This month, 60% of voters in overwhelmingly Hispanic and Democratic Santa Ana, one of California’s largest cities, soundly rejected Measure DD, a ballot measure to give non-citizens the right to vote in their city’s elections. The lopsided result illustrates the social justice Left’s mistaken conviction that Latino voters share their embrace of open borders and contempt for traditional norms of American civic culture.
Measure DD was the political project of several left-wing activist groups that aspire to use Santa Ana a power base for “transforming” politics in urbanized Orange County.
The 2020 elections, coming amidst COVID lockdown as and on the heels of the George Floyd riots, narrowly produced a radical progressive majority on the seven-member Santa Ana City Council that passed the strictest rent control law in the state, harangued law enforcement, opposed “criminalizing” homelessness and railed about “genocide” in Gaza.
At the behest of allied radical non-profits, they also placed Measure DD on the November 2024 ballot, which would permit any noncitizen residing in Santa Ana – even illegal immigrants – to vote in city elections. Passage of Measure DD would have also forced the financially-strapped city to spend millions to operate a parallel voting structure while also defending it against certain litigation.
For the coalition of radical non-profits and unions supporting Measure DD, however, no-citizen voting was about “building Latinx power” by extending the franchise to illegal migrants whose votes they believed they could exploit and manipulate to advance their own ideological agendas.
Funded in part by rich out-of-town progressive donors, the Measure DD coalition fielded platoons of enthusiastic young canvassers for a vigorous door-to-door campaign.
According to their worldview tenets of their world view, Santa Ana was friendly electoral territory for such a ballot measure. Its population of 310,000 is overwhelmingly young, Latino and Democrat. An estimated 20% are undocumented. Democrats outnumber Republicans more than 2-1. English is the primary language in only 20% of homes. The foreign-born population is 42% – more than half of whom are not citizens.
Measure DD proponents cast it as “expanding democracy.” They attempted to create moral linkage to the women’s suffrage and Civil Rights movements – notwithstanding the fact those movements were about claiming the full rights of citizenship for people who were already citizens. They also appropriated the American Revolution-era slogan of “no taxation without representation” – forgetting that the colonists’ objection was that being taxed by Parliament without representation in Parliament abridged their rights as British citizens.
Proponents even tried guilting Santa Ana voters into supporting non-citizen voting. Canvassers passed out campaign fliers claiming the presence of so many illegal migrants in Santa Ana stems because the US “decimates the economies of countries in South America, the Middle East, Africa and Asia” via “regime change, sanctions” and “unfair trade agreements” in order to advance our own selfish “economic interests. Therefore, the Measure DD campaign’s reasoning goes, Santa Ana must give them the vote.
They were countered by a robust “No” campaign led by long-time conservative activist and attorney James V. Lacy. Lacy has made opposing the enactment of noncitizen voting laws in deep-blue California something of a personal mission. He organized a vigorous anti-campaign premised on both defending citizenship and the tremendous financial cost to Santa Ana.
Encased in their ideological bubble, Yes on Measure DD leaders were optimistic about winning. Politico quoted Measure DD leader Carlos Perea – a member of the city’s police oversight commission – telling canvassers, “What is happening right here in Santa Ana is going to send shockwaves across the state and across the nation.”
Perea was correct – but not in the way he meant. When returns came in on November 5, the California tradition of a long wait for results was unnecessary. More than 60% of Santa Ana voters rejected Measure DD – a crushing defeat. Many of them were immigrants who had earned the right to vote through the long process of becoming naturalized citizens, and objected to just handing that right to anyone able to cross the border.
Measure DD’s landslide defeat vividly illustrates the massive disconnect between the social justice Left and the “marginalized communities” whose best interests they profess to represent. Saturated in Critical Theory ideologies, contemporary progressives have embraced the notion that racial identity is all-determinative when it comes to political and social views. On November 5, a super-majority of Santa Ana’s strongly Democratic, heavily immigrant, overwhelmingly Latino electorate proved otherwise – showing with their ballots that they prefer traditional American ideas about the meaning of citizenship. Even in deep-Blue California, it appears there is a limit to voter toleration for radical assaults on the basis of representative government. Food for thought as Democrats ponder the consequence of mortgaging their party to identitarian radicals.
At the same time, however, the three racial identitarian radicals running for re-election were all returned to the Santa Ana City Council. And Perea has already vowed to put noncitizen voting on the ballot again, and unless his Harbor Institute and allied non-profits like VietRise intend to shoulder the cost of qualifying it themselves, they’ll most likely turn to their city council allies to put the matter before the voters again.
Judging by Perea’s comments to the OC Register, the line between his radical coalition and the progressive council majority is very blurred – at least in his mind.
“The beautiful thing about what we did this time around was that we put it on the ballot, and now people know what is possible,” Perea told the OC Register.
Actually, it was four councilmembers who placed it on the ballot, although Perea can be forgiven for including his coalition in “we” since they dictated the language of the ballot and the ballot question to their council allies.
Perea’s upbeat soundbiting is at odds with the post-election bitterness he displayed on social media toward the lumpenproletariat class he pretends to champion:
“Fascism and nativism”! It’s an article of faith among race essentialists like Perea that non-whites, by definition, cannot be racist. Unless, apparently, they vote for Trump and against noncitizen voting.
