This week, the nation watched as California grappled again with the ordinarily straightforward task of counting votes in an election. While large states such as Florida declare election winners within 24 hours, California may take up to two weeks to count all the votes.
Even Los Angeles cannot count its votes in the time of large states despite giving the Clerk an annual budget of $336 million and a $448,179 a year salary with the help of 1,100 budgeted positions.
In most states, voters would be outraged by the incompetence, waste, and inefficiency. However, in the Golden State, voters shrug, as if they can demand no more from their elected officials than subpar performance.
Call it the Politics of Low Expectations and California is the model for the nation.
For years, my students have asked me what the secret is to a successful marriage approaching four decades (For full disclosure, there is an ongoing contractual dispute over my counting eight years of monogamous dating — leading to two dates on our anniversary cakes). The answer is simple. I reduced her expectations so low that I have exceeded them on a daily basis.
That began with our eloping on New Year’s Eve. We were married after an actual shotgun wedding where the clearly expectant teenage bride’s family was screaming profanities at the teenage groom. After paying $50 and using my high school ring for a wedding ring, we stepped out on the street of Old Town Alexandria as a drunk was retching in the gutter. That left only room for improvement.
On any given day, my wife is simply grateful that I have not traded the house and car for a handful of magic beans.
California Democrats seem to have applied my approach to matrimony to politics, creating a politician’s dream voter with few expectations.
That is most evident with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s infamous high-speed train to nowhere.
In 2008, voters were promised a 500-mile High-Speed train running from San Francisco to Los Angeles for $33 billion. It is now projected to cost somewhere between $126 billion and $231 billion. After roughly two decades, no track has been laid, and the current plan is to focus on building a track between Bakersfield and Merced.
Without any track to display, Newsom recently stood before a freight train on an existing track to insist that his train is moving speedily along.
One would think that citizens would be coming for their leaders with torches and pitchforks. Instead, there is a collective shrug as if it is perfectly normal to spend more than the entire budget of Amtrak on a non-existent train.
The same leaders have burned billions in other boondoggles, including a massive solar power farm that produced energy at a higher cost and incinerated thousands of birds a year.
California is facing a growing crisis of rising homelessness, dismal education scores, and an exodus of business and wealthy taxpayers. It has also imposed taxes that make gas the most expensive in the nation while suppressing its own energy industry.
Now, after many voters took the unprecedented step of voting for Republican candidates for governor and L.A. mayor, citizens will wait for weeks to learn the results of an election that would have been called days ago by third-world countries.
The same politics of low expectations are evident in other states. In New York City, voters just shrug when told that they have a budget rivaling that of the entire state of Florida, resulting in awful educational, infrastructure, and other conditions. Voters have watched as wealthy taxpayers have taken their money and jobs to other states.
In return, figures like Mayor Zohran Mamdani promise state-run grocery stores, which will cost tens of millions of dollars to build and operate at a loss.
In Minnesota, elected officials allowed billions to be stolen in fraud while businesses fled a state rife with rioting and homelessness.
In virtually every major city from Los Angeles to Chicago to New York, public schools are spending massive amounts on education to graduate many students who lack basic proficiency in English and Math. In Baltimore, a student failed all but three of his classes and was ranked in the top half of his graduating class.
Yet, voters reelected the same leaders who have denied generations any real opportunity for advancement. While other countries maintain superior school systems at a fraction of the cost, urban voters cast their ballots like lemmings for the same party and politicians.
In states like California, politics has long been run on Henry Ford’s pitch that you can have any color Model T so long as it is black. This election seemed to offer voters something they had not seen in many years: a real choice between a Republican governor and an L.A. mayor.
As California slowly counts its votes, the odds still heavily favor the continuation of California as a one-party state. Poor services, rising crime, rampant homelessness, hundreds of billions in waste and other failures are treated as virtually inevitable. The result is an electorate that only a politician would love: passive voters who expect little from their government and receive even less.
Jonathan Turley is a law professor and the New York Times best-selling author of “Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution.”
President Donald Trump enraged onlookers by spending the 82nd anniversary of D-Day flooding Truth Social with AI-generated videos glorifying himself — riding a camel through a desert, skydiving with a red parachute, walking through cheering crowds in New York — while posting nothing about the soldiers who stormed the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944.
The backlash from analysts was swift.
“It’s D-Day. Trump’s first post on Truth Social is a bizarre AI video about how much people love Donald Trump,” Republicans Against Trump wrote Saturday morning. “Not a word about the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy. That tells you everything you need to know about Trump.”
As the hours passed without any acknowledgment from the Commander in Chief, the group posted updates. “Still no mention of D-Day from Trump.” Then, near the end of the day: “It’s almost 5 p.m. on D-Day. The Commander in Chief still hasn’t said a word about it. Disgraceful.”
What Trump did post included an AI image mocking the Obama Presidential Center as a garbage can surrounded by a tent city, a transphobic AI collage targeting Rosie O’Donnell, an attack on a federal judge blocking his White House drone port, and multiple videos apparently designed to show the world how beloved he is.
Political commentator Molly Ploofkins put it plainly: “Trump marks the D-Day anniversary by glorifying himself with AI slop.”
Others skipped the commentary and went clinical. “Malignant narcissism is a severe, destructive form of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) characterized by grandiosity, a total lack of empathy, antisocial behavior, and sadism,” one widely-shared post read, posted beneath a screenshot of Trump’s AI skydiving video.
Why is the slow count any surprise? Wasn’t it just reported that California college freshmen were entering college with less than a middle school proficiency in math? Why is it any surprise that Californians need extra time to count?
California.
They sent us to Europe, North Africa, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.
Why didn’t they fight the invaders right here in America?
Professor,
I am a lifelong California resident of 50+ years. I vote in every election, and I certainly vote against the inept government on display at every level (state, county, city). Unfortunately, the party that has seized absolute power in the state won’t let it go, even at the cost of honest elections. There is no possible explanation for these late vote tallies except corruption. I will point out I voted in this election and was not required to show ID, yet another example of incompetent government that can only defend such an undemocratic process because of the ease of fixing the election results.
I do not know what else I can do as a California resident. People tell me I should just leave the state, but why should I leave my state because of this malfeasance? Not sure what the federal government can do here – I’m a big fan of states’ rights – but having rigged elections and a party that has seized power, apparently permanently, should not be allowed.
Calm down, @John A, – it takes time to fill out those boxes and truckloads full of modified/corrected ballots to achieve the desired election results.
My heart is with you, but my mind is more along the lines of those who chose to create that sinking manure wallowing ground deserve what they voted for. Just wish they would stop spending MY tax dollars to do so.
Why should California be any different than the Illinois JFK and Al Franken elections, or an attempt to swing a national election with a car trunk full of ballots (for one party) in Broward County, FL by coming up with “found” ballots – calculated as needed and produced? (just to mention a few).
LMAO: In a recent contract negotiation, was sitting on the fence of whether or not to take position (largely because doubting the potential future of the defined objectives). However, easily made decision when relocation (fully compensated) to the Golden Shower State was added to the negotiation process. My first (but restrained) thought of response was “Please remove me from consideration for this position. The selection team should be looking for a candidate with a far lower IQ to assimilate into that cultural region’s limited intellectual environment.”
” . . . hundreds of billions in waste . . .”
Prof. Turley is exasperated by this state of affairs but fails to recognize that the hundreds of billions in waste are going to recipients who gladly vote to keep in power those paying out largesse to them. The recipients of the waste outnumber the providers of the waste.
Only when a John Galt arises to provoke a strike of the producers will things change. But those in power recognized that possibility with the advent of the income tax and the accompanying criminal laws against incitement of non-payment of taxes.
The salary of almost 1/2 a million dollars for a civil service clerk is obscene! I’m a native San Diegan and I moved to the Chicago area for work 25 years ago. Illinois is bad but CA is off the charts!
^ Stupid left-wing troll thinks he’s striking a blow for, whatever, by going onto garbage left-wing websites and doing copy/pasta. What a moron! ^
Democracy is when Democrats win elections.
Parody video of left-wing NGO:
https://x.com/dsonoiki/status/2062647119421526280
SF
Democracy is when Americans give their country away without a fight.
The Pentagon has raised its counterintelligence threat assessment for Israel to “critical,” its highest level.
The most striking addition: a senior U.S. official’s characterization of what Israel has been doing. The aggressiveness of Israeli intelligence collection from Trump administration officials is described as unhinged.
The specific American officials Israel is believed to have targeted: Steve Witkoff, Trump’s chief Iran negotiator; Elbridge A. Colby, the Pentagon’s top policy official; and Colby’s deputy for Middle East policy, Michael P. DiMino IV.
American personnel in Israel found that software to intercept their communications had been installed on their phones. This underscores what officials described as a self-inflicted vulnerability. Senior Trump officials have routinely conducted national security business on personal cellphones, flown on private aircraft, and declined embassy staffing support abroad — habits that make them easy targets, according to the new report.
“The tendency of some senior Trump administration officials to fly on private aircraft, to conduct national security business on their personal phones and to reject staffing from U.S. embassies abroad made them especially vulnerable targets”.
Israel’s threat designation now stands higher than any other U.S. ally and higher than some adversaries, the report notes.
With “friends” like Israel, who needs enemies ????
^ Stupid left-wing troll thinks he’s striking a blow for, whatever, by going onto garbage left-wing websites and doing copy/pasta. What a moron! ^
The Pentagon has raised its estimates of Israeli espionage activity against the United States to the highest level in history, according to a Saturday report citing two US officials.
The report claimed that the Pentagon has raised its counterintelligence threat assessment of Israel to the highest possible, with the main reason being tensions between Israeli and American officials over how to proceed in the war with Iran and its proxy terror groups.
According to the officials, an internal message issued by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency reportedly raised the level for Israel to “critical.”
https://www.jpost.com/international/article-898525
The Pentagon in recent weeks raised the counterintelligence threat level from Israel to its highest designation, “critical,” amid growing tensions between the US and Israel over the direction of the wars in Iran and Lebanon.
The officials said the new designation stems from heightened concerns in the Pentagon that Israel is spying on top US officials in a bid to gather information on internal US deliberations about the regional conflicts.
According to the report, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency raised the level for Israel in recent weeks to “critical” in an internal message.
One of the current US officials was cited as saying the Pentagon’s assessment includes a seven-page document that describes a series specific incidents that raised US concern.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/pentagon-raised-threat-assessment-of-israeli-spying-on-us-to-critical-level-report/