California Journal

Last November, many California voters went to the polls and chose a state senator for themselves and nearly 900,000 of their closest neighbors. In practical terms, this meant working-class Californians living in small, rural, mountainous towns near the Oregon border are represented by the same person advocating on behalf of voters living in wealthy Sacramento suburbs. Can this one legislator truly be accountable to the needs and interests of hundreds of thousands of people living in such disparate circumstances?

Of course not. California's legislative districts are too big and their unwieldy… more

It may seem incredible, but supposedly blue-state California is hemorrhaging Democrats.

Since 1990, when a majority of voters were registered Democrats, the party's share of the electorate has dropped to just 43 percent today. In fact, even as the state has grown, the number of Democratic voters has shrunk. There are about 100,000 fewer Democrats today than there were nearly 10 years ago, even though there are nearly 2 million more voters.

That doesn't sound like the state that voted 13 points to the left of the nation… more

When talking about the evolution of politics and technology, it helps to give a little history. Okay, a lot of history. The human body is, in most senses, the same as it was 50,000 years ago (oh, those cravings for carbs!), and the workings of the human brain haven't evolved significantly in 5,000 years. That's when we learned to better process language, and societies flourished. Seventy-five years ago, television was invented -- the first form of virtual reality. Now the average American watches over four hours of… more

California's political institutions and practices are outdated and no longer reflect the vibrancy and diversity of our state in the 21st century. Key political institutions are badly in need of an overhaul to make them better suited for the new California and its wide range of attitudes, demographics and geographic regions.

In particular, three ailing aspects of our representative democracy stick out. First, the most recent redistricting was nothing more than an "incumbent protection plan" in which party leaders all but did away with legislative elections… more

Like a powerful earthquake, it appears that last year's historic recall of an incumbent governor vented a lot of pressure that was building in the California electorate. Nearly a year later, it's hard to overstate the magnitude of that event and the total rejection of California's political leadership it represented.

Voters chose a celebrity Hollywood action star whose campaign was limited to outsider cliches from a ballot that included a second-term governor, a lieutenant governor and a longtime Republican state senator.… more

The California of the 21st century will have a decidedly deeper Latino flavor, but it will remain what it always has been -- quintessentially California, a state that exemplifies the notion of America as a "permanently unfinished country."

The California of the 21st century will have a decidedly… more