Editor’s note: This article discusses mature themes.
You can’t fail in California if you have a (D) behind your name. The “vote blue no matter who” rule has you covered. A political nightmare is developing here, the scale of which is hard to exaggerate, because a comfortable majority of California voters just pull the lever for the new version of Tammany Hall no matter what.
But before we talk about election results, note that we don’t really have those. Last night, California Secretary of State Shirley Weber made the usual announcement that one expects regarding elections in the Third World: “On Election Night, we will have a good picture of the outcome of most contests, but it will take weeks to know the final results. This is normal.” She’s not kidding. As I write this, the afternoon after election night, we’ve counted a little more than half of the expected ballots, in an election that appears to be hovering below 25 percent turnout.
Here’s what that means. In 2010, the Democrat district attorney of San Francisco — a young Kamala Harris, if you remember that obscure name — appeared to have lost the race for California attorney general to the Republican DA in Los Angeles, Steve Cooley. Here’s an old news headline that revisits the outcome: “When Kamala Harris lost on election night, but won three weeks later.” Certain very interesting things tend to happen when California counts new ballots several weeks after election day.
With that important proviso in mind, we can consider what seems to be happening so far in California’s primary elections. And it’s bad, bad, bad, bad, bad news.
This woman stepped off an airplane from a trip to another continent while wildfires that would engulf roughly 7 percent of her giant city were burning in a place with a badly understaffed and under-equipped fire department, and here’s what she did:
Unbroken catatonic silence. I thought, watching this, that her career was finally over. The joke was on me.
Los Angeles has plummeted into decline and corruption. Skid Row keeps expanding in size and descending into ever-greater chaos and misery, with regular shootings and stabbings and constant overdoses. Here’s a news headline from May 29, days before the election: “$26M Skid Row campus: Violence, drug use surge at ‘Meth Mansion’ as officials stay silent.” A few miles away, the mid-city MacArthur Park is a zombie apocalypse. This news story, covering a Los Angeles Fire Department station near the park where firefighters say they routinely go through six to ten doses of Narcan on a normal shift, was broadcast the day before the election:
Federal prosecutors are finding a constant flood of corruption cases arising out of homeless services in Los Angeles, while an endless child prostitution scandal that recruits from the county foster care system has become so obvious that even the narrative police at The New York Times allowed themselves to notice.
Result: Karen Bass is cruising to reelection, advancing to the general election by a comfortable margin. Democrat Socialists of America candidate Nithya Raman is on pace to finish third with around 20 percent of the vote, after she endlessly ranted that apparent second-place finisher Spencer Pratt is an evil MAGA candidate, so her votes go left to Bass in the general election. Barring a miracle, Bass plunges her city into a ghastly crisis of drugs and wildfire and gangs and child prostitution and ubiquitous encampments, then strolls away with 60 percent of the vote in November.
The more powerful and important Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors meanwhile remains somewhere to the left of Che Guevara, as this dimwitted lunatic …
… has won so decisively in June that she doesn’t face a run-off in November. She’ll be joined on the county board by the idiotic far-left machine politician Maria Elena Durazo, whose campaign is that she posts girlboss pictures of herself with Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama while promising ever more “economic justice” for Democrat client groups.
If you have any doubt at all about the amount of failure Los Angeles voters will cheerfully tolerate, look at the most shocking outcome in the county.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is incredibly important, policing a bunch of small cities as a contract agency while also being the police department for the giant unincorporated portion of the county. The sheriff does more policing than most people notice, since the department provides a bunch of services even for small cities with their own police departments. If your suburban city in L.A. County needs a SWAT team, a bomb disposal team, or a homicide investigation, your local police are calling the sheriff. And in a county with a mountain range and a national forest in the middle, if you drive off the side of the highway in the mountains, a big yellow and green helicopter that says SHERIFF on the side is coming to get you.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department is trapped in an unmistakable institutional freefall. The radically understaffed department is holding together a very basic level of patrol staffing by mandating massive blocks of overtime for deputies, leading to scandals like the one in which the family of a murdered deputy sued the county over the quite plausible claim that their son was too fatigued to defend himself against his killer. In a development that local news media mostly ignore, the department goes to “self dispatch” from time to time when the dispatch system collapses, requiring deputies to decide for themselves which calls to handle. One of the largest urban police agencies in the country is struggling to keep the wheels from falling off.
Result: Woke Sheriff Robert Luna, known for his high school drama club announcements about how much he hates the mean racists at ICE, appears set to advance to the general election by a quite comfortable margin, with enough support across the county to be confident about November.
Elsewhere, the news is at least as unpleasant. San Francisco-based state senator Scott Wiener has spent his career protecting sex offenders who target minors and bragging that sexually active 12-year-olds in California can get their STD medications and abortions without mommy and daddy finding out.
Wiener is running for Nancy Pelosi’s seat in the House, and is likely to win it after last night. Be ready for a national pro-pedophile politics.
State legislative elections point toward more of the same, with a likelihood of more Democrat supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature. Appalling legislators are advancing toward easy reelection, prevailing by comfortable margins in their primaries. The dumber-than-a-golden-retriever Corey Jackson, a doctor of social work who got his doctorate from a degree mill after “writing” a ludicrous dissertation, was the author of California’s successful “anti-book ban” bill, which guarantees children in public schools a right to sexually explicit materials.
Jackson is comfortably above 50 percent in his primary, giving him an easy path to victory in November. All the state legislative races are looking about like that.
Republicans are taking some comfort from the governor’s race, with Steve Hilton holding a lead over Tammany-machine career politician Xavier Becerra, one of the least interesting human beings on the planet. But Hilton’s vote is far less than Becerra’s vote plus the votes for the Democrat runners-up, including the utterly repellent Tom Steyer, who currently sits in third place, so November will be challenging.
California desperately needed a major course correction, and the primary elections so far mostly tell us that nothing of the kind is even possible. We can check again when the count of alleged ballots actually finishes, but there’s very little light shining through the darkness here.
