NEWS OF THE DEATH OF CALIFORNIA PROGRESSIVISM HAS BEEN GREATLY EXAGGERATED

PROGRESSIVES WON IN CALIFORNIA

Mark Twain’s famous quote, "The news of my death has been greatly exaggerated,"can be applied to the New York Report that California voters had rejected progressives and their vision of criminal justice reform in favor of tough-on-crime candidates, made with only a fraction of the votes counted in the low-turnout, off-year primary elections. “Election results in San Francisco and Los Angeles were the latest signs of a restless Democratic electorate that remains deeply unsatisfied and concerned about public safety,” the sub-hed of the Times’ story read.

The Times waa joined by San Francisco heiress Nellie Bowles, who described her family history making it sound like her great-grandfather was a simple German immigrant who established a small deli in gold-rush-era San Francisico, glossing over how he later became a Gilded Age robber baron who was called “the Cattle King of California," and was the largest landowner in the U.S. and took the claim a step further, stating that San Francisco had become a “failed city” under progressive leaders because of their failure to sufficiently criminalize poverty and drug addiction.

The San Francisco district attorney recall, product of a well-funded campaign by San Francisco’s financial rulers that began before Boudin took office and officially started after he had been in office a whole three days, was never a good proxy for statewide sentiment.

By this past Friday, with more mail-in ballots counted, the idea that California voters had resoundingly embraced a more conservative approach to government has fallen apart.

This wasn’t surprising in a state where every registered voter receives a mail-in ballot. People who vote by mail tend to lean progressive and because they have until Election Day to put their ballot in the mail, many of their votes will not be counted until days or even weeks later.

In Los Angeles, the state’s most populous county, Mister Mallworld, former Republican and lately-registered-Democrat billionaire Rick Caruso has found that spending $39 million of your own money is only good for second place, setting a record for money blown on votes counted that might be worse than that of Charles Foster Kane. The lifelong Republican, whose malls have destroyed more nice old shopping districts, replacing them with high-end crap, campaigned on hiring an additional 1,500 police officers to the LAPD, the country’s most lethal law enforcement agency, and forcibly removing people from homeless encampments and shipping them out of the county. While Bass also called for a much more modest increase to LAPD staffing, primarily through shifting administrative and supervisory personnel back to street assignments, she promised to fund programs to help people find jobs, housing, food and transportation, warning, “Los Angeles cannot arrest its way out of crime.”

As of Friday, Bass leads Caruso 42.9% to 36.3%, with a nice 40,000 vote margin.

Friday’s updated results in Los Angeles also boosted several other progressive candidates to either outright victory or substantial leads over more conservative alternatives.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who originally ran for his first election as a “progressive,” only to cover up the crimes of a law “enforcement” agency overrun with deputy gangs and citizen complaints about brutality and lies while pushing a recall of reformist District Attorney George Gascón and railing against the “woke left,” to become a worse example of sheriffing than the preceding idiots in the office, currently has 30.9% of the vote against 25.9% for retired Long Beach Chief of Police Robert Luna; with the race reduced to two opponents in November, Villanueva may become the first single-term Los Angeles County Sheriff in history.

Two Los Angeles City Council candidates who both received endorsements from the local Democratic Socialists of America chapter are currently leading their races. Abolitionist organizer Eunisses Hernandez, who has worked to close a Los Angeles jail, remove California’s sentencing enhancements for drugs, and allocate taxpayer money to alternatives to incarceration, now has an outright majority of 53.5% ahead of incumbent Gil Cedillo with 46.5%, defeating the incumbent. Labor organizer Hugo Soto-Martinez, who called for an end to “traumatizing” sweeps of homeless encampments “that waste millions of dollars pushing people from block to block” has increased his lead over incumbent Mitch O’Farrell, who ran on having overseen last year’s forced removal of unhoused people from Echo Park, with O’Farrell behind 32% to Soto-Martinez’s 40.1%, which with Caruso’s performance gives a pretty good idea of how eager Angelenos are to see homelessness turned into a felony. O’Farrell and Caruso - the leading candidates to promise “toughness” in dealing with the problem - have only lost vote percentage since the primary election.

Katy Young Yaroslavsky, daughter of former liberal County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavky, leads LAPD police union-backed attorney Sam Yebri, 49% to 29.7% and may go over 50% when final totals are announced this coming week.

Kenneth Mejia, a 31-year-old CPA and housing-justice activist who put up billboards showing how little Los Angeles spends on dealing with homelessness in a non-criminal manner compared to the LAPD budget, is 16% ahead of veteran politician and city councilman Paul Koretz, endorsed by the LAPD in the city Controller race.

A slate of public defenders and a civil rights lawyers running for judgeships are on track to all make it to November’s runoff against the political lackeys and former deputy DA’s who constitute most of the Superior Court bench in Los Angeles.

In the City Attorney race, civil rights attorney Faisal Gill has widened his lead over former Deputy DA Marina Torres, 23.9% to 19.9%.

At this point, candidates supported by the LAPD’s Trump-loving police union are running behind in every race.

Outside of Los Angeles, other races are also confounding the story of a state desperate for more punitive elected officials.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta is on track to easily keep his job, despite a challenge from “tough-on-crime” Sacramento District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert who ran as an independent and failed to crack 10% of the vote.

Contra Costa County voters decisively reelected District Attorney Diana Becton, the county’s first prosecutor to bring felony charges against a law enforcement officer for an on-duty shooting, winning the primary outright against a colleague backed by police unions.

In Alameda County, home to the city of Oakland where the murder rate is four times that of San Francisco, Sheriff Gregory Ahern - who oversaw the county’s deadly jail, cooperated with ICE on deportations and platformed the Oath Keepers - lost outright to Sheriff’s Commander Yesenia Sanchez, who has called for alternatives to jail for people with mental illness and reducing the use of solitary confinement, which had expanded under Ahern.

With statewide turnout hovering around 29%, progressives who fared well could still lose in the general election as candidate lists consolidate and more voters show up. But with the information currently available, all the tales of a crime-terrorized electorate desperate for law and order isn’t holding up.

Los Angeles may be difficult, but it isn’t outright bad.

Thanks to all of you who support That’s Another Fine Mess with your paid subscriptions and I hope the rest of you will consider doing so. Your support keeps the lights on here and allows me to caregive for a partner in late-stage Parkinson’s.

Comments are for you paid subscribers.