Dave Weigel

California ballot initiatives.

I mean, you live there for a while.

The phrasing really matters.

And the attorney general controls what how the ballot measures phrased.

And so there were some polling said, well, voters like the Independent Commission.

Gavin's team said, yeah, they say that, but we're going to make this a Trump referendum and they want it.

And, you know, again, we know California will find out the margin.

I don't know at Christmas what it was, but it probably did much better than Kamala Harris last year.

It just a pure partisan.

Hey, this is the Trump sucks measure.

Do you want to vote for it?

It did very well.

Not a surprise that would work in California.

But I think it's that.

That spillover, I mentioned Wes Moore and the difficulty he has there, but Democrats were tiptoeing.

They did not want to think about this too hard.

Do they really want to be blamed for making the partisanship in Congress worse?

And they really do have a screw-it attitude that Newsom's partly responsible for.

One, there's clearly no, what's the penalty?

It's kind of a catch-22.