In How are Californians doing in restoring their race-based university admissions scheme? I predicted that Proposition 16 would get 45 percent of the vote from people in victimhood categories (Black and Hispanic) and then 15 percent of the remaining vote, thus resulting in a 53-47 overall vote.
The actual vote was 44-56.
Aside from general stupidity, how did I get this wrong? One problem with my simplistic analysis is that a lot of Hispanics are under 18 and therefore ineligible to vote. So I should have looked at the size of these victimhood groups relative to the overall population, but with under-18s excluded. (Median age for Hispanics in California is 29; median age for whites nationwide is 43.6; Black Americans also have a lower-than-white median age, by about 5 years)
Also, not everyone votes his/her/zir/their self-interest. Even a proposition intended to help Blacks and Hispanics might not get 100 percent of the vote from Blacks and Hispanics. Seven percent of Blacks identified as Republicans in 2016 (Pew), for example, despite the party’s Equal Opportunity (as opposed to Affirmative Action) tendencies.
So… chalk this up to another one of my election predictions that failed.
(See also Elite coastal Jews advocate discrimination against white and Asian males on the NYT’s efforts to sway Californians into believing in government-organized sorting by race.)
Let’s also check in with Mark Zuckerberg uses his $110+ billion wealth to lobby for a tax increase on people other than Mark Zuckerberg. The goal of the crazy rich was to soak the not-all-that-rich by increasing commercial property tax rates. This failed 48.3/51.7.
I was wrong about this too, but my simplistic analysis hinged on the enormous disparity in the money. Supporters spent $19,182,536.84 versus $1,494,542.17 for the opposition. Almost 13:1. Feinstein wanted it bad. Kaiser Family Health wanted it worse. And M. Quinn Delaney spent $5.5 million all by herself. I didn’t think the opponents had a chance against that level of spending, but this is only Round 1. They attempted it once, and intend to attempt it again. The voters said “no” this time but they’ll tweak the messaging, pump more money into it again, and they’ll eventually prevail, so you’re only temporarily wrong. This is all about the contracting and the government *payroll,* More! More! More! What I don’t think the proponents made clear enough to the victimhood groups is how many hundreds of millions, or billions, in government cash was really at stake. Next time they’ll make it clearer.
“public employment, public education, and public contracting”
https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Proposition_209_Affirmative_Action_Amendment_(2020)
https://akonadi.org/our-team/quinn-delaney/
I think the key was their choice of words when it came to the fiscal impact statement. From the Ballotpedia page:
“No direct fiscal effect on state and local entities because the measure does not require any change to current policies or programs.
Possible fiscal effects would depend on future choices by state and local entities to implement policies or programs that consider race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in public education, public employment, and public contracting. These fiscal effects are high uncertain.[11]”
They didn’t make the promise of an endless river of government $$$$$ explicit enough. Once another 10% of the voters are made more aware of how much money they stand to gain, the balance will shift.
You funny east coasters just do not get the California culture that crosses all ethnic groups. It is always capitalism and personal achievement based. Yes many of them are also Democrats. You need to acknowledge that people from all over the world move to California to succeed. These are driven smart people who are used to tough competition. They do not want some bureaucratic system in the schools telling them to give the college slots to the second or third place students.
Being too old to be affected by college admissions, the big news was Calif* voting to not classify taxi drivers as full time employees. It would definitely have cost jobs, but it only means more of those fees for full time employees are going to be extended to part time employees.
You guys still don’t get it. College admissions are just the public consumption part of the initiative. The gravy is the preferences in state jobs and contracting. Help my rich, liberal friends get richer with public money. In an economy increasingly dominated by the Government, somebody has to win more – and that has to be good friends of people like Gavin Newsom and M. Quinn Delaney. They know what the contracting jobs are, so now they can do more to direct them to people they want keep rich! The Social Justice part is the propaganda.
In the good old days, when the media wasn’t controlled by the same party of scumbags running the government to an complete extent, someone at a newspaper or a TV station would publish an expose on the insider dealings of people like this. But those days are over. Get with the program.
Every one knows that on average favored minorities admitted to elite universities are not equal in ability to their unfavored peers so maybe not all minorities think that being thought of in that way is such a great idea, i.e., in their interest. The largely white elites and diversity bureaucrats think it is a great idea but maybe not all the favored minorities do.
Ocasio-Cortez made a big deal about the Dems losing hispanic support, and blamed it on everyone but herself. Your analysis falls into my line of thinking, that many hispanics, having seen socialism ruin their native lands, want nothing to do with it here in the U. S. of A..
When Trump called foreign land “shitholes,” a lot of immigrants said “Amen.” The real hardcore American haters are upper middle-class college kids and graduates with no notion of how nasty the rest of the world really is.
Cue up some oldies, The Dead Kennedys “Holiday in Cambodia,” to make my point:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7sF8rkSPDH8
@Mememe: You’re right. They know all people starving to death in Venezuela. The American media doesn’t care about them, but that’s because they have good jobs and food to eat. Nice places to live, escape to on Long Island and New Jersey from the hellhole of New York, and so forth.
The people who know what real poverty comes from know that it’s Socialism, which inevitably makes everyone equal, except the very few, which always keeps the scumbags in power.
https://www.ft.com/content/d107562c-35d9-11e9-bb0c-42459962a812
“The people who know what real poverty comes from know that it’s Socialism”
Alex, amen to that, but what is left from my liberal friends see the USoA transforming itself magically into something like the Nordic countries at best or the Netherlands at worst, rather than Venezuela, under the wise leadership of Biden and Co. Some of them are from the former USSR for crying out loud, but they were kids when the country fell apart and do not know any better. The anti-commie vaccine does not last more than a generation, it seems.