Reminder: local voters reject expanded affirmative action policies

Next week, San Jose's City Council will consider a new definition of "equity" that will greatly inflate the scope and impact of race-based affirmative action policies across the city. In anticipation of the meeting, we recall Suzi Murillo's Opp Now analysis of the Fall 2020 elections, in which she alone pointed out that local voters soundly rejected local politicians' moves to expand race-based preferences.

If all you did was read the Merc and the local online news sites, you'd think that Santa Clara County resembled an undergraduate seminar at Oberlin on Critical Social Justice Theory: a hotbed of far-left identity politics. Friend of Opportunity Now and senior in Political Science at UC Berkeley Susie Murillo offers a thoughtful take on election results.

Coming from San Jose and going to school in Berkeley, it's easy to think everybody in the Bay Area is a Woke Democratic Socialist. But our recent election's results tell a different, much more moderate story about the profile of local voters. Three big takeaways:

1.) County voters rejected Proposition 16, an effort to reinstate affirmative action policies on a broad scale. Even though the San Jose City Council unanimously came out in favor of Prop 16, the voters in supposedly Woke Santa Clara County rejected their advice 52% to 48%.

2.) County politicians and voters ignored Democratic Party censures. You may have missed it, but Joseph DiSalvo won the county Board of Education seat even though the county Democratic Central Committee voted to censure him over verbal sexual harassment allegations, some over a decade old. DiSalvo says that Zoe Lofgren, one of the most influential Democrats in the Bay Area, ignored the censure and continued to endorse him. These censures have little meaning.

3.) Centrist independents continue to beat progressive candidates. Despite broad support from local Democrats and Green Party progressives, newcomer Jake Tonkel (who ran an excellent campaign) failed to unseat middle of the road, pragmatic Dev Davis in District 6. Liberals have long hoped to flip this district, but failed once again.

Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity.

Photo by Anda Chu