The "California Top Two Primary Act," known as Proposition 14, passed with surprising margins in counties across the state yesterday. The campaign for the proposition should be congratulating itself; many political observers did not see this big win coming for Prop. 14.

Under Prop. 14, voters can vote in the primary election for what used to be referred to as "partisan elections" for any candidate regardless of party affiliation of either the candidate or the voter. Candidates can even chose to not disclose their party affiliation on the ballot. For example, and admittedly at the extreme, if the Communist Party qualified as a political party in California and had a candidate running for Congress in say, Congressional District #9 (Berkeley), the candidate could chose to not disclose that significant political affiliation on the ballot.

Lawyers for both political parties will now be focusing on a legal challenge to Prop. 14. I think the fact that candidates can chose to remove information from the ballot about their party affiliation is a significant line of legal attack. It emasculates the political parties. Prop.… Read More

From today’s Wall Street Journal Political Diary E-mail…… Read More

Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley not only won the Republican nomination for Attorney General, he got his dream match-up in Kamala Harris, the uber-liberal District Attorney of San Francisco, and he will be California’s next Attorney General.

Kamala Harris is simply unelectable as Attorney General. She has the worst criminal conviction rate in the state, having barely won over 50% of her felony trials. She presides over a Sanctuary City and actually provides support and legal comfort for illegal immigrants. She is on the hot seat for failing to disclose massive negligence in the San Francisco crime lab, a failure that could result in the release of thousands of violent criminals. She opposes the death penalty. She was THE most liberal candidate in the Democrat primary, and now she is toast. (PS – How do you feel today, Chris Kelly? $10 million for a 2:1 loss. Ouch.)

Steve Cooley is certainly not a perfect candidate. He’s got big problems with his administration of the Three Strikes law, especially his office policy not to pursue a third strike unless it is a violent felony. He also authored a ballot initiative to weaken the Three Strikes law.… Read More

Sadly I received my last piece of campaign mail today, Wednesday, the day after the polls closed, at my home in Dana Point. It was a Poizner piece mailed out under an Orange, Ca bulk mail permit. If someone from that campaign wants to contact me, I’ll send you a scan of the piece. The Dana Point post office is notoriously slow in processing and delivering “red tagged” political mail, which is entitled to First Class priority handling. But arriving a day after the election just adds insult to injury.… Read More

As is always the case after a major election, there is much more to write about than there is time to write! Look for more substantive analysis on specific races and such, but for this morning, I will take a stab at some overall analysis – all of which will be too brief in any one, but this is an overview, after all. I am not going to be pouring election numbers into this, you can get plenty of that elsewhere. Before I start my run down, I want to echo the praise extended by FR friend Aaron McLear to the Capitol Press Corps who all stepped up in their blogging and tweeting last night. Outstanding. Also a reminder – I am mostly looking at GOP races – someone else will take a closer look at the Dems…

OK, off to the races…

STATEWIDE RACES GOVERNOR: Congratulations to Meg Whitman, and to her (extensive) campaign team. Whitman posted a convincing win over rival Poizner. So much so that Whitman goes into the Summer with significant momentum. I wonder if her first commercials will be up…today?… Read More

Hi FR gang, I thought I’d knock a little rust off my FR password in honor of Flash’s new arrival [Congrats!]

The race for the 12 county 4th Senate District up here is nearing its conclusion and what a ride its been. I’ve got a good feeling about it, with great thanks to my team…more on that later.

Justa bit on Prop 14, as I’ve seen very good commentary on here already. As vows are being made to have intra-party conventions in response to a possible passage of Prop 14, I have to wonder how that will be a better process than what we have now. The smoke-filled room way of doing business is the exact turn off to voters that will be perpetuated by PASSING 14, when, potentiallya few hundred party people can be wined and dined to favoring a candidate vs. having to make the case to all the electorate in a party primary.

With the "goal" of 14 to cause more moderate candidates, you instead get more bought and paid for ones answering to afew party bosses. The freedom of people that choose to affiliate with a particular party ideal areleft to choose an annointed one, post the party convention, not their… Read More

Check out this new website developed by the Institute for Government Studies at UC Berkeley.It called California Choices and it is apartnership between IGS, the Bill Lane Center for the American West at Stanford, the Center for California Studies at Sacramento State, and Next 10, a Bay Area "green" think tank founded and funded by venture capitalist F. Noel Perry. This website shows the positions mostmajor statewide organizations have taken on state ballot measures and allows you to email your positions to friends.

This could be a handy tool when your friends and family call to find out how you voted on the ballot measures. The only issue is that the website does not tell you how they might be using the information collected during the transmission of information from friend to friend. Are they collecting and tallying the info? Are they collecting emails? I’m assuming that if the website proves to be useful to the public over the long termthose… Read More

From today’s Wall Street Journal Political Diary Email… (yours truly is quoted)…… Read More