We got our California mail-in ballots yesterday, so Kim and I decided to take the time to work through the long two-page, four-sided ballot together. We needed all the help we could get to work through it and we had the extensive voter information pamphlet (more a booklet than a pamphlet) as well as our good friend Claude to help us work through the issues. The first page was pretty easy because it was the ballot for governor, lieutenant governor, Secretary of State, Controller, Treasurer, Attorney General, Insurance Commissioner, Congressman for our district and state senator and assembly. I paid special attention to the Insurance Commissioner based on what I have just gone through with my homeowner’s insurance (more on that later), but the rest was pretty easy for us. There is no secret about which way we lean in our political sensibilities. It seems a little strange, but in this state where Democrats now dominate, the Republican Party has tended to breed the most reactionary opponents one can imagine. I suppose that’s the way of the world with people in a minority position. They feel the need to get more extreme to get noticed or they just feel angrier because of their minority position and naturally get more militant. That seems certainly to be the case with the California Republican Party and its positions. Therefore, our votes were a clean sweep for the Democratic candidates with no exceptions despite the fact that neither of us is a member of the Democratic Party and have never been so. Fundamentally, I feel that we are in a worldwide existential fight for survival of our democracy and our humanity (I know that sounds like an overstatement, but I’m not so sure it is at this point where we have suffered under the Trump Administration for a decade).
Let me take a minute and discuss the Insurance Commissioner position. This race is between two Democrats, Jane Kim and Ben Allen. Kim is the progressive, backed by Bernie Sanders, someone I always pay attention to as a sensible though radical-sounding voice of reason. Even her home paper, the San Francisco Chronicle says her approach to remodeling the state’s natural disaster protection coverage after the New Zealand model is rash and could destabilize the market. Allen is a state senator from the disaster-wracked Pacific Palisades, who wants to keep the current reforms that open the market to more insurers by letting them price in wildfire risk. He is backed by the California Democratic Party, which means this is the moderate Democratic candidate versus the progressive Democratic candidate problem we are seeing all across the country. I am torn, but my recent insurance experience caused me to go with Allen. I was facing a 150% increase in my insurance premiums ($9k to $22k) with the government-sponsored FAIR Plan (not unlike a version of what Kim is proposing). The bureaucratic mistakes imbedded in the pricing were enormous and almost insurmountable (pricing me at a Protection Class upgrade from 3 to 10 when the rules suggest I am in a Class 1 area). I opened the process up to outside third-party bidders, which is sort of what Allen supports. At first the results were underwhelming with a reduction to $15.5k possible but with drastically reduced coverage and much higher deductibles. Then, all of a sudden, a new market entrant bid to provide me the same coverage and deductible for $4.1k. What!?!?! It’s a new market entrant that is now the second largest surplus line writer in the country. They are deemed by Claude to be a legitimate and reputable provider, so I went with their bid. I cannot ignore the reality that the government-provided solution was hidebound, arbitrary and costly to the extreme and the commercial solution appears to be much better for us lowly consumers…at least at this moment and in this instance. This is a very pragmatic approach to my political decision-making, but I always want to vote for what is best for most of the people most of the time and I consider homeowner insurance costs to be just the sort of issue that needs this sort of thinking. This is not a vote for private versus public sector, but a vote for what is good for the majority of Californians….or at least I hope so. Check back with me once the policy is written and any future claims are paid or not…
Then we go to the part of the ballot that gets a lot more confusing. To begin with, there are 17 non-partisan judicial candidates for the court system where we are asked to vote yes/no and there is no explanation in the voter pamphlet about what needs to be considered. You can vote for removal, but since they are governor appointees and removal just means the governor appoints another person, what’s the point? I guess if there is some real controversy over some candidate, you can vote for removal, but that is rare, so this whole section is basically a throw-away other than in rare instances. I found nothing on any of the 17 that implied I should seek their removal, so 17 yes votes from me.
Then there are the educational posts: a state superintendent, a community college board member, and two local high school board members. For these, Claude was extremely helpful in sorting through the fundamental issues, which seem to come down to mostly fiscal concerns. Do we care more about the quality of our educational efforts or more about our pocketbooks. I always vote for education because I feel that in the long run that’s more additive to our collective prosperity and I sure as hell want better educated people around me whenever I can .
The county elections and fire district elections are somewhat easier in one sense and harder in another. I’m afraid I go down the party line on the county positions though I do not have strong reasons at a local concern level for that. As for the fire district, who the hell knows. I had to vote for three of five and yet only one of the candidates bothered to post a statement in the voter pamphlet, so it really was one big toss-up.
Then we get to the various state proposition (14 of them) and county measures (A and B). The county measure were like the education measures…health and wellbeing of the population versus fiscal restraint. I always vote for the people, so that was easy. The propositions were a lot trickier and I used Claude over and over to parse each issue. Some were pernicious because they involved either voting for more affordable housing by increasing mortgage availability versus not letting people put themselves in harms way by overleveraging themselves. That is a much more challenging set of issue to parse, but I went with more housing and the view that the market would determine if they could ultimately afford it or not. The big proposition was Prop 40 about the billionaires’ one-time tax and then Props 41-43 were political attempts to mitigate the impact of Prop 40, should it pass. I have an overriding worldview that wealth disparity is very harmful for us all in the long term, so I went pro on the tax, not because I want to chase the Musks and Brins out of the state but because I think the world needs to get more in balance than the last forty years has allowed it to gravitate to. Bernie Sanders has this one right…it’s more radical that billionaire’s can spend money on multiple yachts and fun space travel when many Americans can’t afford a decent living.
Bottom line, we have voted and I feel good that we mostly understood what we were voting for, but as relatively highly educated voters that have the use of Claude and working brains, its a wonder that other voters can get through all of this without throwing up their hands and just not voting. Maybe we need to simplify the process?