There is an argument making its way through anti-Trump circles about how Democrats in Congress should react to Trump’s agenda. Neither side of the argument is saying to support the Trump agenda; but one side says Democratic House members and senators should vigorously oppose, amend, and try to block things, even though they lack the votes, and the other side says Democrats should stand back and keep their fingerprints off the GOP actions, so when things go south (such as tariff-fueled inflation, for just one example) they can fairly argue that the Republicans own it.
In Washington, the Republicans have all the power. The White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives, even the Supreme Court. The Democrats are just highly paid tourists in that city.
Republicans are in the reverse situation in Sacramento, and even more so. The Democrats don’t just have control of all organs of state, but they have supermajorities in both chambers of the legislature.
“Democrats in the California Senate have held the supermajority for 12 years, and Republicans are not close to breaking it in the 2024 election,” reads a mid-November report from the GreenbergTraurig law firm, “despite 36 of 120 lawmakers in the Senate and Assembly leaving office due to term limits or other reasons (including a handful of assemblymembers running for Senate).”
How power weakens
With the Democrats’ supermajorities in the Assembly and the Senate secure, GreenbergTraurig notes that “the balance of power will not shift in either house. The Republicans would need to pick up five Senate seats and nine Assembly seats to break the supermajority.”
Which is a shame, for the Republicans — and for the Democrats, because the best thing that could happen to California Democrats is if they could lose some seats in Sacramento. Their supermajorities have led them astray, no longer feeling the need to compromise with the opposition, and no longer feeling the need to be in touch with voters, as evidenced by Sacramento’s ham-handed attempt to thwart Proposition 36.
A preponderance of power is not just a problem for Democrats. Consider how the hard-right GOP ran rampant in Wisconsin when the GOP gerrymandered supermajorities in the state legislature; they were totally out of sync with voters and did weird stuff. Now with the gerrymandering reduced by a court order, they have a bit more balance in their legislature.
Their supermajorities have led them astray, no longer feeling the need to compromise with the opposition, and no longer feeling the need to be in touch with voters.
Or look to Florida, where the GOP governor and a rubber-stamp supermajority in the state legislature have weaponized state power against businesses (hi, Disney!), universities, and others who oppose them. When Ron DeSantis made his abortive attempt to run for president, he ran into a serious problem, despite the huge amounts of money poured into his campaign by anti-Trump Republicans: Most Americans aren’t Floridians, and they don’t want a culture war. They rather like Mickey Mouse.
That’s something for Gavin Newsom to keep in mind as advisors and commentators and maybe even the whispers in the back of his brain all try to anoint him as the new national Democratic leader and a likely 2028 frontrunner.
Representing the voters
Or you could ask the voters. An October 2024 survey of Californians by the Public Policy Institute of California showed that voters’ top concerns about this state were cost of living, housing costs and availability, and the homeless crisis. When asked about the country as a whole, they listed the economy (including unemployment and jobs), political extremism and threats to democracy, and immigration.
And 60 percent of respondents to the PPIC survey said California is going in the wrong direction. That’s essentially the same result reported back in January when UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and the Los Angeles Times found 57 percent of California voters saying the state is going the wrong way. That same survey found 47 percent disapproving of Governor Newsom’s performance — one percentage point higher than those supporting him.
To be fair, there have been bills passed in Sacramento to try to address some of these issues. But in recent years, Democratic legislators have produced a firehose of lefty bills, some have passed, some haven’t, some are still in the works. They range from telling department stores how they can label their toys, trying to create pot cafes, forcing cars to warn speeding drivers, prevent local governments from requiring IDs of voters, add three more official state symbols, consider more than a dozen reparations bills, make undocumented immigrants eligible for homebuying and jobless assistance, force gas stoves to have a warning label, and oh so much more, none of them addressing the issues that voters have told pollsters are their top concerns.
A party with a smaller margin of power would be forced to do a bit more focusing on those priorities and a bit less of left-wing wish-fulfillment.
