From today’s Wall Street Journal Political Diary E-mail…
California Bong Hits
If Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer lead Democrats to victory in California, will it be due to new voters who came out mostly to vote for marijuana legalization?
It’s possible, according to a new SurveyUSA poll that shows Ms. Boxer with a 46% to 44% lead over Republican Carly Fiorina. Among those voters who say they are determined to vote in this year’s California race, a significant number say they are motivated by Proposition 19, which would make consumption and growth of small amounts of marijuana legal. Among habitual voters, Ms. Boxer trails by four percentage points. When "uniquely motivated" voters who tend to favor Prop 19 are added to the survey, she takes a two-point lead. "Boxer has a unique tractor-beam in 2010 that is drawing to the polls otherwise disaffected voters," reports SurveyUSA.
That may be true, but the tractor beam could be weakening as signs multiply that Prop 19 is in growing trouble. The latest Los Angeles Times poll shows the measure failing by 51% to 39%. Should Proposition 19 lose, the reason won’t be opposition solely from older voters, who traditionally oppose drug use. Pro-pot forces have targeted African-Americans and Latinos, arguing the war on drugs incarcerates them at higher rates than whites. But those pitches seem to be falling flat. The Los Angeles Times poll reports that both blacks and Latinos oppose the measure by greater percentages than whites — nearly 2 to 1 in the case of Latinos.
"The use of marijuana is associated with criminality in the Latino community, and that is of major concern for voters," says Manuel Castells, a University of Southern California professor who worked on the survey.
The survey adds to evidence that minority groups are more socially conservative than the population as a whole. In 2008, exit polls showed that Proposition 8, which sought to define marriage in California as solely between a man and woman, won only because of support from 70% of black voters and a majority of Latinos.
— John Fund