Berkeley IGS Poll on California Propositions were all wrong and biased in favor of Democrats, like flawed national polls, and Here is the Run-Down.

The results of California’s vote on statewide ballot propositions reveals a much more conservative voter when engaging in “direct democracy” then when voting for partisan candidate races. Joe Biden won more than 65% of the vote in the Golden State on election night, showing it to be among the “bluest” of “blue states.” Every one of California’s statewide elected officials are liberal Democrats. However, in this election, California voters stunningly rejected the recommendations of the state’s Democratic Party and its leaders, and big-spending labor unions, again and again. In one crushing blow, 58.4% to 41.5%, Californians voted in favor of Uber and Lyft and their drivers, by voting Yes on Proposition 22. The successful ballot measure will cut against the so-called “Assembly Bill 5,” an iconic labor union driven law in the state, and free drivers and the companies from the most onerous of California’s regulations and allow drivers to continue to consider themselves as “independent contractors.” The result is more flexibility for employment opportunities for Californians, and a blow for freedom and the so-called “gig” economy that will simply allow people who own cars and have free time to continue to make money on the side. It is a big loss for the labor unions and their allies in the State Legislature, whose game-plan is to expand as much as possible the state’s regulatory and taxing authority well beyond traditional labor relations and into other private and innovative enterprises. And it is a huge loss for the California Democratic Party.

Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!

California voters went even further in rejecting Democrat policy programs. They overwhelmingly rejected a measure, Proposition 21, that would diminish property rights and impose “rent control” on property owners, by 60% to 40%. Proposition 21 was vigorously supported by a “Who’s Who” of the state Democratic and liberal establishment including not only the official the Democratic Party, but also the ACLU, the United Auto Workers, Black Lives Matters Los Angeles, the SEIU, and the Los Angeles Times. Their collective strength could not convince voters to curtail property rights. Another measure, Proposition 23, to further regulate smaller dialysis clinics in a way that favored health care unions went down in total flames, losing 64% to 36%. An additional measure that would eliminate bail in California, favored once again by the Democratic Party and its’ criminal defense lawyer allies, and opposed by law enforcement organizations and the state Republican Party, lost 55.4% to 44.6%. And the Democrats biggest prize on the ballot, Proposition 15, a property tax hike focused on commercial real estate, was failing this morning with only 48.3% of the vote compared to 51.7% “no.”

California’s votes on ballot propositions included other cheer for positions taken by the state Republican Party. Voters rejected by a wide measure Proposition 16, which would have reinstated racial preferences in the state Constitution.

But what is really remarkable was how wrong the polling was on these measures and how those inaccurate polls may have been influenced by what I term “systemic liberal bias” in California’s institutions. These public polls offered no clues at all to the wholesale rejection of the Democrat’s ballot propositions in this election. For example, in late September the UC Berkeley Institute of Government Studies issued a press release on four of the statewide ballot measures, namely Props. 15, 16, 21 and 22. The Berkeley poll had the Proposition 15 tax hike leading by 15 points (it is losing by 3), Proposition 16 losing by 8 points (it won by 12 points), Proposition 21 “has voters split evenly” in the poll when it lost by almost 20 points on election day, and the big one, Proposition 22, favored by 3 points when it won on election day by about 17 points.

How could the Berkeley poll be so wildly wrong? Not just closely wrong, but unequivocally wrong! The pollsters might argue that it was predictive but “only at the time”. But the counter to that is the poll and press was released just a week and a half before active “early voting” started in the state. Logically, the polling clearly was NOT predictive, it was wrong. To what extent does the error factor evidence a bias? Pollsters will say the poll was not biased, or that perhaps there were technically adjustments that should have been made in the samples of voters. Yet if you look at the actual results of the four measures polled for the September 22 press release, the common denominator is a deep under count of the side of the initiative endorsed by the Republican party.

Berkeley did announce poll results again closer to the election for the period October 16-23 and they did adjust their numbers slightly in favor of what became the winning side, but they were still way off of the actual result and appear to again poll in bias in favor of the Democratic Party position. In this subsequent poll on Proposition 22, 46% were reported as “Yes”, 42% was reported as “No,” and 12% were “Undecided.” If one is to believe in the validity of this allegedly “unbiased” academic poll, one has to believe that 100% of the “Undecided” vote ended up voting “Yes” on Proposition 22, since on election day the Yes side grew by slightly more than the entire 12% “undecided” tally reported in the poll. No way that happened. The poll was wrong in the voting result. And again, being so wrong, I believe as a free American that the poll reveals what I call a “systemic liberal bias” in the polling.

The national polls were all wrong, the most notable being the NBC poll released just the Sunday before the election showing that Joe Biden held a 10 point lead over President Trump, and that Trump was receiving just 5% of the black vote. It is axiomatic that NBC’s polls, and most all other national polls, were like fairy tales – wishful thinking intended to influence the outcome. Even counting California’s huge vote for Joe Biden, his national margin over Trump is actually a couple hundred thousand votes less than Hillary Clinton’s total in 2016. In other words, Biden appears to have under-performed Hillary Clinton, and certainly did not beat Trump by ten points. ABC News counts 68,976,189 national votes for Biden this morning, compared to 66,260,459 for Trump. That is not a landslide for Biden at all. Rather than a 10 point lead as NBC broadcasted with corporate funds a few days before the election, the result is just a 2 point lead. And the anecdotal evidence is, win or lose, Trump will have won far more of the black vote than 5%. NBC, like Berkeley IGS, was way off. Perhaps intentionally so, because of “systemic liberal bias.”

The polling industry in the 2020 election in general has proven itself to not only be unreliable, but especially when it comes to California ballot measures, heavily biased in favor of the Democratic party – there can be no other conclusion.