California has entered a period of cognitive dissonance. Proposition 36, the state’s tough-on-crime proposal repudiating a decade of leniency, won in a landslide with 70% of the vote Tuesday. Voters are also now rejecting lenient progressive prosecutors – in the most direct way possible.
Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon, author of the 2014 ballot initiative most Republicans and many Democrats blame for the retail theft crime wave, previously survived two recalls over the past two years even when voters in San Francisco, one of the most liberal cities in the country, ousted his ally Chesa Boudin in 2022.
But on Tuesday, former federal prosecutor and Republican-turned-independent Nathan Hochman soundly defeated Gascon 61.4% to 38%. Voters also appear poised to reject a ballot measure Newsom backed, increasing the minimum wage to $18 an hour. Another Democrat-backed measure aimed at bolstering apartment rent control failed Tuesday.
Despite California’s tectonic shift to the right and the nation’s defeat of fellow San Francisco liberal Kamala Harris on Tuesday, it’s business as usual for Gov. Newsom and his hand-picked state Attorney General Rob Bonta. On Thursday, the pair anointed themselves the leaders of the Donald Trump resistance and protectors of California’s progressive values that the rest of the nation had just roundly rejected.
Newsom appointed Bonta in 2021 when President Biden tapped Xavier Becerra, California’s former attorney general, as his Health and Human Services secretary. Newsom and Bonta have since forged a legal-legislative tag-team fighting for liberal causes and silencing their political opponents. The governor has used his bully pulpit to call special legislative sessions and push liberal measures in the Democratic super-majority controlled Assembly and state Senate while Bonta files lawsuits and civil rights investigations against their political adversaries. […]
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