California Is Where Democracy Died

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.  

California, as we’re seeing through the lenses of the Los Angeles mayoral race, is a dysfunctional state. The Democrats talk a lot about democracy dying in darkness. Democracy is dying in California. 

Now, what do I mean by that?  

When you look at the LA mayoral race, you start to see a familiar pattern that all of us who live in California have noticed in State Assembly, state Senate races, and congressional races, and we saw it on the national scale as well.  

But in California, what happens is a conservative candidate will take a lead or finish on Election Day ahead, and then almost with a smirk, the Democrat opponent counts on ballots, mailed-in ballots that start to appear a week, two weeks, three weeks, four weeks after the actual election deadline, and they are at ratios of five to one, ten to one, twenty to one.  

And they show the power of the SEIU and other public employee unions, as well as the California Teachers Association, the big money from the billionaire class of Silicon Valley, etc. 

And then the Democrat candidate that we thought lost actually wins. And then if you allege that something’s wrong, you’re called a conspiratorial nut or an election denier.  

But Spencer Pratt was ahead by seven points, and Ms. [Nithya] Raman had already given a concession speech.  

And now it’s a week after the polls closed, and suddenly these troves started appearing all week, in which it wasn’t two to one. She was the third candidate when the Election Day tallies had begun, and we had about 50% to 60% of the vote. She was well behind Spencer Pratt and well, well behind Karen Bass. 

Suddenly, these ballots started coming in, and they were overwhelmingly for the third candidate, Raman.  

And now, as I’m speaking, suddenly Spencer Pratt lost his lead that he had established and apparently everybody thought he had won. It’s a familiar pattern. 

Now, why does this happen?  

It happens because there is a Democrat monopoly in California. We haven’t had a Republican governor in about 15 years. We have no statewide Republican elected officials.  

There is a supermajority in the state Assembly and the state Senate. Because the governor appoints Superior Court, appellate court, and Supreme Court justices, we haven’t had a single conservative justice appointed in 15 years, and most of the conservatives under Arnold Schwarzenegger have now retired.  

So the executive, legislative, and judicial branches are all controlled by the left and the Democratic Party. 

Now, why did that happen? Why did the state of California that was run by Ronald Reagan, George Deukmejian, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Pete Wilson, what happened?  

Well, the state bureaucracies during the period of Jerry Brown’s first term and his second term, and Gray Davis’ short term, they began regulating administratively, stopping construction, raising taxes in the legislature with thin majorities.  

And pretty soon, a large number of Californians that were upper middle class, middle class, and lower middle class said, I can’t take this anymore. The schools are bad. We have the most illegal aliens. We have the most foreign-born. We have the most welfare recipients. We have the most homeless. We have the highest sales, highest gas, highest electricity, highest gas taxes. Schools were rated in the bottom 10. Reason Magazine just judged us 49th in roads, etc. 

And they left, 12 million. This year, maybe 300,000 to 500,000.  

These were the conservative party of California, the Republican Party. They’re gone. We also, during this period, let in about 10 million people over 40 years who came here illegally, and many of them came from south of the border and were very impoverished.  

So today, that constituency is heavily reliant on union jobs and public largesse. Half of all births in California are Medi-Cal, and 40% of the population is on public assistance via Medi-Cal. 

And then we have the Silicon Valley billionaire class that dominates, and the upper, upper, upper professional class that dominates the coastal corridor, and they’re not affected by the consequences of their left-wing ideology.  

That’s why we have a monopoly, that’s how it happened. 

How does that manifest itself in an anti-democratic way? 

How do you vote in California? You just register to vote. Does it require anything? Well, you have to have some ID. If you don’t have a driver’s license—and by the way, they give driver’s licenses to illegal aliens—so when they say no illegal aliens are voting, they have a driver’s license that allows them to register to vote.  

And because there’s no ID check when you actually vote, of course thousands of them are voting. Everybody knows that.  

But more importantly, you don’t have to have any sort of legitimate ID. You can have a credit card. You can do almost anything to register. 

If you’re homeless, if somebody comes up to you on the street, and we’ve got over 80,000 to 100,000 people, you can say, do you have an ID? No. Well, we’ll give you an ID number. You don’t have any ID. We don’t know who you are, but just tell us who you are, and then we will register you.  

And the same day, you will fill out the ballot. Oh, you can’t read? You don’t know how? You can make a mark, and I will witness it. I can witness 10,000 votes if I want to. Or you can sign your name. 

If the signature is only 40% correct, it’s correct. And in 2024, they only rejected 1% of California mail-in ballots. 

Then the ballots come in by mail. There’s no ID, and we have ballot harvesting. One person can go to a person’s house and say, I need you to register to vote. Here it is. Show me a credit card, show me anything, or I’ll give you an ID number. And then here’s your ballot. Fill it out. I’ll take it, and I’ll drop it off at a depository.  

And that’s why California is screwed up. 

We have no authentication of anybody. We have no idea how many homeless people are voting. We have no idea how many illegal aliens are voting.  

We have no idea who is voting because people in the government mail out a ballot to every registered voter, whether that person has been living at that address or not.  

So traditionally, everybody who has children that go off to college and then they don’t come back, they get that ballot at their home.  

People who are renting still get ballots at that residence when they move out if they don’t tell people.  

So there’s thousands of ballots that are floating around for anybody to take, sign, or just make a happy face mark and send in. 

And because of that, this Democratic monopoly persists . 

And they don’t listen to the people. In 2014, we passed a water bill Proposition 1, over $7 billion to build reservoirs. We were desperate for water, but the bureaucracy didn’t want it, the Sierra Club didn’t want it, the Left didn’t want it. The people wanted it. 

 So what did they do? They ignored it. They had $2.3 billion to build reservoirs out of that seven-point-something billion dollar water bill. They didn’t build the Sites Reservoir. They didn’t build Los Baños Grandes. They didn’t build Temperance Flat. We could have had 7 million acre-feet.  

What did they do with it? Gavin Newsom took $250 million of the people’s money designated to build dams, and he blew up four of them. And they were valuable in the Klamath River.  

They served recreation. They created clean hydropower. They helped private owners. They had cabins on the lake, and they were flood control, and they were wonderful investments.  

He blew them all up. He used money that the people voted to build dams to blow them up. 

We have passed Proposition 209 years ago and lately Proposition 16. The people said we do not want racial preferences, no racial preferences, in hiring, in promotion, in admissions, in any state institution.  

What did we do? The bureaucracy, the Democratic Party, said, OK, calm down. We won’t do it. And yet if you go to CSU campuses or you go to UC campuses or you go to community college campuses, there are separate graduations by race.  

They say they’re not. They say they are theme graduations or auxiliary graduations, but there is nobody out of that particular tribe or ethnic group that goes to those. They are segregated.  

There are segregated theme houses. There is preference still in admissions. They call it community service or community activities, but they find ways to use race in hiring, admissions, and promotion, and they ignore the will of the people. 

They have done it for 30 years, and there’s no consequences because the judiciary is overwhelmingly left-wing. In fact, it’s more left-wing than the legislature. 

We had redistricting. We passed a law years ago that said a bipartisan commission of five Republicans, five Democrats, and four independents would redistrict according to population and geography without politics. 

No sooner had they done that than Democrats who had power in the state lowered that facade, and they began bringing groups to testify and say, well you need to consider race and ethnicity, and this group’s underserved, and that group’s underserved.  

And before you knew it, they had redistricted so that although 40% of Republicans vote in national elections in California, 40% of the electorate vote Republican, we were only getting about out of 52 congressional seats, we were getting about 10 or 12, and then we went to nine.  

As I speak today, the bipartisan disinterested election commission has redistricted so that we have seven. About 13% of congressional district is Republican.  

And by the way, the Democrats added that to the original bill, it just said state redistricting for Senate and State Assembly seats. They added the congressional seats. 

Is that enough for the Democrats? No. Even though Donald Trump got over 38% in the last national election from California voters, 30% of them voted for Trump, and although we only have about 13% representation in the Congress, hey redistrict again.  

Gavin Newsom introduced a bill, the Democratic power lobbies funded it, and now we’re going to go down to about five seats. So they want to get down to around 6% or 7%, that’s not enough. 

So you add all of this up, and what is the pattern? The pattern is they created ballot laws and said they were legal. And they ensure that Democratic candidates are going to win when you don’t have IDs, you have same-day registration, and you don’t have to have any ID to get a driver’s license that serves as the basis for, and when I say no ID, I mean no legitimate ID, which serves as the basis for registration and voting. 

So if you have the voting, and if you have the judiciary, and you ignore propositions, so when people pass propositions, the bureaucracy and elected officials say we’re still going to discriminate by race, we’re just not going to build dams, we’re not going to build reservoirs. That’s your problem.  

And oh, we’re going to have a bipartisan commission, but we’ll find a way to help Democratic incumbents, and we’ll do it by race as well. 

Add it all up, and California is where democracy died. 

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