B-Stories

I know this post is a big skew from my normal video/photo posts, but I’m using this site as an outlet for something that is on my mind.

As glad as I am to see Obama win the election, it saddens me deeply to see that Proposition 8 (Banning Gay Marriage) has passed.

As many of my friends are devastated by this horrible discrimination of human rights, personally I find it disturbing as well as eye opening as to how exactly Prop 8 managed to pass. Early in the campaign, polls had the “yes” trailing by 17 points, and as much as we can “trust” polls - this campaign tells us, if anything, that it all comes down to election day and the voting numbers.

Typically in general measures the battle is waged between the urban, suburban, and rural. The urban  swaying liberal, while the suburban/rural leaning conservative.  Naturally, the thinking is that if California, a state with top 15 (population) US cities as Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Fran/San Jose/Oakland, you’d be inclined to expect any liberal measure to be a “shoe in”. Looking at the red/blue map to the right, you can see that even though liberal Obama won by a large amount in total votes, if you were to take total counties, the race would be much closer. By this I mean number of Red counties vs Blue Counties.

Now to the Green/Orange Prop 8 Map (above left). Here you can see that California had 9,924,244 votes for this proposition, you can also note that there are some big metropolitan parts of California that voted *YES*, mainly Los Angeles, and San Diego.

This is really where this proposition got it’s life and was able to pass.

LA county alone counted for 2.6 million total votes. If you tack on the extra 1 million votes from San Diego, you have a whopping 35% of the total California vote leaning toward the “Yes”. Then you add on all the rural real estate, basically all of non-coastal California, and you realized pretty quickly that Prop 8 is gonna happen. Note: Again how both counties were strong Obama supporters.

So the question presents itself…
With the entertainment industry, Los Angeles is supposed to be a very liberal county, how the heck does it vote to pass?
The answer here is simple. Los Angeles is liberal but it is also HUGE and filled with sprawling suburban areas. So for all the Santa Monicas, Hollywoods, Downtowns,  West Hollywoods, Echo Parks, Silverlakes… you have the Agoura Hills, Santa Claritas, Alhambras, Downeys, Carsons, Diamond Bars, Breas, Torrances, and THEN some.

So then the question comes about -  What about the SF bay area? Besides the cities of San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, isn’t the BAY Area comprised of dozens of sprawling suburbs as well?

This is true. If you’ve explored the bay area, you’ll even know that San Jose can’t be considered much of an urban area itself, it’s really all suburb. So how do all of the “suburbs by the Bay” shoot down this proposition so fiercely? This explanation comes down to population. While the Los Angeles area is comprised of a vastly diverse group of people. The Bay Area is in fact, a lot less diverse.

By diverse, I don’t just mean races, I mean classes, ages, and religions.

The primary industry in the Bay Area is technology… which equates to higher education, which means college degrees, young minds (again technology), and leads to liberal thinking. Add on the cities of San Francisco and Berkeley (two of the most liberal cities on the planet) feeding these suburbs for generations and you’re gonna have a strong liberal vote.

Personally, I’ve always wanted to believe that the cities of San Diego (where I went to college), and Los Angeles (where I currently live) were up to the open minded level of the Bay Area (where I grew up). But breaking out the results of the Prop 8 vote, I see we’ve got work to do.

Below is a gallery of the results of the Bay Area counties. I’m very proud to say that is where I grew up.

All graphics and maps are from the LA times.