'You don't get red-pilled overnight': California's political players explain what happened in 2024

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

52% : POLITICO spoke to some of the most influential forces in California politics -- including both state parties, Planned Parenthood and a leading expert on the state's Latino voters -- to share their initial take on the 2024 election results, and the questions that they've not yet answered.
50% : The poll by Paul Mitchell of CA120 found that abortion rights was particularly motivating for certain non-Democrats who ended up backing the Democratic contender.
49% : This year, California voters aligned with the state GOP's position in eight of nine general election ballot measures (the party stayed neutral on a tenth measure to enshrine gay marriage in the state constitution, which easily passed).
49% : This time, Planned Parenthood California spent $3.5 million on "connecting the dots," Hicks said, making sure voters were aware about these Republicans' past records on opposing abortion rights.
47% : More than three-quarters of respondents said that California state government policies made prices much higher or somewhat higher.
46% : Hicks (no relation to Rusty Hicks of the California Democratic Party) said her organization learned from 2022, when voters overwhelmingly backed a ballot measure to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution but still elected incumbent Republicans in key House seats.
42% : Most significantly, the overwhelming passage of Proposition 36, which imposes stricter penalties on some theft and drug crimes, reversed a decade-long trend of Californians embracing criminal justice reform and showed the GOP's tougher-on-crime posture was resonating with a large swath of voters.
31% : But Planned Parenthood California is pushing back on the narrative that a campaign centered on reproductive rights was entirely a disappointment.
25% : Harris got 1.8 million fewer votes than Joe Biden did four years earlier, a decline in vote share that was far more consequential than the roughly 75,000 more votes Trump got compared to his 2020 campaign.

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