California’s app-based corporate luminaries such as Uber and Lyft just waged the most expensive state ballot measure campaign in U.S. history — and it paid off big time, allowing those companies to thwart the will of all three branches of California government. By approving Proposition 22, voters allowed those companies to avoid a 2019...
How Not to Freak Out: A User’s Guide to California’s Election Night Results
If you were looking for the best advice on how to spend the hours after the polls close on election night, here’s the best we have to offer: Go do something else. Turn off your TV, close your computer, put away your phone. Now go for a walk. Bake a...
Ziplocked: Last Look at California’s Presidential Money Race, by Zip Code
Vertiginous blue spires on the urban coast and crimson plateaus stretching from the Central Valley to suburban SoCal — this is the presidential race for California cash, in 3D. In the map below, each zip code is colored according to the candidate who amassed more individual contributions from its residents. That’s blue...
New Law Sets Gun Control to Autopilot in California
Thanks to a bill signed recently by Gov. Gavin Newsom, California consumers are going to see fewer handguns for sale in the Golden State. Assembly Bill 2847 solves no problems but creates yet another gun control hurdle for law-abiding firearm manufacturers and the consumers that rely on their products. Since an absurd...
Why President Trump’s Attacks on Voting by Mail Could Backfire for California GOP
Republican political operatives aren’t accustomed to chasing down last-minute voters this close to Election Day. But, in yet another reflection of what a strange year 2020 has been, they are. And they aren’t happy about it. According to figures collected by the electoral information firm, Political Data Inc., a surprising...
Challenging the Model Minority Myth: Asian-American Students Divided Over Affirmative Action
The moment he stepped into Clovis High School, Chali Lee — now a first-year at Clovis Community College — left his Hmong identity outside its doors. Other students, he said, saw him as just another Asian male, another model minority — someone taking up all the seats at colleges. Lee...
Cash Blitz: Who’s Spending the Most to Influence Your Vote for California’s Legislature?
By Ben Christopher and Laurel Rosenhall State law caps the amount donors can give to a legislator’s campaign — but these special interests can spend as much as they like mounting their own campaigns to praise or trash candidates. And the money interest groups are pouring into these “independent expenditure committees”...
Is It Too Late to Mail in Your Ballot? Here’s Why You Don’t Need to Panic
A week before Election Day and anxiety over the postal service’s ability to ferry voters’ ballots to county election administrators on time has ratcheted up yet again. Here are the reasons the alarm bells are ringing anew: Back in May, the United States Postal Service’s top lawyer advised voters across the country to put...
Here’s the Challenge of Implementing Historic Groundwater Law
California celebrated the passage of historic legislation six years ago when Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, written to achieve sustainable groundwater management for basins throughout the state. The groundwater law requires governments and water agencies to halt overdraft and bring groundwater basins into balanced...
Slated for Deception? Beware of All Those Glossy Mailers Telling You How to Vote
Amid the torrent of laminated campaign ads churning through the postal system this season, the slate mailer stands out as a perennial — and many say unseemly — California political tradition that dates back to at least the 1950s. Though new restrictions may be on the way. You’ve seen these before: A...