Florida Is For Workers… But What About California? How Ballot Measure Results Complicate Red/Blue Narratives—And Intensify Our Parties’ Identity Crises
The battle over Proposition 22 in California was one between gig economy companies (like Uber and Lyft) and labor unions, and is indicative of similar fights in which the Democratic Party will be forced to take sides in the future. Photo via Pikrepo.
Most coverage of the 2020 elections has focused on the headliner event: the presidential race between incumbent Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, warranted by the stakes and abnormal nature of the election. It took nearly four days for enough votes to be counted to allow the majority of media outlets to confidently project that Biden would defeat Trump after flipping five states, making him the first candidate to successfully oust an incumbent president in twenty-eight years. Moreover, President Trump has yet to concede the election, choosing instead to spread unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud and to impede the transition of power.
But these post-mortems have drowned out important discussions about the results of some of the most captivating races: statewide ballot measures. The results of some measures were semi-predictable: a majority of New Jersey voters, for example, approved a referendum to legalize recreational marijuana. Some results were more surprising: South Dakota, a much more conservative state, voted to do the same.
However, ballot questions in two states in particular really stand out: Florida and California. In Florida, by a margin of nearly 22 percent, voters passed Amendment 2, raising the minimum wage in the state to $15 an hour by 2026. Meanwhile, in California, voters overwhelmingly passed Proposition 22 which reclassifies gig workers, those who “enter into formal agreements with on-demand companies (e.g. Uber, TaskRabbit) to provide services to the company’s clients,” as contractors, thereby exempting them from protections to which they were previously entitled.
The results are not only interesting in themselves, but when juxtaposed against the results of the presidential race in the two respective states, they become fascinating. How could Florida, a state that went for Trump (by a bigger margin than in 2016), vote so overwhelmingly to raise the state minimum wage? And how could California, a state that came out for Biden by a roughly 2-to-1 margin, side with the California Republican Party and pass a proposition meant to strip a subset of workers of various protections?
These results force us to ask pressing questions about the future of both parties. In particular, they compel us to dig deeper into a major ideological battle playing out within the Democratic Party. How can we account for these seeming contradictions between who voters preferred in the presidential race and how they voted on these ballot measures? Is the path forward to adopt populist slogans and to focus on how the party can improve the quality of life of working people? Or does its future lie in the suburbs, and is working hard to appeal to more moderate middle/upper-middle class voters the way to assemble a winning coalition? For whom will the party advocate most strongly for in the coming years?
Something Strange in the Sunshine State
Florida has long been a prized catch for both political parties, especially when it comes to presidential politics. Most candidates who win, whether Republican or Democrat, only do so by the narrowest of margins: Trump won Florida by just 1.2 points in 2016. Obama won by less than a point in 2012 and less than three in 2008. Bush won by five points in 2004, and infamously, in 2000, Bush defeated Gore by just 537 votes out of nearly six million cast amid a dispute that was drawn out for weeks in court.
2020 was no different. Heading into Election Day, the race in Florida was a toss-up, though many thought that Biden was slightly favored to win: The RealClearPolitics final polling average had Biden up by 0.9 points, and FiveThirtyEight’s algorithm claimed that Biden had a 69-in-100 chance of coming out ahead. But the underdog came out on top: Trump won fairly decisively—by a margin of more than three percent, far exceeding his margin of victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The Republican victory in Florida might suggest similar success for conservative causes down the ballot. That is certainly true in part, with two Democratic congresswomen from Miami-Dade, both of whom flipped their seats in 2018, losing re-election.
But the results of one high-profile statewide ballot measure complicate the notion that conservatives were the only won who achieved great success this election cycle. By a 61–39 vote, Floridians voted in favor of Amendment 2, a measure that would raise the state’s minimum wage from its current $8.56 to $15 by 2026.
Raising the federal minimum wage was one issue among many that divided Biden and Trump during the presidential race; Biden supported increasing the federal minimum wage to $15, while Trump did not. In a state that Trump carried by a wider margin than any Republican presidential candidate since 2004, voters overwhelmingly voted in favor of an amendment that contradicts his platform. Even though Trump’s margin of victory in the state was comparatively narrow, it can be deduced that a sizable percentage of Republican voters in the state, certainly somewhere in the double-digits, must have supported this measure.
Yet polling has often found that raising the minimum wage is a popular cause, transcending party lines. In 2019, the Pew Research Center found that 67 percent of Americans supported raising the federal minimum wage to $15. When broken down along party lines, 86 percent of Democrats support the position, while 43 percent of Republicans feel the same way. When you look at the crosstabs of both party and income, the results become even more striking: 56% of working-class Republicans (i.e., Republicans with family incomes of <$40,000/year) support such an increase. These results might shock those who see the Fight for $15 movement as a radical left-wing crusade. Speaking to the material needs of working people appeals to those people regardless of their stances on other issues.
We are still faced with the question of how this amendment could pass the 60% threshold required for passage while, at the same time, Biden was soundly defeated. How can popular support for a particular position on a minimum wage question be so high, while popular support for the candidate who took that position was much lower? One possible explanation is that the minimum wage issue is not one that many voters prioritize. Voters may prefer to vote for a candidate who agrees with them on some issues but takes a different stance on the minimum wage than for a candidate who disagrees with them on more important issues but shares their view on the minimum wage.
But maybe the real issue lies not in any sort of policy issue but in messaging—or, more specifically, how the Biden campaign portrayed itself. A recent In These Times article quotes activist Kofi Hunt, who argues that the ballot measure succeeded because it spoke directly to the struggles of lower-income people, while the Biden campaign, though equipped with a more worker-friendly platform than the Trump campaign, didn’t focus enough on how a Biden presidency would help those with lower incomes. Instead the Biden campaign focused more on drawing attention to Trump’s negative attributes than to Biden’s positive ones. By not doing the work required to tie itself to the fight to raise the minimum wage, and by not fighting enough to push back against Trump’s arguments that he was the better candidate for working people, the Biden campaign lost out on a major opportunity. Given the apparent popularity of a position like raising the minimum wage, it seems likely that had Biden done that sort of work, he would have carried the state, or, at the very least, significantly reduced Trump’s margin of victory.
After several House Democrats in swing seats lost re-election in 2020, including two in Miami-Dade County, it has become a common refrain that Democrats’ best chances for success in the future lie in abandoning left-wing sloganeering for moderate, “pragmatic” solutions that appeal to centrist voters. The success of the movement to raise the minimum wage in Florida, a state that Trump won, complicates that narrative.
Calling the fight to raise the minimum wage a “left-wing” cause is, as the polling cited earlier indicates, a gross oversimplification. Had the Biden campaign made a bigger effort to tie itself to this cause, there is a great chance that it could have secured more votes from the left, the center, and maybe even, to a lesser extent, the right. The blame here does not lie entirely with the Biden campaign; many members of the general public learn most about the policy positions held by presidential candidatesby watching the televised debates, and this issue was one that was not brought up in more than the most fleeting manner. But leaning into this cause appears to have been a possible pathway to victory in the state for the Biden campaign, and it is one that they seemingly did not fully recognize.
Gig Trouble in Little California
It was never a matter of if Joe Biden would win California—it was always by how much? The answer: quite a bit. Though not all votes have been counted at the time of publication, Biden appears poised to defeat Trump by roughly thirty points.
Democrats may have won the biggest prize, but conservatives saw some down-ballot success, flipping multiple House seats that Democrats won in 2018. Congressional races aside, there was one (landslide) victory by conservatives that deserves special attention: the passage of Proposition 22. Proposition 22, which was endorsed by the California Republican Party and opposed by the California Democratic Party, was drafted in response to the passage of Assembly Bill 5 (2019), a bill pertaining to gig workers. Assembly Bill 5 explicitly classified gig workers as employees, thereby entitling them to benefits like “minimum wage, overtime considerations, and paid sick time.” Proposition 22 exempts app-based delivery services from those provisions by reclassifying drivers as independent contractors and not employees, therefore not entitling them to those benefits.
The gig industry shattered campaign contribution records, donating $181.4 million to the campaign to pass the proposition. (In California, as is the case in Florida, there are no limits to how much corporations can spend on campaigning for ballot measures.) Their spending paid off. In a state that Biden won by nearly 2-to-1, this GOP-backed ballot question passed with close to 60% of the vote. For it to have passed, a fairly significant number of Biden voters must have gone against the California Democratic Party’s recommendation and voted how Silicon Valley wanted them to. California, in some respects, was the mirror image of Florida; the latter supported the Republican candidate for president while voting to pass a “progressive” amendment, while the former backed the Democratic candidate while passing a GOP-endorsed proposition.
How could so many Democratic voters have sided with the gig industry over labor unions, activists, and the California Democratic Party? To attempt to understand this, perhaps we should first look to the party elite. Though many of the most left-wing figures in the Democratic Party look at Silicon Valley with skepticism or even scorn, many higher-ups see Big Tech as a potential ally—and some have worked in Silicon Valley themselves. Valerie Jarrett, an adviser to the Obama Foundation, serves on Lyft’s board of directors; Tony West, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris’s brother-in-law, is Uber’s chief legal officer; and Anthony Foxx, who served as Transportation secretary under Obama, is Lyft’s policy chief.
Ever since the rise of the gig industry, some Democratic Party elites have tried to pull off a somewhat awkward balancing act, seeking to satisfy both labor unions as well as the companies those unions view as adversaries. Just as some members of the party elite remain receptive to Silicon Valley’s demands, so too, do a significant portion of the Democratic base—at least when targeted directly by the advertising campaigns devised by Silicon Valley. Given the influence of the tech industry in California politics, exacerbated in this instance by campaign finance regulations that allow corporations to dump as much money as they please into ballot measure campaigns, it is unsurprising that so many Californians across class lines would come out and vote for this measure. This was not just a matter of upper-class tech executives and moderate suburbanites coming out to support this measure. The aggressive campaign by Silicon Valley to convince working-class voters that the passage of Proposition 22 would be in their best interest played a major role. It can not be ignored, for example, that Uber came under fire for advertising for the passage of the proposition on the scheduling app that drivers are required to use in order to do their jobs.
Herein lies the gaping schism between two major forces in the Democratic Party. On the one hand, the formal party apparatus (made up of activists, legislators, and the like) as well as labor unions, came out swinging in opposition to this proposition. On the other, the gig industry, which has direct ties to a number of prominent Democrats and has donated extensively to Democratic candidates as recently as this cycle, was successfully able to use its resources in order to convince voters across class lines to support a cause championed by the right. So long as this tension remains, Democrats will struggle to form a coherent approach to issues that affect the working class, which, as Florida demonstrates, could very realistically end up harming them electorally.
Possible Paths Forward For The Right and The Left
These seemingly shocking incidents fit into a larger identity crisis that both major parties are facing at the end of the Trump era. The Florida results call to mind the question facing Republican Party leadership: should the party return to the form of conservatism that was dominant prior to the rise of Trump, a form which celebrated free markets and frowned upon government intervention in economic matters? Or should it go further down the road of economic semi-populism that Trump has paved? It is not yet clear which way the party winds are blowing. However, the fact that Marco Rubio, who was considered a more traditionally conservative alternative to Trump in the 2016 Republican primaries, recently said in an interview that the GOP should transform itself into a “working-class coalition” and that big businesses “only care about how their shares are performing” over the interests of their employees lends credence to the idea that some party factions are at least open to moving in a direction that might consider supporting provisions like raising the minimum wage. With that said, these intra-party debates are yet to take center stage.
The Democratic Party, as the California results demonstrate, is faced with a much more urgent crisis. A recent Brookings Institution report argues that Biden was victorious due to a performance in large suburbs and small metropolitan areas that was far superior to Clinton’s in 2016. Perhaps moving away from progressive rhetoric, like that surrounding the fight to raise the minimum wage, and shifting towards more neoliberal economic policy would help the party capture voters similar to some voters in California who were receptive to the desires of Silicon Valley—especially those who are generally liberal but hold more moderate positions on fiscal issues—giving them a path to victory in swing districts and states in cycles to come.
But shifting all attention to the suburbs could do serious harm to the party. Though Democrats made gains in the suburbs this year, they performed worse in the urban areas that have provided them with steady support for decades. Shifting away from working-class demands risks further alienating those voters, the cost of which could potentially outweigh the benefits in suburbs.
The results in Florida challenge the assumptions of those who argue that abandoning progressive rhetoric and adopting more centrist policies is the only way to secure more power. A considerable bloc of Trump voters backed an increased minimum wage, and one could certainly argue that leaning into economic populism more, rather than less, could be the way to both win support from Republicans and hold onto blocs that have traditionally supported Democrats—benefits that may or may not exceed those that the party would see in the suburbs if it did the opposite. Perhaps Biden could have won Florida if he had been more vocal in his support for increasing the federal minimum wage and made a bigger attachment of the issue to his campaign platform.
There are no easy answers, of course. Republicans will continue to debate whether economic populism should be pursued. Democrats will continue to play the blame game, with moderates accusing progressives of alienating swing voters with “extreme” rhetoric and progressives accusing moderates of failing to see the mass appeal of progressive policies. There is no way, in this moment, to empirically prove that either side in either argument is more correct than the other. But 2022 is just around the corner, and before either party can generate a plan of attack, they will need to ponder the questions that these results raise.
Jake Tibbetts is a staff writer at CPR and a senior in Columbia College studying sociology and political science. Much of his coursework has been related to contemporary political and sociological theory, the sociology of race in the U.S., and U.S. elections. Born and bred in Massachusetts, he enjoys hiking and biking when he’s not starting political arguments.