Don’t look back in anger: experts weigh in on the 2024 election

On Nov. 7^th Capitol Weekly and the UC Student and Policy Center hosted a post-mortem of the 2024 election that featured three issue-specific panels conducted over Zoom and a live keynote panel. All featured some of the brightest and most experienced political minds in California. The story below features a very brief overlook of each of those presentations, all of which are available in their entirety on the Capitol Weekly site and as individual episodes of our podcast.

Panel 1: The Face of the Electorate

In the first panel, The Face of the Electorate, a quintet of political consultants wrestled with voting trends in the presidential election as well as down ballot races. Several of the panelists openly said they were surprised by Trump’s decisive victory.

Republican strategist Tim Rosales said he had expected Harris to ultimately eek out a victory.  Harris operative Courtni Pugh said the vice president’s campaign was preparing for not only a long election night, but several days of uncertainty.

Democratic consultant Bill Wong said he thought Trump’s victory could be attributed to not what happened during the campaign itself, but to messaging that occurred prior to it.

“We make it sound like that either the Harris campaign was horrible, or the Trump campaign was genius, but we don’t take into consideration what’s been said in the intervening years and months prior to the election cycle starting and what kind of groundwork,” Wong said. “The analogy is if your orange tree is not producing oranges, is it because of the tree or because of the soil?”

Mike Madrid, a political consultant known for his expertise in Latino voters, said he thought the presidential election largely swung on the Democrats misread of working-class voters and Latinos.

“The Democrats still believe that they are the party of the working class,” he said. “They’re not. They have not been for some time.”

Just as importantly, however, he added that Latinos are transitioning from immigration being their central issue.

“We’re moving away from Latinos being a racially and ethnically driven voter and towards a pocketbook, affordability, economic, more populist voter. Most of the evidence is suggesting that Latinos are not becoming more conservative, they’re becoming more populist,” he said, adding “Quit running against Pete Wilson. It’s been 30 years.”

Demographer Michael Wagaman said he believed Trump’s resurgence can be attributed, at least in part, to voters wearing rose-colored glasses about the once and future president.

“There’s this bias in campaigns to think that there’s this one silver bullet issue. And that’s not the case.”

“Presidents get more popular when they stop being president he said, adding, “When you’re not a politician, it’s easier to be popular.”

Perhaps the biggest point of contention on the panel was whether there was a gender gap in the electorate. Madrid insisted there was not. Pugh insisted there was.

But otherwise there seemed to be a broad consensus on the panel that Democrats generally misplayed their hands on a number of fronts, one being over relying on the issue of reproductive health to drive turnout and carry their candidates to victory.

“There’s this bias in campaigns to think that there’s this one silver bullet issue. And that’s not the case,” Wong said.

Abortion was not enough to carry the day. Indeed, Madrid maintained that many women voters prioritized the issue of immigration over reproductive rights, blunting the influence of abortion on the presidential election.

Pugh didn’t exactly agree, but acknowledged Democrats have “a lot of soul searching” to do. “It’s time to get real,” she said.

Panel 2: The Ballot Initiatives

In panel 2, The Ballot Initiatives, four panelists active in California’s public affairs talked about the passage of recent propositions that passed in California and the most and least surprising parts of them passing.

Panelist Brandon Castillo, one of California’s leading campaign strategists and public affairs issues managers said the passage of Proposition 35 was “a refreshing blowout win” and the passage reinforces Californians strong support for the Medi-Cal program.

“One of the refreshing findings of out modeling and our polling is that it is not a partisan issue,” Castillo said.

Castillo said the passage was in part due to voters understanding what the proposition was about and the proposition clearly stating where the money would be going.

Panelist Jeff Gozzo from Gozzo Strategy and Campaigns worked on Proposition 2 and said it is important for voters to understand what they are voting for and how that money will be spent.

“We know from our research that there is a broad support for public education in California,” Gozzo said.

According to Gozzo, it is not a partisan issue. The key to success for this proposition was connecting to voters, clearing confusion about what the money was, where it might be spent and letting them know that it would be going directly to schools.

“It took 17 years for the California Apartment Association to get Costa-Hawkins through the legislature….It’s going to take a long-term concerted effort in order to repeal it.”

Suzie Shannon, a policy director for Housing is a Human Right, said that a large number of Californians support rent control and “along party lines, the Democratic Party supported it.”

According to Shannon, Californians supported the passage of Proposition 33 until Gov. Gavin Newson came out and opposed it.

According to Shannon, things are going to get worse because there are 186,000 people who are homeless in the state of California with the highest number of rent burdened people in the

nation.

“It took 17 years for the California Apartment Association to get Costa-Hawkins through the legislature,” Shannon said. “It’s going to take a long-term concerted effort in order to repeal it.”

The panel can be heard in its entirety here.

Panel 3: The National Picture

This panel started with bang, as the opening question from moderator Laurel Rosenhall of the Los Angeles Times noted president-elect Donald Trump’s well-documented history of lying in asking “what role the truth plays in our democracy, in our political system, in our media ecosystem, and whether it is a value for our society.”

The answers were, as one might imagine, quite varied.

Campaign strategist Marva Diaz told the packed house in attendance that all political messaging has some form of spin to it, and in an era of diminished media it is almost impossible for reporters to fact-check every single thing a politician or representative says.

UC San Diego political science professor Thad Kousser further noted that while other politicians have followed Trump’s playbook in that regard, he is not the first politician to brazenly lie as a matter of habit. The bigger issue, Kousser, said, is the public’s declining lack of faith in our institutions and the guardrails in place to keep those lies from taking hold as fact.

“Flo Cofer ran for mayor [in Sacramento]….She could not run around saying ‘they’re eating the dogs and the cats.’ People would laugh at her.”

Paul Mitchell of Politicl Data said he sees Trump as an outlier, the one politician who – for whatever reason – seems to always get away with being caught in obvious lies in a way no other politician could ever do. Mitchell, a well-known bicycling enthusiast, used the example of disgraced bicycle racer Lance Armstrong, who lied for years about his use of performance enhancing drugs before finally coming clean and suffering permanent banishment from the sport. That admission, Mitchell said, did almost nothing to rehabilitate Armstrong’s tattered image or to enable him to stay in cycling.

Meanwhile, he says, Trump has brought a World Wrestling Entertainment-like atmosphere to the political arena, where basically the more outrageous the antics and the lies, the better. And to date, he is the only one who appears to have that kind of carte blanche.

Mitchell made another comparison to make his point – Sacramento mayoral candidate Flo Cofer.

“Flo Cofer ran for mayor [in Sacramento],” he said. “She could not run around saying ‘they’re eating the dogs and the cats.’ People would laugh at her.”

You can catch the full keynote panel here.

Panel 4: A Look Ahead

The day’s final panel asked our panelists to offer thoughts on what the future could bring for California under the next Trump administration. The consensus? In a word, contentious.

“Obviously, it’s going to set up a pretty adversarial relationship between the White House and California,” said longtime conservative strategist Jon Fleischman, founder of the Fleischman Consulting Group, who noted that Gov. Gavin Newsom has already called a special session to address Trump’s election. Fleischman called Newsom’s action “very political” and accused the governor of using it “to kick off the last two years of his governorship to line up his run for president,” a bid many observers expect Newsom to make.

Fleischman was on something of an island in that regard, with others on the panel praising Newsom for taking fast action to meet the challenges facing California head on.

“Trump’s the one who campaigned very explicitly that he’s going to punish states like California,” said longtime Democratic consultant Roger Salazar of ALZA Strategies. “So I think it’s very timely of the governor. It’s a defensive issue more than an offensive one.”

What that defense fully looks like is yet to be determined, but the panelists definitely expect a wealth of pre-emptive bills in the coming years aimed at protecting California’s policies on everything from health care to the environment.

Fleischman agreed, but cautioned that while supermajority Democrats in the Legislature can steamroll their Republican colleagues, it is those same Republicans who will have the kind of relationships in D.C. that California might need to stave of the worst of Trump’s tendencies.

“When the governor calls a special session to ensure that we’re doing everything we can to shore up and secure providers, patients, vulnerable communities, here in California it’s because that’s what Californians want.”

Certainly one of the more concerning aspects of the election for many Californians is the chance there could be even greater restrictions placed on women’s bodily autonomy, perhaps even a national ban on abortion that would supersede this state’s constitutional protection for the procedure.

In that regard, Jodi Hicks, CEO and President of Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, also praised the governor for his action.

“Californians have spoken very clearly where they are on issues of reproductive freedom” and access to all forms of health care for women, Hicks said.

“So when the governor calls a special session to ensure that we’re doing everything we can to shore up and secure providers, patients, vulnerable communities, here in California it’s because that’s what Californians want,” she said.

Susannah Delano, executive director of Close the Gap California, which recruits progressive women to run for office, agreed that lawmakers can and should look at as many pre-emptive measures as they can. But she also noted that Trump’s election in 2016 definitely inspired more women – who are now set to be a majority in the Senate for the first time in California history – to run for office.

The panel can be heard in its entirety here.

Capitol Weekly reporter Brian Joseph and intern Mahrukh Siddiqui contributed to the report.