CA Special Election: I'm giddy but wary

Wow. It was a very gratifying but costly victory in what turned out to be a war against the corporate Borg machinery.

All the initiatives, I'm sure you know, were beaten this time around, barely in some cases (Prop. 73), but what a terribly bloody, messy, and, most of all, freakingly expensive battle it was up to the end. This is what concerns me the most.

Better writeups here at the amazing fantastic wonderful Alliance blog. The Alliance, the united front of the unions, was at the heart of this battle. UPDATE: I'll also add these writeups at Eric Mar's blog, Educational Justice. Eric Mar is Pres. of the SF Board of Education.

One note on the polling: see Brian at Calitics, who compares the numbers from all the polling outfits, save for the LAT results. In this election, none were really predictive across the board. Lots of reasons why, no serious fault of the polling outfits (except for that egregiously bad Stanford/Hoover poll, what's their problem?), because the numbers were all too close and I honestly think there was a great deal of fluidity.

E.g. SUSA 11/4-11/6 results hit 1/5 well (prop. 75), 2/5 okay (prop. 76 and 77), 2/5 (73 and 74) kinda off.

But I'm still left feeling really really miffed we went through this in the first place.

On to the positives. The blessing in disguise: the faux action hero guy fronting the Borg has genuinely lost the misplaced trust and goodwill of California voters. Voters took seriously his broken promises to the schools, probably the reason why Prop. 76, the one cutting school funding, was defeated so soundly. The Borg will have to figure some other way to do what they want to do. And they will. We'll see what they're up to for the June election.

I think we finally realize we've got something serious going on, and we'd better pay attention. Here is the chance for progressives to offer genuine solutions and to educate people about the corporate Borg machinery. We have a vacuum in leadership here; let's hope we can fill that vacuum because the Borg will continue on with still another permutation.

Onward.