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The election gods keep revealing more and more nuggets of gold in the days after Tuesday’s election and some are no less than 24 karat. 

The California gold rush is on. 

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Eureka!

This map shows dark red spots in California where they’re only mildly red, according to the punditry class, but if the roles were reversed, we know how much the other side would ballyhoo this switch. Ballyhoo all you want. And know this, all is not lost in the Golden State. Some of this liberal and libertine wokeness is reversible. Changing hearts and minds is hard work, though, as Scott Presler can tell you.

Donald Trump flipped ten counties from blue to red from 2020 to 2024.

The president-elect also got the highest percentage of the vote from Californians since George W. Bush 20 years ago. Nationwide, he also beat out W., earning 45% of Hispanic and Latino votes. 

The California, Washington, and Oregon elections aren’t officially certified until early December.

During the 2016 campaign, I was in interior Mexico for a family event and an older Mexican woman told me, “I love Trump!” I never forgot that. She wasn’t alone, either. 

Mexican voters may have just hired their first female president, lefty AMLO protegé, Claudia Sheinbaum, but Mexican voters aren’t necessarily woke. 

Authentic

Victor Davis Hanson tells a story on one of podcast episodes that may help explain why Trump, a billionaire, appeals to all kinds of people. Trump was being escorted around the California Central Valley by then-Congressman Devin Nunes. This trip involved going to dairies, ranches, and farms. Hanson said Trump showed up to these rural photo ops wearing his suit and tie. Whereas other candidates would try to look like the farmers and ranchers they were meeting, Trump dressed as his authentic self. People like authenticity. It conveys the idea that a candidate isn’t trying to fool them. 

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     Related: Californians Vote to Make Crime Illegal Again

Inauthenticity by the Democrats, especially Kamala, is why they weren’t trusted with the win.

Democrats didn’t talk about the economy unless it involved price fixing. 

Democrats didn’t talk about crime, except to lie and say it was down. 

Democrats didn’t talk about cultural issues, except to say your beliefs were wrong. 

Democrats didn’t talk about the open borders bringing in criminals, except to deny criminals were coming over open borders.

What’s that old saying? People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care? 

Trump showed them he cares about these issues and has never wavered on them. 

Here were more of the nuggets from the Gold[rush] State. 

Santa Ana winds

The City of Santa Ana said no by a twenty point margin to a measure that would allow non-citizens to vote in elections.

The leftists pushing this lunacy, such as the Southern California cell of the American Civil Liberties Union, thought they’d establish a beachhead in this 45% Latino city, thinking, well, of course, the Mexicans who are now American citizens would totally go for this. Wrong-o.

More than 60% of Santa Ana voters thought diluting their votes with votes of non-citizens (good luck keeping track of that) was a bad idea. 

The real estate industry and apartment builders poured money into the effort to stop this anti-American measure from passing. Money they need not have used had the cynical backers of this measure respected the law and the franchise accorded by citizenship.

Bye, George

The biggest losers of Soros prosecutor George Gascon being removed from the Los Angeles DA’s office are the Menendez Brothers.

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Breeding cynicism

San Francisco voters ousted the progressive machine’s London Breed and replaced her with a non-politician, a Levi Strauss nepo baby, Dan Lurie, who beat Breed and three other candidates in the city’s confusing ranked-choice voting system.

     Related: Congrats California! I Hope Your Daughter and Her Dog Enjoy a Long and Happy Marriage

Streets covered with homeless drug addicts and chaos tourists are the reason Breed was replaced.

Lurie runs an anti-poverty non-profit. 

Michael Bloomberg put $1 million into Breed’s losing campaign. Can’t imagine why the gun grabber would want her in office. I kid, I kid. Lurie put $13 million of his own money into his campaign.

Portland mayor 

Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: the new mayor runs a non-profit that confronts the issue of homelessness. Yes, that’s right, San Francisco’s mayor runs such a non-profit, and so does Portland’s latest surprise mayor.

If nothing else, ranked-choice voting keeps things interesting. Unfortunately, the inconsistency of the voting process sometimes produces surprising results, and not necessarily in a good way. 

Meet Keith Wilson, the founder of Shelter Portland, that provides emergency shelters and daytime places for homeless people to go. 

Refreshingly, Wilson is opposed to handing out government tents to people, wants to get out of a homeless partnership deal with Multnomah County (which gave out the tents), and actually had a job as the CEO of a trucking company before running for mayor. His is a “fossil free” trucking company. He wants all city vehicles to run on something other than gas. 

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Gee, a guy who’s had a job outside of government before. Portland hasn’t had one of those since Bud Clark. 

This is Bud.

Clark’s job wasn’t only to pose for this risqué poster. He was the owner of the successful Goose Hollow Inn. 

Bud was one of a kind. 

We’ll withhold judgement of Wilson. 

Bye, Ted

Wilson replacesTed Wheeler, who has termed out as Portland mayor. 

That’s right, the man who oversaw some of the biggest blunders in the city of Portland — an untenable increase in drug tourists, which spilled out into the sidewalks, streets, and freeway underpasses of the city; an increase in drug cartel traffic; and allowing the Secular Taliban, comprised of Antifa, anarchists, and BLM, to strip speech rights, tear down statues, burn buildings, and terrorize citizens — is no longer mayor of Portland. 

Angels

San Francisco’s tech moguls and angel investors desperately tried to defeat the wokest, weirdest, and most destructive member of the city/county commission that runs the city, Dean Preston. 

As of this writing, the Democratic Socialist whose district that includes the Tenderloin, and the now highbrow Haight-Ashbury looks as if he’s losing the latest round of the ranked-choice voting. 

He can’t be gone fast enough.

Rent seekers

Two proposals to impose rent control on the West Coast, Messed Coast™ were defeated in the City of Portland and State of California.

California voters defeated rent control in Proposition 33, and voted for Proposition 34, which restricts the spending of prescription drug revenues and also involves rent control.

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     Related: West Coast, Messed Coast™ Election Hits and Misses

Will Swaim, who runs the California Policy Center and hosts the Radio Free California podcast with financier David Bahnsen, explains what was at play in this vote:

This is a group that takes advantage of a federal drug discount program for AIDS drugs, resells those drugs at a much higher rate, captures the profit and then spends it on rent control projects. For that reason, Proposition 34 comes back from the apartment owners who are saying, you know what? We’re going to stop that malicious practice.

We’re going to punish this guy by requiring him to spend almost all of his money. Ninety-eight percent of his revenue from that program must now be spent only on the purposes for which the program is intended, that is, to take care of people who need these federal drug discounts, not so that you can earn a profit, so that you can run rent control programs. That guy calls this a social benefit organization, the guy who runs the LA AIDS Foundation.

Imagine that. 

Spams of normalcy

Oregon voters said no to ranked-choice voting. It has created such a mess in the cities of Portland and San Francisco that Oregon voters said no, thanks by a 60-40 vote.

Oregon being Oregon, however, the measure to make it easier to unionize pot industry employees won. 

Gas is good

Though the land of vanity issues continues to churn out woke demobots in Washington state’s statewide offices, there is some good news. 

After getting bamboozled by termed-out (thank God) Jay Inslee’s fake carbon plot, which would eventually have banned natural gas—the cleanest fuel out there—Washington state voters said hey, we like natural gas, and voted to keep it. They voted “yes” on I-2066, so that Washingtonians would be able to afford to keep their homes warm in the winter and cool in the summer. 

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…because Inslee didn’t think that was important. 

His replacement is worse, however. Washingtonians voted Attorney General Bob Ferguson into the governor’s office. He’s the former wingman for Inslee, giving him the cover of his office for lockdowns, firings, forced COVID mandates, and other ill liberal programs. He was fine with restauranteurs being put out of business with COVID fines. He gave the olé to the Department of Corrections to let out top tier sex perverts, put men in women’s prisons, and give inmates, including a notorious murderer, free sex change surgery. 

     Related: West Coast, Messed Coast™ — Portland Predicts a Violent Election Night

So called “conversion” talk therapy for unhappy gender-confused people is still illegal, but actual conversion is not. 

It’s science, people. See? It’s all there on the sign to read. 

Unless you prefer this sign. 

I’ll be looking into the disappearing West Coast, Messed Coast™ voters that I wrote about in Did God Rapture Some 15 Million Democrat Voters? If Not, Where’d They Go? West Coast media are asking with a straight face, Gee, where’d they all go? I’ll also look into the byzantine ways in which Gavin Newsom thinks he’s going to lead the resistance against Trump by using taxpayer dollars…again. 

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They haven’t ruined everything yet

It still looks like this. 

Until next time, look for beauty in everything—especially those gold nuggets in the election results.

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