Respectfully, this take is ignorant.

I mean ignorant in formal sense, in that you’re speaking without a strong foundation of knowledge. But also in the informal sense in that frankly, what you’re saying is ugly and insulting to the working class of America, whose capacity to think you dismiss on the basis that you don’t know why they did something other than what you’d do.

To be clear: there ARE voters who match your description. However in many cases – as was the case in California’s billionaire tax – those are not the deciding votes.

The people who decide elections are – contrary to popular myth – complicated.

In the Bay Area, residents voted both to reject the wealth tax AND reject a measure that would make it harder to raise taxes in the future AND voted to raise their own taxes through a 0.5 % to fund a public transit rescue package.

From even a cursory glance at the results across CA’s elections, it’s clear that voters didn’t have some flat left-versus-right metric, they demonstrated complicated, nuanced, choices.

Before concluding that this failed because working class voters are dimwitted savages too dumb to govern themselves, let’s wait until organizers and academics actually study the returns.

And in 2028, I’m going to go back out and work on passing the next version of this.

I think I’m going to start using my own domain, so I can change hosts if needed without having to change email addresses. This seems like it’s going to be an issue we’ll always need to be prepared to deal with.