California Democrats were shocked in 2020 on Election Day when Proposition 16 — which would repeal the state constitution’s prohibition against preferential treatment based on race — lost 57 percent to 43 percent. In a triumph of wishful thinking over experience, they are apparently going for another repeal effort in 2024, this time one that could stymie their effort to recapture the House of Representatives.
One can see why progressives are tempted. California is a majority-minority state — only 35 percent of its people are Anglo. The biggest minority is Latinos with 39 percent, followed by Asian Americans with 15 percent, blacks with 5 percent, and those who are multiracial making up 4 percent. Joe Biden won the state by just under 30 points in 2020, and Governor Gavin Newsom romped to reelection last year with 59 percent.
They also think they have the same advantages they had with Proposition 16. Virtually the entire political and media establishment will endorse it. The state’s Democratic attorney general will prepare a ballot summary biased in favor of the measure. Major corporations and labor unions will provide a large campaign war chest.
Most importantly, proponents have sugarcoated the measure they want the state legislature to put before voters on the November 2024 ballot. Instead of repealing California’s Proposition 209 — which in 1996 banned using race, sex, national origin, and ethnicity as a factor in government programs — it would allow state agencies to send the governor a waiver request to use race as a factor if the waiver was based on “scholarly” research.
The proposed constitutional amendment has overwhelmingly cleared the state assembly, but is currently awaiting action in the state senate. Its main proponent, Assemblyman Corey Jackson, claims that using “objective, research-based findings” will help identity groups with “culturally specific programs based on race, color, ethnicity, national origin, or marginalized genders, sexes, or sexual orientations designed to improve outcomes for people in those groups.”
Nonsense, says Wenyuan Wu, executive director of Californians for Equal Rights Foundation. She said that Jackson’s effort would “bring back racial preferences, as long as someone claims racial preferences will improve outcomes.” In the end, California’s Democratic governor would be the final arbiter of which research would be valid enough to justify identity-based racial programs. The “exceptions” from a ban on race-based programs could quickly swallow the rule.
Thomas Saenz, the president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, says the broad nature of the language would allow California’s public universities to once again use race as a factor in admitting students. Of course, that could quickly run into the Supreme Court’s recent decision barring race-based university admissions.
Jackson is nonetheless determined to make California open to race-based preferences in hopes the Supreme Court will come around to his thinking. Just because the high court “is not in our favor, that doesn’t mean that we should not push back against it,” he said.
Other Democrats aren’t so sure. Privately, they told me that Jackson is taking a big political risk. Republicans have no chance of winning California for president, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be hard fought battles over four to six House seats that could determine partisan control of that body.
“The California Legislature could hand Republicans a gift that would make it easier for them to keep the House,” a retired Democratic political consultant told me. He noted that a post-election survey by the Institute of Governmental Studies at Berkeley after Proposition 16’s 2020 failure found that only 56 percent of African-American voters thought it was a good idea, and only 30 percent of Latinos and 35 percent of Asians agreed.
The growing Asian-American vote clearly leans Democratic, but the Republican share is also expanding, moving from 26 percent in 2018 to 30 percent in 2020 and 32 percent in 2022.
In California, Asian voters are turning more conservative on issues such as university admissions, which they see as being tilted against Asian applicants if race is a factor.
In California, Democrats may have lost two congressional seats in Orange County in 2020 because Prop 16 was on the ballot. Republicans Michelle Steel and Young Kim, two Korean Americans, ousted liberal incumbents, and both won reelection in 2022. Steel told me that Proposition 16 brought Asian voters who opposed it to the polls, and they then supported her and other candidates who also opposed it.
In 2022, Asian-American voters were instrumental in the recall of San Francisco’s progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, from office: “in the three supervisor districts with the highest share of Chinese language ballot registrants (10 percent or more), 65 percent of voters voted to recall Boudin. . . . One in five individual contributors to the Boudin recall effort had an Asian surname.”
Liberal Asian groups lined up to support the recall: “We’re tired of having attacks on our seniors dismissed, delegitimized, ignored,” the Asian Pacific Democratic Club tweeted. “It’s not progressive or Democratic to talk at, instead of listen to, communities of color.”
Similar tone-deafness could impact the Democratic Party’s vote totals in California if an attempt to undermine the ban on race-based programs is put on the 2024 ballot. Five congressional districts where Asians are a fifth or more of the population are considered toss-ups and could determine House control.
There was a time when liberals learned from their political overreach. It was only after they abandoned efforts at strict gun control, for instance, that they recaptured the House and Senate in 2006. Today, liberals can learn from that example, or they can repeat their misbegotten attempt in California to emphasize identity politics — and expect similar results.