Politics, Institutions, and Public Opinion

Campaigns & Elections

His name isn’t on the November ballot—indeed, he last set foot in California in August, for a Republican fundraiser dinner at his golf course in Rancho Palo Verdes—yet Donald Trump remains an oversized part of the Golden State’s election-year conversation.

If you happen to be curious about California’s Proposition 45, which aims to speed up environmental reviews by amending the Golden State’s notorious CEQA statute, the initiative’s opponents want you to know that a vote for Proposition 45 is tantamount to a vote for America’s forty-fifth president: “The timing is no accident,” one "No on 45" ad reads.

“President Trump has spent the last two years rolling back the clean air and clean water protections Californians spent fifty years winning. Now oil and gas companies, for-profit utilities and data center developers are following his lead, spending tens of millions of dollars to weaken California’s own safeguards. Their motivation has more to do with their profits than Californians’ cost of living.”

Further up on the fourteen-initiative slate, opponents of Proposition 39—if approved, it would require California voters to provide identification when voting in person—are none too shy about playing their “Trump card.” Here’s the argument against the measure, as it appears in California’s Official Voter Information Guide:

VOTE NO. Donald Trump lies about elections and uses those lies to grab power.

STOP TRUMP’S POWER GRAB. Trump wants revenge on California—he has delayed LA wildfire relief, undone laws to keep our air and water clean, and constantly attacked our immigrant friends and neighbors. Now he wants to undo our freedoms and democracy with Prop. 39. Trump’s cronies want to rig California elections so they can seize and keep control of Congress and the White House. Trump will do whatever it takes to tear apart our right to vote, dodge accountability, and hold onto authoritarian power.

CALIFORNIANS WON’T FALL FOR IT. We........

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