that Reagan always enjoyed support in heavily democratic areas (by registration) such as Bell Gardens, Huntington Park, El Monte etc.

Partisan registration isn't particularly meaningful.

California used to have a lot of Tory Dems, and the GOP outpaced its registration figures like clockwork. Also class was more important in the partisan divide. The GOP did much better relatively speaking with absentee voters. The Tory Dems are now Pubs, or dead or elsewhere generally, the class differential has eroded away to almost nothing, along with the GOP margin with absentees, and independents/declined to states (the percentage of the pie they represent like most places has more than doubled) tend to at most be split and probably lean Dem, with a fair number not registered Dem because the Dems are not Left enough for them.

I remember as a junior high school student doing phone calls for a Pub right winger, Max Rafferty God help me, running against perhaps Alan Cranston, but I forget at the moment. About a quarter of the Dems that I called in the San Fernando Valley said they were going to vote for him. These days that number would be close to zero.

As Xahar said, partisan affiliation isn't particularly meaningful at the presidential level (just look at Oklahoma :P ) And yes, Reagan did well among the blue-collar white Democrats in places like the ones you mentioned-though it must be remembered, of course, that it was the white-collar middle and upper class areas of the state (Orange County being the classic example) that were historically always the most strongly Republican, and where the grassroots 'movement conservatives" of the Goldwater campaign (and later the Reagan campaign) were most concentrated.

Furthermore, the Reagan effect was real everywhere, but in California it masked the underlying trends towards the Democrats. Bush Sr kept CA in the GOP column in 88, but he was no match for the charismatic, culturally progressive, economically center-right reformist "New Democrat" Bill Clinton in 92-and those Third Way qualities played well in California.

Finally, demographic changes in the California electorate played a big role, of course. California's Democratic Party is very diverse, with so-called "gentry liberals", young professionals, blue-collar Latino workers, public sector employees, Silicon Valley executives, naturalized Asian immigrants, Hollywood executives, San Francisco bankers...all of these people find common cause with the Democratic Party. 

It helps the Democrats, btw, that both the California Republicans and the national Republicans have become increasingly right-wing, partisan, and ideologically rigid. As California becomes ever more diverse, cosmopolitan, and urban/metropolitan-focused, what plays well in more homogenous suburbs and exurbs of "Middle America" falls flat on its face here, politically speaking.