Davis, CA – The upside of the November vote is that we will get maximum turnout for local elections – District 2 Council, Measure Q and Measure T. And while in concept that may sound like a good thing, the practical result is that the Presidential Election – even in a state where the contest has long since been a foregone conclusion – has literally sucked the oxygen out of the room.
While California may not be a battleground state – my social media feed is filled with people who have traveled the short drive to Reno where they get not just a presidential barnburner but also a critical Senate Race. The more adventurous have gone to more exotic places like Pennsylvania to make their stand.
From the start, the local City Council election, which is an open seat, has been upstaged locally by Measure Q.
I will focus my closing remarks then on this election with thoughts on Measure Q.
We are about to see how difficult it really is to defeat a tax measure in Davis. While I think the opponents of Measure Q have run the more robust campaign, they have several extreme handicaps.
First, this isn’t a two-thirds vote. It requires a mere simple majority. That makes this a pretty tough lift for any opposition.
In a town that has a heavy blue tilt, it was always going to be difficult to get the voters to oppose a tax measure that quite frankly no one will notice in their pocketbooks in any real sense.
Polling from November 2023 – granted, outside of any campaign context – showed theoretical support for such a measure at 70 percent. Those numbers won’t hold, but that demonstrates the countervailing winds.
Finally, because this is a Presidential Election, and everyone will vote, the No side is going to have to get to infrequent voters and get them to care enough to vote no. That’s probably the hardest part of this lift.
This isn’t a land use measure where the default in Davis seems to be no – a tax measure runs the other direction.
At the end of day, the No on Q side has done enough to make this not a foregone conclusion, but I still don’t think Q will go down in defeat. If it does, it would be truly momentous and the city and council will have to seriously rethink things.
I think the true goal here of the opposition is to send a message to city hall – and I think on many levels, they have succeeded in doing that.
I have questions about how deep the discontentment goes – but the people who are unhappy are those who are paying attention and that should be cause for concern.
And, by the way, while I have attempted to stay out of this fight as a partisan, I am right there with the opposition on several points.
First, the handling of the commission issue was the absolute trigger for much of the opposition. Frankly, there is a huge difference between the usual anti-tax campaigns led by folks like Jose Granda and a campaign led by folks like Elaine Roberts Musser, Alan Pryor and Matt Williams (among others).
This was a needless and self-inflicted fight even though most people in the community have no idea what happened – and wouldn’t care much if they knew.
Second, I am not happy because it has been obvious for at least a decade that the city is in need of more revenue and, for various reasons, several of the efforts have gone down at the polls for various reasons.
Third, I am not happy, because the council consciously chose the revenue measure over housing this election. They wanted to clear the runway for this measure and then they fumbled the ball by creating the needless commission issue that has given us the worst of all worlds.
I am particularly frustrated because to me the top issue is housing along with economic development, and this issue has distracted from both. It has squandered a high turnout election, pushed a contentious housing project off until a special election, and has failed to really move the ball forward – pass or fail.
If this ends up actually failing, there will have to be a pretty explicit “Come to Jesus” moment for the city and city council. If this ends up passing, there are a lot of questions that should be asked.
Given everything, this should have been an easy pass – given that it was not, hard questions need to be asked.
As I said, I still think this passes, but it is not the foregone conclusion it might have, and perhaps, should have been.
