'The most misunderstood state': why California's not as liberal as you think

It took mere minutes after California polls closed on election night for networks to call the state for Joe Biden. Millions of votes in America’s most populous state were still to be counted, but Biden’s wide victory in California was guaranteed – the state is, after all, seen as a liberal bastion.

But zoom in on its sprawling 58 counties, and the solid-blue picture of California is blurred. Even with a rousing race for the White House luring new voters to the ballot box this year, congressional conservatives held on to their seats and Republicans are poised to pick up more in close races they lost in the last cycle. Californians sided with corporations on the future of gig work, decided against affirmative action, and nixed both stronger rent control and a new business tax that benefits schools and local governments.

“California is the most misunderstood state in the country,” said the political scientist Bruce Cain, who teaches on the American west at Stanford University. “It has always been that way.”

California continues to produce some of the most influential and oppositional politicians on both sides. The Golden state is home to some of the most prominent conservative voices, including the House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, and the Trump-allied congressman Devin Nunes. It is also home to the Democratic House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the House intelligence committee chairman, Adam Schiff – all of whom secured new terms this election.

It still has large swaths of red territory hidden behind a Democratic super-majority in the state house. Vice-President-Elect Kamala Harris, who hails from the Bay Area, is the only California Democrat who has made it to the White House. Before the 1990s, a largely Republican-held California sent Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to the national stage.

That’s why, Cain said, it shouldn’t be surprising to see some hard-fought congressional seats slipping from Democrats this year. “These were in many instances Republican seats that were held for a decade or two, sometimes longer,” he said. “It didn’t take much to tip it away – those seats were really on loan.”

The sharp ideological divide, embodied by the big battle at the top of the ticket, also encouraged Californians across the political spectrum to weigh in. They said they saw this election as the most consequential of their lifetime and, according to surveys done by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), roughly three-quarters of respondents said they were more enthusiastic about voting than ever before. They were not just Democrats.

“The enthusiasm about voting was similar among Democrats and Republicans,” said Mark Baldassare, PPIC’s President. “We are a blue state, but it meant that Republicans were going to turn out in California even if the presidential election was a foregone conclusion.” The election brought roughly 22 million people to the polls, according to statistics from the California secretary of state – the most in the state’s history—and roughly 88% of eligible residents were registered.

“In what everybody was expecting was going to be a blue wave election, it looks like a few of the seats will turn Republican again,” Baldassare said, adding that focus on the presidential election and representatives also could have clouded concentration and understanding of California’s complicated 12 state propositions.

“This was a particularly challenging year for ballot measures,” he said. Along with the attention-suck from the race for the white house, Californians were thinking about the pandemic, wildfires, and the homelessness and housing crisis. “They looked through the ballot trying to get some sense of: what should I do? What’s going to help the problems that I am seeing now and where are the solutions? Who can I trust?”

California’s propositions give power to voters to determine proposed changes to state law, but all that is needed to get a proposition on the ballot in California is $2,000 and enough signatures to constitute at least 5% of the voting public. (Measures proposing changes to the state constitution require signatures from 8% of the electorate.)

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/most-misunderstood-state-why-californias-110007075.html

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Alexander Hamilton, Enslaver? New Research Says Yes

The question has lingered around the edges of the pop-culture ascendancy of Alexander Hamilton: Did the 10-dollar founding father, celebrated in the musical “Hamilton” as a “revolutionary manumission abolitionist,” actually own slaves?

Some biographers have gingerly addressed the matter over the years, often in footnotes or passing references. But a new research paper released by the Schuyler Mansion State Historic Site in Albany, New York, offers the most ringing case yet.

In the paper, titled “‘As Odious and Immoral a Thing’: Alexander Hamilton’s Hidden History as an Enslaver,” Jessie Serfilippi, a historical interpreter at the mansion, examines letters, account books and other documents. Her conclusion — about Hamilton, and what she suggests is wishful thinking on the part of many of his modern-day admirers — is blunt.

“Not only did Alexander Hamilton enslave people, but his involvement in the institution of slavery was essential to his identity, both personally and professionally,” she writes.

“It is vital,” she adds, “that the myth of Hamilton as ‘the Abolitionist Founding Father’ end.”

The evidence cited in the paper, which was quietly published online last month, is not entirely new. But Serfilippi’s forceful case has caught the eye of historians, particularly those who have questioned what they see as his inflated anti-slavery credentials.

Annette Gordon-Reed, a professor of history and law at Harvard and the author of “The Hemingses of Monticello,” called the paper “fascinating” and the argument plausible. “It just shows that the founders were nearly all implicated in slavery in some way,” she said.

Joanne Freeman, a professor of history at Yale and editor of the Library of America edition of Hamilton’s writings, said that the detailed evidence remained to be fully weighed. But she said the paper was part of a welcome reconsideration of what she called “the Hero Hamilton” narrative.

“It’s fitting that we are reckoning with Hamilton’s status as an enslaver at a time that is driving home how vital it is for white Americans to reckon — seriously reckon — with the structural legacies of slavery in America,” she wrote in an email.

Serfilippi’s research “complicates his story, and in so doing, better reflects the central place of slavery in America’s Founding,” she said. “It also more accurately reflects Hamilton.”

But Ron Chernow, whose 2004 biography calls Hamilton an “uncompromising abolitionist,” said the paper presented a lopsidedly negative view.

The paper, he said in an email, “seems to be a terrific research job that broadens our sense of Hamilton’s involvement in slavery in a number of ways.” But he said he was dismayed at the relative lack of attention to Hamilton’s anti-slavery activities. And he questioned what he called her sometimes “bald conclusions,” starting with the claim that slavery was “essential to his identity.”

“I don’t fault Jessie Serfilippi for her tough scrutiny of Hamilton and slavery,” he said. “The great figures in our history deserve such rigor. But she omits all information that would contradict her conclusions.”

Hamilton married into the powerful Schuyler family in 1780. Slavery was common among New York state’s elite, and the Schuylers were some of the largest slaveholders in their area, with more than 40 people enslaved at the Albany mansion and another estate over the years.

In recent years, the mansion has done extensive research into “the servants” (as the enslaved people of the household were usually referred to), which has been incorporated into its tours. That the Schuylers were enslavers does not necessarily shock visitors, Serfilippi said. But the extent of Hamilton’s connections with slavery is a different story.

“There are some people who come here knowing he wasn’t exactly an abolitionist,” she said. “But there is surprise when I talk about the details of the research.”

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https://news.yahoo.com/alexander-hamilton-enslaver-research-says-130152965.html