California election 2020: how voting metrics show the state’s growing political division

The dozen voting measures Californians weighed in this month were a bag of reforms, spanning corporate taxation, rent control, criminal justice and other topics. Although the proposals varied, the results showed a clear division: Voters in Los Angeles County and San Francisco Bay Area are far removed from the rest of the state on most issues.

It’s a chasm that has widened in recent years, as choices in the state’s two main population centers have increasingly differed from those in suburban and rural counties.

One result is that ambitious and progressive proposals have been rejected, despite majority support in dense liberal enclaves.

This was seen this year in the failures of Proposals 15 and 16.

Each has taken on a decades-old, voter-approved voting measure rooted in the history of state conservatism. Proposition 15 called for voters to partially override a landmark property tax rule enacted in 1978. Proposition 16 called for a full-scale repeal of the 1996 affirmative action ban. In both cases, Los Angeles and the Bay Area voted in favor, while the rest of the state opposed the changes.

The defeats underscored a reality of the state’s political calculation. For a voting measure to prevail, the support of LA County and the Bay of Nine County area is not sufficient. Together, the two regions have just under half of the state’s registered voters.

The gap was also marked on other measures, sometimes with a different result. In two cases, voters in Los Angeles and the Bay Area were strong enough to lead initiatives opposed by the rest of the state to victory.

Even on matters on which both sides of the state agreed, their enthusiasm differed, sometimes significantly.

Two voting measures on criminal justice reforms illustrate this point. Voters across the state supported Proposition 17, which gave those convicted of felony the right to vote while on parole. But the margin of victory was 30 points higher in Los Angeles and the Bay Area.

Voters in urban enclaves were also more enthusiastic about rejecting Proposition 20, which sought to toughen penalties for certain criminal offenses.

Of the 12 polls, Los Angeles and the Bay Area were separated from the rest of the state by 10.6 percentage points on average.

The Times analyzed the results of the 68 proposals that have been on the ballots with the presidential general elections since 2004 and calculated that same gap for each year. The number has continued to increase.

LA and the Bay Area are now in tune with it, but that wasn’t always the case. In 1978, Proposition 13 sparked outrage and capped property taxes statewide. San Francisco was one of three counties to vote against the initiative, while Los Angeles supported the measure, supported by more Republicans than the state as a whole.

Four decades later, LA and the Bay Area united in favor of this year’s Proposition 15, which would have partially reversed the effects of the old measure. But voters in Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties were not swayed. The measure could not exceed 40% of support in any of the three counties, and it failed.