IMMIGRATION MAY TURN OTHER RED STATES BLUE

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS    

    “IMMIGRATION MAY TURN OTHER RED STATES BLUE”

    The Tea Party, most conservative element of today’s Republican Party, takes its name from a historic incident. But today it appears to be ignoring history, at least the recent political history of California.

          For months, the Tea Party has campaigned against the “path to citizenship” portion of the immigration bill passed by the Senate in June, calling it “amnesty for illegals.” Emails from TeaParty.org urge  “a full frontal assault on every member of Congress with a No Amnesty! Fax Blast.”

          But as the philosopher George Santayana observed early in the last century, “Those who cannot remember history” may be condemned to repeat it.

    The political history of California’s last two decades offers plenty of object lessons for Republicans, some of whose national leaders have taken heed by supporting the immigration bill.

          Nowhere is a repeat of this history more likely than in Texas and Florida, two states where Republicans control both the governors' offices and the legislatures, where large numbers of Latinos already vote, but with large numbers of eligible Hispanics who have not yet bothered to register or even to become citizens.

          One survey found two years ago that Texas had 920,000 U.S citizen Latinos not registered to vote and about 3 million other Hispanic residents who are eligible to become U.S. citizens but have not applied. In Florida, where elections often have been decided by very small margins over the last 15 years, the same study found 600,000 Latino U.S. citizens not registered to vote.

          The large numbers of non-voting Latino citizens set those states up to follow California out of the red Republican column into Democratic blue territory. Imagine the seismic shift if Texas, the foundation for all recent GOP presidential campaigns, were to turn blue.

          That’s what Republican members of Congress concerned about their own party’s future probably should remember as they decide whether or not to allow a House floor vote on the immigration bill passed by the Senate in June.

          For California was once a pretty red state in presidential politics. Before 1994, Republicans carried this state in nine of 12 post-World War II national elections. But the GOP has not won here since, and the only top-of-ticket statewide victories by a Republican in that time were those of Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose movie stardom and centrist politics won him many non-GOP votes.

          No one has the slightest doubt what caused this shift: the 1994 Proposition 187 and then-Gov. Pete Wilson’s vocal support for it. Within four years of that anti-illegal immigrant measure’s passage, more than 2.5 million California Latinos applied for citizenship and registered to vote, the vast majority as Democrats.

          So there is no doubt about the power of the immigration issue to galvanize the previously politically lethargic among Hispanics.

          Every poll of Latinos in America shows immigration as their central issue; one Latino Decisions survey found more than 65 percent of U.S. citizen Hispanics either have an undocumented immigrant family member or know one personally.

          Now it is Republicans in the House who may block what would be the first federal measure since 1986 to give immigrants here without authorization a chance to acquire citizenship, even if the path would be long, convoluted and expensive. If the GOP manages to kill the bill, there’s the strong possibility a tide of Latino citizens all over the country will register and vote – against Republicans.

          Yes, Republicans, especially in Texas, say it can’t and won’t happen there. Conservative Republicans said the same thing here in 1994.

  

          Do the effects of the immigration issue endure? In last year’s presidential vote, fully 18 years post-187, California Latinos voted Democratic by an 80-20 percent margin. In the Ronald Reagan era encompassing most of the 30 years before 187, California Hispanics usually voted Democratic, too, but by far smaller margins of about 60-40 percent. That extra 20 percent of Hispanics, especially with a much larger Latino vote than previously, is one big reason California became to Democratic presidential candidates what Texas has been for Republicans – a seemingly unshakeable base.

          Republicans opposing the immigration measure as a form of amnesty for people they call criminals say they can’t compromise their principles. But if they don’t bend on this issue, they may soon no longer have sufficient political clout or numbers to make a difference on any other issue they consider a matter of principle.

        

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     Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, go to www.californiafocus.net

CONSUMERS SHOULD GET ENTIRE ELECTRIC SETTLEMENT

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS

    “CONSUMERS SHOULD GET ENTIRE ELECTRIC SETTLEMENT”

          For the 47^th time in the last 10 years, an out-of-state electricity generating company has just agreed to repay big bucks to Californians for overcharges during the power crunch of the early 2000s.

          The question now is whether consumers will see much of the $750 million British Columbia Hydro and its Powerex division agreed to cough up.

          Despite newspaper headlines and television news teasers saying customers of Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric will get significant credits on their electric bills, that is not certain.

          “Our press release was deliberately vague about who actually will get the money because that will still have to be decided by the state Public Utilities Commission,” said a spokesman for Attorney General Kamala Harris, who negotiated the latest settlement.

          A look at what happened with past settlements (in all, 60 out-of-state companies bilked Californians out of more than $10 billion during the crisis of 2000-2001) shows why there’s plenty of reason for uncertainty about who will get the $273 million in cash BC Hydro will pay and the $477 million in credits it will issue.

          During the first five years of restitutions, more than $6 billion was recovered from Texas- and Oklahoma-based companies like Enron, Reliant Energy, Mirant Energy and the Williams Cos., but almost none of that money found its way to this state’s 12 million-plus electric customers, business and residential.

          Rather, those settlements took the form of renegotiated long-term power contracts or cancellation of past debts owed to the generators by Edison, PG&E and SDG&E. When then-Attorney General Bill Lockyer and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission boasted that the settlements might lower future power rates, it came as cold comfort to customers still paying the bumped-up prices. Rates here are still higher than in all but seven other states, so it’s hard for consumers to see any benefit from the early big-money repayments.

          Smaller settlements followed, with pretty much the same pattern – most of the money has been used for almost anything but repaying the victimized people and businesses.

          A classic example was last year’s $120 million settlement from NRG Energy Inc. for the part it and the bankrupt former generator Dynegy played in the power crunch. To be paid over four years, that agreement sees NRG (which seven years ago bought Dynegy’s interest in two California power plants) spending 80 percent of the money on a network of electric-car charging stations along major highways and in the state’s biggest cities.

          Consumers, then, are getting pennies back on the many dollars Dynegy stole from them, while NRG ends up owning a chain of charging stations for the convenience of people who can afford to buy electric cars – most costing far more than the average vehicle. It's a classic way of taking money paid mostly by average folks and using it to convenience a corporation and the wealthy, all clothed in pious environmental rhetoric.

          No one has ever explained why that money shouldn’t have gone straight back to consumers.

          Then, when BP Energy paid an $18 million settlement, money from the former British Petroleum went into “an account to be designated by the California Department of Water Resources.” None of that cash found its way back to the pockets of anyone you know.

          Now comes the BC Hydro settlement, the largest in several years. Harris bragged in her press release that it “brings long-awaited compensation to California ratepayers for Powerex’s conduct.”

          But it remains to be seen whether customers will see even a few pennies of compensation. Considering the sorry record of the utilities commission in passing out money from previous settlements, it would not be wise to bet on consumers getting much, if any, of this new cash and credit, when simple justice demands they should get it all.

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

WHY MANY POLLS WERE WRONG: NEW VOTERS ACTUALLY TURNED OUT

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 2013, OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
     “WHY MANY POLLS WERE WRONG: NEW VOTERS ACTUALLY TURNED OUT”

          Think back to last fall’s election, when many analysts – especially Republicans – were amazed that President Obama won the popular vote by almost 4 percent over Republican Mitt Romney, a 51-47 percent margin that was fully three percent higher than the final average of nine major polls, from Gallup to Public Policy Polling.

          Even the most accurate of those surveys – the ABC/Washington Post poll and Pew Research – understated the Obama margin by a full percentage point.

The explanation has now arrived, courtesy of California Secretary of State Debra Bowen. It is that the vast majority of newly registered voters actually cast ballots. That’s something to think about as new poll begin to appear, now that the 2014 election season has informally begun.

          The turnout among new voters confounded many pollsters, who often change their survey models in the final weeks before a major election to concentrate on what they call “likely voters.”

          When some polls stuck to the registered model late last September and into early October, Republicans complained loudly of alleged bias among pollsters, saying that polls based on registered voters overstated the Democratic vote and undershot the number of Republicans who would turn out. For everyone knows, they said, that higher percentages of Republican registrants than Democrats come out for elections.

          They even set up a Web site titled “Unskewedpolls.com” which took poll results and changed them to give Romney an eight-point edge one month before Election Day. (After the election, Unskewedpolls.com headlined that it was foiled by “revenge and racism.”)

          Historically, the Republican presumptions are correct. They are more correct, though, in primary elections and special elections than in presidential votes, where the historical average turnout in California – which represents a decent cross-section of American voters – runs to about 79 percent of all registered voters, about 30 percent more than typically vote in primaries.

          But something different went on last fall, and it suggests that pollsters will need to change.

          Two factors altered things markedly: heavy registration of new Latino voters (26 percent more registered to vote last year than four years earlier) and online voter registration.

          No major polling organization figured those new voters into sampling calculations when they began, late in the election cycle, to separate likely voters from the general pool of registrants.

          Registrants have usually been judged as likely voters based on their prior turnout records and their levels of enthusiasm about current candidates.

          But information gathered by Bowen, California’s top election official, suggests that new registrants in 2012 were more likely to vote than the average veteran voter.

          In Orange County, for example, 82 percent of those who registered online after it became possible in mid-September actually voted. That’s a spectacular showing for persons who are not longtime, habitual voters that pollsters would usually classify as “likely.” Plus, 81 percent of new registrants who used the old-fashioned paper methods to sign up actually turned out. Equally spectacular and unexpected by the so-called experts. And much better than the overall performance of all registrants, only 67 percent of whom cast ballots.

          In Santa Barbara County, the numbers were exactly equal among those newly signed up online and on paper, at 86 percent compared with an 81 percent overall turnout.

          Those numbers were pretty much matched all around the state. And since almost two-thirds of those signing up for the first time last year registered Democratic, it turns out the polls were skewed to make the Republican turnout look significantly better than it actually was, not the other way around, as GOP activists and officials charged. So much for Unskewedpolls.com.

          In a post-election talk at the Sacramento Press Club, California Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo, whose surveys turned out far more accurately than many of his national counterparts’, observed that the results square with human nature: If someone makes the effort to register in the waning weeks of a campaign, chances, it’s because he or she is deeply committed to some candidate or issue.

          Polls disregarding those individuals, as every national measure of so-called likely voters did last year, will always be wrong, always behind the latest developments.

          Which means that pollsters, like everyone else, must adjust to cope with today’s brave new online world – or else they will become obsolete.

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Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough: The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net

LINES BLUR BETWEEN CITIZENS AND NON-CITIZENS

CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 2013 OR THEREAFTER

BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
      “LINES BLUR BETWEEN CITIZENS AND NON-CITIZENS”

          As the lines begin to blur between American citizens living in California and immigrants who are here legally, it’s fair to begin asking what’s the difference? What rights and privileges should be reserved strictly for citizens?

          These questions are highlighted by two bills that swept easily through the California Legislature, one already signed without much fanfare by Gov. Jerry Brown, the other awaiting his signature at this writing.

          Essentially, they take some functions previously reserved entirely for citizens and open them up to legal residents, green card holders.

          These developments really began almost 150 years ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court determined that the Constitution’s 14^th Amendment applied to foreign residents of this country and not only to citizens. From then on, immigrants were entitled to equal protection under all laws. They already could own property, and right up to this day, they can hold virtually any job if they possess documents showing their presence here is legal.

          So what’s left as the exclusive realm of citizens? Voting and its offshoots, for one thing. One of those offshoots is jury duty, where voting rolls are usually used when state and federal courts summon individuals to serve. Another is working at the polls, where individuals sign up with county officials to verify that voters only cast one ballot and to assist anyone who can’t understand how to use the state’s seemingly ever-changing ballots, which in the last two decades have evolved from punching chads out of cards through electronic machines to the ink-on-paper systems used in most counties today.

          But the new law and its possible companion put big dents into these former reserves for citizens.

    The one already signed for the first time explicitly allows legal immigrants who have not been naturalized to serve as poll workers, instructing voters on how to understand their ballots. The law allows election officials to appoint up to five persons who are not U.S. citizens to work at each precinct. That’s more workers than some precincts now have.

          “There are nearly 3 million (California) citizens who are fully eligible to vote and not English proficient,” the bill’s sponsor, Democratic Assemblyman Rob Bonta of Alameda, told a reporter. “We have a shortage of multilingual poll workers. There has to be language access at the polls.”

          But all naturalized citizens have passed a test administered in English. If they could do that, and then managed to register as voters, why shouldn’t they understand their ballots?

          The potential second new law allows non-citizen legal residents to serve on juries. This, of course, flies completely in the face of the longtime tradition (not a Constitutional requirement, though) that every American accused of a crime is entitled to an impartial jury composed of his or her peers. That has usually been interpreted to mean jury pools should contain a proportional mix of the populace of the area, considering race, gender and national origin.

          But should anyone be tried by individuals who have never passed a test of their knowledge of American history, government and traditions? This may not be an absolute legal requirement, but how many citizens would want non-citizens to judge their guilt or innocence?

          Then there’s the question of how non-citizens might be called since they’re not listed in the voting rolls where most jury summons originate.

          All these difficulties, of course, merely beg the central question raised by the new measures, which is that if duties and privileges long accorded only to citizens are now also assigned or given to non-citizens, what’s the point of citizenship?

          American citizenship, of course, has long been a cherished goal of immigrants, who often attain it only after hard work and significant costs. If fewer activities are now limited to citizens only, what happens to the incentive toward citizenship?

          Blur the distinctions between citizens and those who are not and there’s not much left to move people toward citizenship – perhaps just the reality that only citizenship would guarantee anyone the right to stay in this country if political winds ever shift radically and result in a mass expulsion of non-citizens.

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    Email Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough, The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias columns, visit www.californiafocus.net