California voting Republican?
 

Recalling Gray Davis and voting in a Republican (albeit Schwarzenegger) has got me thinking.... Are the Democrats in danger of losing California's electoral votes for the '04 election? The Republican party has been getting more and more power around the country in recent times, is this just another example of it?

Then again, it's hard for me to think that a vote for Ahhh-nold represents a prospective vote for Bush, even if they are members of the same party.

If you look at the voting record, the bay area is solidly democratic, the rest of california is not.

For example. here are the 2000 presidential election results:

http://www.polidata.org/en2000/ca00pcy.pdf

People like to think of the whole state as being full of granola-eaters, but in truth there are huge cities like Sacramento that are not very liberal at all.

That said, I think the recall vote was more against Gray Davis than for Arnold. We've had republicans in charge before (remember that guy named Reagan?) and I don't think this recall election is a real sign one way or another.

My sense is that California is the same as it has been. Arnold isn't much of a traditional republican, he's positively liberal in a lot of his views, so even if he creates a moderate republican vote in the state, I'm not sure how much of that rubs off on Bush.

I'd be surprised if California went Republican in the next presidential election. They arn't that smart :)

Schwarezenneger also is not that much of a Republican, heh.

Thanks for the productive contribution to the discussion. :)

Funny you should mention that:

Wall Street Journal Online/OpinionJournal

This is a disturbing trend I've seen lately on both the left and the right: If the majority decides something, they are are brushed off as intellectually inferior.

Now to be fair, I've done this myself and majority rule is not always a good thing (e.g. slavery), but when it is used blindly to dismiss something like the California election, it becomes a crutch where the intellectually snobish do not have to deal with the issues at hand, i.e. Gray Davis was a terrible governor and a career politician whereas Arnold was percieved as a no nonsense get-something-done solution.

Jesse Ventura was also seen as an alternative, but while he said some gutsy (and stupid) things now and then, he did nothing to help Minnesota but invest millions of our dollars into a failure of a light-rail system.

I don't think Arnold was percieved as anything other than "not Gray Davis". His only position was that he was against the car tax. I think the voters would have elected a Bucket of Chicken if they thought it would would win against Gray Davis. :)

Bucket of Chicken...mmmmmm.....

Seriously, though, I don't believe for a second that California will turn out for Bush. The only thing that could cause that state to support a reactionary, anti-environmental, oil industry tart like Bush is Chuck Hagel's rigged Diebold voting machines.

And though Gray Davis sucked, Enron sucked harder--and for more money. Who was buddy-buddy with Kenny Boy Lay? Oh yeah...W! That will make him popular in Calif. for certain.

Then why didnt they vote for the other 133 canidates?

Because he was considered the "not Gray Davis" with the greatest chance of winning.

Exactly. I talked to several republicans at work who liked McClintock *much* better, but voted for Arnie because they didn't think McClintock could win.

I think the election was definitely a mandate that Californians wanted Gray Davis out of office. I'm not convinced that it was a mandate that people liked Arnold or his political platform.

The rubber meets the road now. I'm curious to see how Arnold will repeal the car tax AND balance the budget. He does have some smart people on his team, but he will have to either cut government programs deeply OR raise revenues somehow to balance the CA budget.

And remember, fixing things that he talked about, like corruption in the worker's comp system, actually cost you more in the short run. You have to hire consultants and extra staff to restructure the system to eliminate corruption, then slowly the corruption goes away. In the short run, the corruption is still there and you have the added expense of trying to fix it. It's a good goal in the long run, but in the short run it doesn't help him balance the budget.

Well they liked Mclintlock better, so all this shows is that they chose rebublican over democrat. THey could have voted Bustamante but the fact is, the most people chose rebublican.

Part of the problem was that Bustamante was Davis's Lieutenant Governor, and hence, not a very good "not Gray Davis."

Had a more popular democrat not so closely aligned with Davis run -- such as Dianne Feinstein -- the vote may have been much closer.

And your point is? I said people weren't voting for Arnold, they were voting against Gray Davis. Bustamante was working for Gray Davis, so of course some of the dislike rubbed off on him. I don't think you can conclude at all that people were voting "republican", I think, at best, you can conclude that people were voting "against Gray Davis and anyone associated with him."

O ok if that makes you feel better. I mean not voting "Gray Davis and anyone assoiciated with him" means the same thing as voting Republican in my book.

While I think CA got a nice wakeup call with Grey Davis, I don't see the state swinging to the republican side anytime soon. It would be nice, but to many fringe left wing interests out there.

Lets take NJ for an example, they had a horrible corrupt senator and were going to vote for a republican. The democratic party at the last second put up a new canidate, violated state law, got the state supreme court to support the illegal action and they voted in a new senator who is quite possibly senile, but definately a democrat.

If the dems in CA would have had a canidate better then Davis and Bustamonte, the state may not have swiched sides.

Given that there was a Green party candidate who did pretty well in the results, your statement is incorrect. You are, of course, entitled to have factually incorrect opinions.
;)

Yep, I agree. Had Davis had the balls to resign, the dems could have potentially put forward a good candidate.

And the Green won? You can spin this any way you want but the fact remains that a Democratic govenor was booted out and replaced with a republican, one that won by over a million votes. So what is incorrect about this?

Really and what hat would they pull him out of? Why didnt this good canidate run for office like 134 people did? :lol:

Well it IS quite possible they didn't have any good canidates, it may have been party politics that kept anyone else from running. You have a sitting gov and the leut gov up in an election. You have Bill Clinton out there pushing for Davis (kiss of death btw heh), you don't want to stick your neck out lest it get chopped off.

Now odds are Arnold would still have won, (though possibly not), but he wouldn't have had such an overwhelming vote in favor.

Your "won by over a million votes" point is misleading. The vote for the recall was 55% for the recall, 45% against. Hardly a mandate or a landslide.

You said:
I was just pointed out that you are factually incorrect with this statement. Perhaps you meant somethign different. If you would like to learn why, please look here:

http://vote2003.ss.ca.gov/Returns/summary.html

It would be interesting to see how many registered democrats voted against the recall and for Arnie.

As a democrat looking at this from the other coast, I have no problem with Arnold winning this. I don't see Arnie as a wacko right winger or moron puppet to the christian right conspiracy.

If his new budget proposal comes up flat, we can call another recall, right?

So Arnold didnt win the election by over a million votes? Hmmm I guess all the newspapers and TVstations got it wrong.

My god, one million is not that big for CA. Going by percentage is a much better way to look at the statistics.

I'm a roaring liberal who's pissed as anyone that the Terminator won, but people did not vote for him because "they were dumb." They were pissed off at Davis, they knew who Schwarzenegger was, they liked the sound of his moderate stance on everything more than those of his extremist rivals.

That's not what I said. I said that the recall won by 55% to 45%. Do you even know the population of California?

You, however, did say that not voting for Gray Davis equalled voting republican. I was pointing out that your statement was incorrect.

The REAL question my friends is does voting for Arnold = voting Republican.

No HR, voting for Republicans, when there was a democrate, and a green avaliable is called voting for Republicans. Again, you can spin it all you want, but a democrate was kicked out and replaced with a Republican.

Thank you for stating the obvious. That's an obviously true point, but you said that any vote against Gray Davis was a vote for a republican, which is obviously not true.

The point of this thread was whether arnold winning was a sign of voter sympathies in California changing. Given a 55 to 45 split over the recall, I don't see that being the case. Nearly as many people voted against the recall (3.8 million) as voted for Arnold (4 million).

I've said all I have to say on this thread.

No I said a vote against Davis and those associated with him, ei the Democratic Party was a vote for the Rebublican Party. If it wasnt, than a third party would have one. Why are you so determined to not see that a democrat was so lousy in his job that the state kicked him out and placed a republican to fix his errors?

But the number who voted for Arnold AND McClintoc was something like 60%. Thats the number that scares the crap out of the DNC, not Arnolds number by itself.

As if there is even a difference between Republicans and Democrats these days. Schwarzenegger getting into office was not nearly as much of a suprise as when Ventura (an Independent) became Governor in MN. :rolleyes:

Saddly true, though as many republicans move to center the democrats move to the left trying to show how they are different (such as Howard Dean). Either way we are going to be socialist, I would guess in about 15 years, and the revolution against it will come in 50.

Mmmmm I think I got off topic :p

Or the entire scale has shifted right, causing right to look moderate and left to look radical...

I could only hope, but when our president is trying to get free drug care for everyone in the country, I don't think thats the case.

Can you name a modern president who hasn't "tried" to get free drug care? When Bush creates a system for free drug care you have a point but until then you don't.

Except veterans:

http://www.enquirer.com/editions/200...oc_amos26.html

Ill echo that I don't think the success of the Californian recall is a vote for the Republican mandate, especially not the the Bush flavor of Republican. As successful as the Republican party is there seems to be some party fragmentation: You have your Neo-cons (Bush style big gov, "moral," interventionalist), Socially liberal / fiscally consvervative (Ah-hold) and then the Old school that still lurk somewhere (Nixon/Eisenhower types). While potentially I think California could vote republican if the reps ran a social liberal; however, there is NO WAY the south will allow that kind of hijacking of the good ol' Repbulican party. I still see California voting dems, pretty much no matter what (Everyone remember that Diane Feinstein, like the most ardently liberal member of congress, is still the most popular politician in Cali).

As for this comment:
"The president, after all, is a graduate of both Yale and Harvard, and the governor-elect is a self-made immigrant businessman. It is possible for very intelligent people not to be snobs about it, not to adopt the pose of an "intellectual," and that would seem to describe both Bush and Schwarzenegger."

While I dont want to sound like the "liberal intelligencia" I know Im going to: Bush didnt exactly earn those Ivy degrees like most of us would have liked him to have. Not only did his aristocratic background get him into Andover (a feeder high school for Ivys), but furthermore, his lineage basically openned the door for him to Yale (I believe the previous two generations of Bushes also went to Yale...and Andover). The fact he pulled C's is also a little disheartening. As for Harvard Business school, it admits pretty much on a "how powerful is your name basis" while not entirely, it definitely helps to bring that to the table for, as they describe, "to give a class of future business leaders with a diverse background of experience."

Not to say that Bush is stupid though, he is an incredibly brilliant politician with excellent person to person people skills, but my opinion is that he represents the old money feeding candidates into the poilitical system. (To be fair, The Gore's are another family with this trait). If you guys need me to rebuke the Arnold characterization, I will, but I think that one is pretty easy to figure out.

T

PS Arnie is also married to a Kennedy...Strange bedfellows?