The unions threw so much money against the props and at Arnold, he never recovered.
The vaunted conservatives of California didn't come out to vote. It was a low turnout. the only ones who came out were the the CTA, SEIU, etc. I think teachers were even sending anti proposition flyers home with the kiddies. Crying 5 year olds saying their teacher was going to be fired. Typical CTA nonsense.
“I agree with you and PSJones. It was Arnold vs the Unions. It seems that 3 of the 5 props were hard core anti-state union, but the others were pretty common sense.
The unions threw so much money against the props and at Arnold, he never recovered.
The vaunted conservatives of California didn’t come out to vote. It was a low turnout. the only ones who came out were the the CTA, SEIU, etc. I think teachers were even sending anti proposition flyers home with the kiddies. Crying 5 year olds saying their teacher was going to be fired. Typical CTA nonsense.”
Add to that the nurses’ union (CNA), the cops (PORAC), Prison Guards (CCPOA) and the firefighters, as well. I was still working at the hospital then, and I was up to my eyeballs in their lies and distortions about the ballot measures and the nurses were all heavily propagandized on the whole thing. They were being told that the ballot measures would cost them their jobs, and other such nonsense, when they did nothing of the kind.
Arnold’s first term was better than people on here seem to remember, up until that particular ballot fight. After that, he knew he had NO backup from the GOP here, especially the “hard right”. They disappeared from the voting that year. The same guys that couldn’t get McClintock elected to the Lt. Gov seat in 2006 or Controller in 2002. Even had we had someone better than Arnold in the Governor’s office, they still would have had to deal with a Senate and Assembly that were not only Democrat majority, but just shy of 2/3 SUPERmajority. I don’t care WHO you put in that spot, even Reagan himself, the problems here were not going to get fixed.The fact of the gerrymandered districts here put paid to any chance of that.
As far as not spending money here on further GOP operations, all well and good, except how much does the GOP get OUT of CA by way of donations? It’s probably pretty close to even, if not a net outflow of money.
Kinda like what Fedzilla has been getting from CA for a long time now. CA gets 78 cents on the dollar of taxes sent to DC. Yeah, they’re sending some here by way of the bonds mentioned in this thread, but it’s very little to make up for decades of taking. It sure would help if the Feds also took care of their responsibilities at the border, too.
That’s substantively a major part of both the financial and electoral problems that California faces.