Even in deep-blue territory, voters might decide that they have had enough.
Even in deep-blue territory, voters might decide that they have had enough.
D avid Jariustokaeutulelei Tangipa is a first-generation American of Polynesian ancestry. In 2024, at the age of 28, he was elected to the California State Assembly as a Republican. And he has been appalled to learn just how much the Democratic legislature is marinated in identity politics.
Members of the assembly jostle to inject race into every debate. Last fall, they easily passed a bill to allow colleges to favor the descendants of American slavery for admission, as well as a bill to begin a restitution process for victims of racially motivated uses of eminent domain. These bills were so radical that Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed them. (Though he did sign into law another bill, instituting the Bureau for Descendants of American Slavery, which will attempt to outline a structure for future reparations payments.)
Last month, Tangipa watched as the Democratic-dominated legislature voted 54 to 14 in favor of a state constitutional amendment to dismantle huge chunks of Proposition 209, which bars state institutions from considering race, sex, color, or ethnicity in the context of public employment or education. It had been passed with the support of 55 percent of voters in 1996. “For nearly 30 years, Prop 209 has prohibited race-based preferences. Now Sacramento politicians want to reopen the door,” Tangipa said in an official address. “Californians deserve fairness, not a return to race-based decision-making.”
The proposed amendment now goes to the California State Senate, which, like the assembly, has a Democratic supermajority. If approved, the amendment will appear on the ballot in November. The issue before voters will be if they wish to exempt K–12 education from the ban on race- or sex-based preferences. The only part of Prop 209 applicable to public education that the amendment would leave in place relates to what the U.S. Supreme Court has unequivocally ruled as unconstitutional. In 2023, the Court issued a ruling that barred colleges from considering race as a factor in higher education admissions — and cast constitutional doubt on all race-based preferences. “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote.
California voters had sent the same message in 2020, when the legislature tried to restore all race preferences via Proposition 16: When it appeared on the ballot, 57 percent rejected it. Bill McGurn of the Wall Street Journal noted: “This was a stunning rebuke, not only because the rejection came from residents of a blue state but because the losing side had outspent opponents something like 14 to 1.”
But progressives were undaunted. In 2024, the California State Assembly passed a new effort to neuter Prop 209 that would have allowed the governor to gut the ban on racial preferences by creating “exceptions” to it. But the state senate failed to take up the measure. Now progressives are back with yet another attempt. They are counting on the endorsement of most of the political establishment and the media. Rob Bonta, the state’s Democratic attorney general, will no doubt prepare a ballot summary that casts the measure in a favorable light. And once again, unions will likely bankroll an extensive campaign.
But there is a growing trend that could upset their calculations. Helen Raleigh, a Chinese immigrant and author of Not Outsiders: Asian Americans’ Political Activism from the 19th Century to Today, notes that many Asian Democrats in California are fierce opponents of race-based university admissions, which they view as discriminatory against high-achieving Asian applicants. “Asians increasingly want to scrap failed DEI programs” and replace them with “MEI: merit, education, and intelligence,” she told me.
Indeed, a survey conducted after the failure of Proposition 16 in 2020 found that only 56 percent of African-American voters thought it was a good idea, and only about a third of Latinos and Asians. The fact that Asians make up over 15 percent of California’s population helps explain why — while Joe Biden won the state by nearly 30 percentage points in the 2020 presidential election — Kamala Harris won by only 20 points in 2024. If progressives continue to push for quota politics, even voters in deep-blue California might decide that they have had enough. This November, Democrats could even lose some of the contested U.S. House seats in California that may decide which party holds the majority in that body.