2020 General Election Guide | California & Los Angeles County
Rants, resources, and unapologetic irreverence to prepare you for the election of a lifetime
Well well well, what have we here. If it isn’t the consequences of our own elections coming back to haunt us. (More on that later.)
So, I’ve written and distributed these snarky election guides for every election since 2002. At the beginning of each, I open in earnest with a variously rancorous, splenetic, or desperate plea: “Vote, you pathetic excuse for a citizen! Democracy needs you! It’s imperfect but it’s what we’ve got!”
However… this election is, uh, different. Early voting has reached record highs. The abject misery of the past four years has by now fulminated into a thick miasma that chokes nearly every aspect of American life. It has startled awake all but the most pitifully insouciant persons to the bleak reality that yes, indeed elections have consequences for all of us, and yes, indeed we do get precisely the government we deserve. And oh boy, what a government it has become!
Four years ago, 100 million eligible voters didn’t vote. And of those who did, a not insignificant minority of self-absorbed puritanical liberals couldn’t manage to vote for Hillary Clinton because they wrongly believed that a vote is a Valentine: Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line. And now, here we are. Imagine that! I won’t waste a word (or million) enumerating the myriad ways in which our country has since decayed into a complete fucking joke — you already have at least the Top Ten engraved into your souls for all of time — but I will defend the absolute necessity of each incremental if imperfect step towards progress we take in every election.
As I observe in horror — but not shock — the extent to which our country and what will become its history have been poisoned by this unprecedentedly maniacal administration, I can recall in excruciating detail every hysterical Democrat (myself among them) who in 2016 implored all eligible voters to consider just how bad things would get when we didn’t win. I take only a modicum of pride in now whispering, “see?”
I won’t rub it in. But I will nevertheless remind you that we didn’t get here because politicians snuck into our homes and stole our votes from under our pillows (although, Republicans have come close). Of all the harrowing uncertainties we face right now as a nation and a species, how we got here isn’t one of them. We got here because millions of people didn’t engage. Especially in the 2014 midterms, when the lowest voter turnout in 72 years caused Democrats to lose nine Senate seats, which in turn enabled Mitch McConnell’s ascendancy and its attendant debasement of democracy. And no I will never stop reminding you of this deeply sad fact, because it underpins every governmental challenge we face today, and everyone who didn’t vote in 2014 is complicit.
More recently, we’ve witnessed not only how vulnerable our democracy is, but also how ill-equipped we are to save it — unless we vote a full ballot in every election. The revolution we need is one of participation. When we do, we take back the House like in 2018. And when we don’t, we lose decades of progress like in 2014 and 2016. It’s not a mystery, we got here because of us. (Oh, and Michelle Obama’s “when they go low, we go high” line, which did a lot more harm than good. But that’s a rant for another day.)
Now that I’ve brought the mood down and sufficiently admonished every loser who didn’t listen to me for years, let’s get on with the main event!
Whomst is This For? 🤔
This guide is for any resident of California, particularly residents of Los Angeles County (where I live) whomst have not voted yet. If you’ve already voted, thank you! I’m thrilled to see historic early voting numbers all over the country— and I know many of you reading this guide have already done your civic duty. I also know some of you have moved out of state, so please share this guide with anyone in your California community who could use a second (or first) opinion.
Same Day Voter Registration 📆
At this point, there’s no acceptable reason for you not to be registered. If you’ve confirmed you’re registered, feel free to skip ahead and spare yourself from this section’s invective.
Voter registration messaging has become so ubiquitous that smartphone apps and USPS mailers and websites and billboards and cavalcades of tone-deaf celebrities are imploring people to register on an hourly basis. This is a good thing. But if you’re lazy, you’re busy, you’re confused, you just moved… that’s fine, even your dumb ass can vote as late as on election day despite not being registered (and despite the new statewide mail-in ballot initiative). This is thanks to the Same Day Voter Registration provision here in California and other states. Leaving things to the absolute last possible minute as you apparently love to do: you will just show up to a polling place, register, and cast your vote. Here are more details — now you have no excuse. Tell your friends, especially if they’re the kind who forget to pay parking tickets and only change their bedsheets every two months.
References & Resources 📚
I do my own research using a range of sources that inform my recommendations for candidates and propositions up and down the ballot. Here they be:
- Ballotpedia »
- Voter’s Edge »
- CADEM.org (California Democratic Party) »
- Democratic Socialists of America, Los Angeles »
- League of Women Voters of California »
- Los Angeles Times »
- ACLU of Southern California »
If you need recommendations for San Francisco Bay Area local propositions, as well as candidates such as city supervisors, see below:
Warning: Savage Opinions Ahead 🗣
We won’t agree on every candidate or proposition. My goal is not to change your mind, but to present a blend of perspicacious opinion and ruthless sarcasm so you can land squarely in your own views—whether we agree or not. I won’t judge your views, but I will identify you as the braindead corporate shill, narcissistic trust fund baby, or religion-enslaved GOP apologist that you are.* Candidates and voters are human and therefore imperfect, as are ballot propositions. No human or law will ever be perfect in all contexts. The goal is always progress: it is not the end but a means to an end, and should be at least incremental, if not radical.
*this is an example of sarcasm
Elected Offices (local ballots will vary) 🏛
The lists below may not encompass every district. If your local candidates / offices are not listed, enter your address into the CADEM endorsements form here, which provides endorsements for the entire state. Additionally, for those of you in Los Angeles County, you can view all DSA-LA endorsements here — which includes endorsements other cities such as West Hollywood, Culver City, Burbank, and Alhambra.
• Los Angeles City & County Offices
Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, District 2: Holly Mitchell
Los Angeles District Attorney: George Gascón
Los Angeles County Superior Court Judges
Office №72: Myanna Dellinger
Office №80: Klint James McKay
Office №162: Scott Andrew Yang
Los Angeles City Council
District 4: Nithya Raman
District 10: Mark Ridley-Thomas
Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education
District 3: Scott Schmerelson
District 7: Patricia Castellanos
Los Angeles Community College District Board of Trustees
Seat 1: Andra Hoffman
Seat 3: David Vela
Seat 5: Nichelle M. Henderson
Seat 7: Mike Fong
• California State Assembly
1st District: Elizabeth Betancourt
2nd District: Jim Wood
3rd District: James Henson
4th District: Cecilia Aguiar-Curry
5th District: [no Democrat running]
6th District: Jackie Smith
7th District: Kevin McCarty
8th District: Ken Cooley
9th District: Jim Cooper
10th District: Veronica Jacobi
11th District: Jim Frazier
12th District: Paul Akinjo
13th District: Carlos Villapudua
14th District: Tim Grayson
15th District: Buffy Wicks
16th District: Rebecca Bauer-Kahan
17th District: David Chiu
18th District: Rob Bonta
19th District: Phil Ting
20th District: Alexis Villalobos
21st District: Adam Gray
22nd District: Kevin Mullin
23rd District: [no Democrat running]
24th District: Marc Berman
25th District: Alex Lee
26th District: Drew Phelps
27th District: Ash Kalra
28th District: Evan Low
29th District: Mark Stone
30th District: Robert Rivas
31st District: Joaquin Arambula
32nd District: Rudy Salas
33rd District: [no Democrat running]
34th District: Julie Solis
35th District: Dawn Addis
36th District: Steve Fox
37th District: Steve Bennett
38th District: [no Democrat running]
39th District: Luz Maria Rivas
40th District: James Ramos
41st District: Chris Holden
42nd District: [no Democrat running]
43rd District: Laura Friedman
44th District: Jacqui Irwin
45th District: Jesse Gabriel
46th District: Lanira Murphy
47th District: Eloise Gomez Reyes
48th District: Blanca Rubio
49th District: Edwin Chau
50th District: Richard Bloom
51st District: Wendy Carillo
52nd District: Freddie Rodriguez
53rd District: Godfrey Santos Plata
54th District: Tracy Bernard Jones
55th District: Andrew Rodriguez
56th District: Eduardo Garcia
57th District: Lisa Calderon
58th District: Cristina Garcia
59th District: Reginald Jones Sawyer
60th District: Sabrina Cervantes
61st District: Jose Medina
62nd District: Autumn Burke
63rd District: Maria Estrada
64th District: Fatima Iqbal-Zubair
65th District: Sharon Quirk-Silva
66th District: Al Muratsuchi
67th District: Jerry Carlos
68th District: Melissa Fox
69th District: Tom Daly
70th District: Patrick O’Donnell
71st District: Liz Lavertu
72nd District: Diedre Nguyen
73rd District: Scott Rhinehart
74th District: Cottie Petrie-Norris
75th District: Karen Schwartz
76th District: Tasha Boerner Horvath
77nd District: Brian Maienschein
78th District: Sarah Davis
79th District: Shirley Weber
80th District: Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher
• California State Senate
1st District: Pamela Swartz
3rd District: Bill Dodd
5th District: Susan Talamantes Eggman
7th District: Steve Glazer
9th District: Nancy Skinner
11th District: Scott Wiener
13th District: Josh Becker
15th District: Ann Ravel
17th District: Josh Laird
19th District: S. Monique Limón
21st District: Kipp Mueller
23rd District: Abigail Medina
25th District: Anthony Portatino, Jr.
27th District: Henry Stern
29th District: Josh Newman
31st District: Richard Roth
33rd District: Elizabeth Castillo
35th District: Steven Bradford
37th District: Dave Min
39th District: Toni Atkins
• US House of Representatives
1st District: Audrey Denney
2nd District: Jared Huffman
3rd District: John Garamendi
4th District: Brynne Kennedy
5th District: Mike Thompson
6th District: Doris Matsui
7th District: Ami Bera
8th District: Chris Bubser
9th District: Jerry McNerney
10th District: Josh Harder
11th District: Mark DeSaulnier
12th District: Nancy Pelosi
13th District: Barbara Lee
14th District: Jackie Speier
15th District: Eric Swalwell
16th District: Jim Costa
17th District: Ro Khanna
18th District: Anna Eshoo
19th District: Zoe Lofgren
20th District: Jimmy Panetta
21st District: TJ Cox
22nd District: Phil Arballo
23rd District: Kim Mangone
24th District: Salud Carbajal
25th District: Christy Smith
26th District: Julia Brownley
27th District: Judy Chu
28th District: Adam Schiff
29th District: Angélica Dueñas
30th District: Brad Sherman
31st District: Pete Aguilar
32nd District: Grace Napolitano
33rd District: Ted Lieu
34th District: David Kim
35th District: Norma Torres
36th District: Raul Ruiz
37th District: Karen Bass
38th District: Michael Tolar
39th District: Gil Cisneros
40th District: Lucille Roybal-Allard
41st District: Mark Takano
42nd District: William O’Mara
43rd District: Maxine Waters
44th District: Nanette Barragán
45th District: Katie Porter
46th District: Lou Correa
47th District: Alex Lowenthal
48th District: Harley Rouda
49th District: Mark Levin
50th District: Ammar Campa-Najjar
51st District: Juan Vargas
52nd District: Scott Peters
53rd District: Georgette Gómez
• President & Vice President of the United States
Joseph R. Biden 👨🏼🦳 & Kamala D. Harris 👩🏽🦱
Propositions ✒️
Ah, California. My least favorite part of voting is doing the job of a duly elected legislative body. While I welcome the opportunity to participate in shaping law and budget allocation, the incessant barrage of ballot propositions and referenda every election would seem to suggest that we haven’t elected a legislature to do this for us. Alas, now for the 18th year, here are my proposition recommendations. I’ll try to keep them pithy and offensive.
• California Statewide Propositions
✅ Proposition 14—YES: $5.5 billion bond to fund stem cell research. You know, the kind of fetally-sourced stem cell research that the president benefited from in his treatment for 🍻🦠 whilst pro-life imbeciles and hypochristians across the land were conspicuously silent on the matter.
✅ Proposition 15 — YES: Increases funding for K-12 education and community college by increasing property taxes on commercial properties (not residential or agricultural) worth more than $3 million, and bases this tax on market value rather than initial purchase price. This is a small incremental step towards correcting the perpetually harmful effects of 1978’s disastrous Proposition 13, which, in many cases, has homeowners continuing to pay 1970's-era property tax rates for homes that have increased in value by 1,000% or more. It’s highly unlikely that anyone reading this will be negatively affected by Proposition 15, but if you feel you will, what’s it like to be rich and a fuckface?
✅ Proposition 16—YES: Allows what is commonly referred to as “affirmative action” to factor in government decision-making such as public employment, education, and contracting. This is a complex, nuanced issue and Proposition 16 is imperfect—as is affirmative action as a whole. However, it is a step in the right direction and is overwhelmingly supported by Democratic leaders.
✅ Proposition 17—YES: Restores voting rights to people who have been convicted of a crime, imprisoned, and released. Yes, that means “convicted felons.” They should be able to vote after their prison term has ended.
✅ Proposition 18—YES: Allows 17-year-olds to vote in primary and special elections if they will turn 18 by the next general election. The sooner we bring young people into the electorate, the more engaged the overall electorate will be.
✅ Proposition 19—YES: At first glance, this realtor-supported measure appears to just be a tax cut for baby boomer homeowners, which I would not only never endorse but also delight in rejecting. However! There’s more to it, and it contains a highly beneficial provision that closes a loophole for heirs—look it up if you want more detail. Simply: Proposition 19 will adjust a range of property tax rules to provide a net increase in tax revenue for local governments and schools, in part by ending special tax breaks for properties that are inherited from a family member. Must be nice!
🚫 Proposition 20—NO: Look no further than Republican slimebag Devin Nunes’ support for this truly garbage proposition to understand that it is a GOP-led prison-loving initiative to increase incarceration and further reinforce Republicans’ reputation as social-control-obsessed malfeasant megalomaniacal police-fucking whores.
✅ Proposition 21—YES: Show me a person who peddles the hackneyed economic myth that rent control actually increases rents and I’ll show you an idiot. While I only occasionally have to listen to conservative real estate shills make my ears bleed with this Reaganomics deregulatory diarrhea, each time it’s enough to send my eyes rolling so far back into my skull that I see my own brain frying from the incursion of such radioactive fuckshit foolishment. I truly cannot believe how these vile, contemptible people stand themselves and get through the day without being plucked out of their pathetic lives of arrogance and returned to the free-market Ayn Randian wasteland from whence they came. Anyway! Central to rent control is the reality that every citizen needs a place to live, but, 1: not every citizen can afford to own property, and 2: not every business owner needs to be in the landlord business. Therefore, it is incumbent upon governments, at minimum, to regulate rental increases levied by landlords. Proposition 21 expands rent control to further protect the housing stability of our massive tenant population. Endorsed by Bernie Sanders!
🚫 Proposition 22—NO: Speaking of free-market fuckshit! Tech giants Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Instacart, and Postmates have collectively spent $184,340,892.01 (yes, that is the real figure) to convince you that they can’t afford to classify and pay their drivers as employees. That’s the most money ever spent on a California proposition since 1999. Repulsive. Fuck off.
✅ Proposition 23 — YES: Tricky! Put on the ballot as part of a union negotiation, this one depends on your view of the role of the electorate as an overseeing body for such a specific niche industry (as opposed to the rental market, which affects huge swaths of the population). So, highly profitable dialysis centers have spent nearly $100 million to scare patients into believing that additional regulation will increase costs and reduce quality of care, which usually means that the opposite is true. Additional protections for patients, such as prohibiting clinics from discriminating based on which insurance a patient has, are long overdue. Opposition scare tactics claiming that doctors will somehow be stolen from ERs to staff dialysis centers are blatantly false. That being said, many feel that the frequency with which dialysis clinic regulation has appeared on the ballot is in itself an affront. I appreciate both sides here, and I certainly respect the view that a Yes vote rewards the ballot abuse I moaned about in my intro to this section, but I will be voting Yes to hold dialysis clinics accountable.
🚫 Proposition 24 — NO: Who doesn’t want more privacy and accountability? It sounds like precisely what we need, especially in an era that made casual teatime conversation of Russian election interference, Cambridge Analytica, and those ads that pop up on Instagram after you have one silent thought about a bidet. While these proposed consumer privacy protections are in many cases a good step forward (such as penalizing companies that violate consumer privacy!), these revisions to privacy law contain some nuggets that actually benefit large tech companies. I vacillated on this one and see both sides, but ultimately decided to join the ACLU of Southern California, League of Women Voters of California, and the San Francisco Chronicle in voting No.
✅ Proposition 25 — YES: Ratifies a 2018 law that replaced money bail with a risk assessment system. The fact of the matter is that cash bail criminalizes poverty. If you are charged with a crime and can’t afford bail until your trial begins, you go to jail. This is unjust. Opponents say the risk assessment tool would be discriminatory, but I say money bail already is. We need to begin bail reform, and this is a good step.
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✅ Los Angeles County Measure J—YES: This is a crystal clear representation of the burgeoning “defund the police” movement. It redistributes 10% of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department funding to community investment and alternatives to incarceration, which includes programs for under-resourced communities—many of which are themselves victims of police violence.
✅ Los Angeles Unified School District Measure RR—YES: Approves $7 billion in bonds to fund public school safety upgrades.
Here goes everything 🗳
Thanks for reading, sharing, and voting. Here’s hoping we still have a democracy in 2021. I leave you with this gem from Remy Ma’s Instagram. Watch it, and then push they ass to the polls.
💙❤️💙
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