PROP 19 DIDN'T RESONATE WITH MINORITY VOTERS

Blacks, Latinos, and Asians who voted for Jerry Brown and Barbara
Boxer went against marijuana legalization.

Who killed Proposition 19? It's a question that cannabis legalization
proponents will be asking themselves for weeks to come. Was it Tea
Partiers? Apathetic young voters? Or was it the marijuana-producing
counties of Northern California, which feared losing market share for
their main cash crop? Each of those story lines has already received
attention. But a closer look at election results and exit polling
data points to a different reason for why Prop 19 went down:
Democratic voters. Specifically, blacks and Latinos, and to a lesser
extent, Asian Americans.

Democratic voters didn't support Prop 19 as one might expect. While
the six major Democratic counties - Alameda, Contra Costa, Los
Angeles, Sacramento, San Francisco, Santa Clara - all backed Jerry
Brown and Barbara Boxer by significant margins, their support for
legalizing marijuana was tepid at best. And in some cases, they
flat-out opposed it. In Democratic-rich Los Angeles County, for
example, 63 percent of voters went for Boxer and Brown, but only 47
percent backed 19. If Democrats had voted for the measure like they
did for the party's top two candidates, it would have won.

Who were the Democrats who went against Prop 19? According to exit
polling by CNN, it appears to have been blacks, Latinos, and Asians.

Those three groups propelled Boxer and Brown to victory. Boxer took
80 percent of the black vote, 66 percent of the Latino vote, and 58
percent of the Asian vote. Similarly, Brown scored 77 percent of the
black vote, 64 percent of the Latino vote, and 55 percent of the
Asian vote. Yet those three groups also rejected Prop 19. Only 47
percent of blacks voted for it, 46 percent of Latinos, and 39 percent
of Asians. Of course, those numbers aren't much different from how
white voters treated Prop 19. Just 46 percent of whites voted for it.

But here's the key difference. Whites went Republican this year. A
majority of whites voted for Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina and
against marijuana legalization "" a predictable Republican outcome.
But blacks, Latinos, and Asians split their ballots. Large majorities
of them went for Boxer and Brown, but then crossed over and voted
against Prop 19. If blacks, Latinos, and Asians had voted for Prop 19
the way they did for Brown and Boxer, then the measure would have won
by roughly 100,000 votes, the data shows.

The results were particularly striking when one considers that blacks
and Latinos are disproportionately targeted for marijuana offenses.
The Drug Policy Alliance recently produced two reports showing just
how bad it's been for blacks and Latinos. Blacks in California's 25
largest cities are arrested for pot possession at rate four to twelve
times higher than whites, even though many more whites report getting
high. The numbers for Latinos are almost as bleak.

In Los Angeles County, for example, cops arrested blacks for pot
possession at seven times the rate of whites from 2006 to 2008. That
represented nearly 35 percent of all pot possession arrests, even
though blacks make up just 9.6 percent of the county's population.
And Latinos, who make up 10 percent of the county's population, were
arrested twice as often as whites. "For decades, law enforcement
strategies have targeted low-income people of color who bear the
disproportionate burden and stigma of arrest, prosecution and
permanent criminal records for marijuana possession and other minor
drug offenses," Alice Huffman, president of the California NAACP,
stated in one of the reports. The NAACP itself favored Prop 19.

But Dale Gieringer, state coordinator of California NORML, said he
wasn't surprised that so many Democratic voters cast their ballots
against legalization. After all, both Boxer and Brown opposed Prop
19, as did nearly every newspaper in the state. "It's not a
Democratic or Republican issue," Gieringer said, noting that many
independents and libertarians voted for Prop 19. "It's just not an
ideological issue."

Gieringer was matter of fact about blacks and Latinos being against
pot legalization even though they're targeted more often for
marijuana crimes. "The fact is that blacks and Latinos are targeted
for all crimes, and so marijuana just isn't any different in that
regard," he said.

Other interesting tidbits from the exit polling: White men split
evenly on Prop 19 - 50 percent to 50 percent, but they went big for
Whitman and Fiorina. That's the independent/libertarian vote that
Gieringer talked about. As for white women, only 42 percent of them
voted for Prop 19, while 46 percent of them went for Boxer, and 47
percent, for Brown.

In the months ahead, pot legalization supporters may be reluctant to
address the issue of race and Prop 19, much like gay-marriage
supporters were uneasy about blaming the passage of Prop 8 on black
and Latino churchgoers. But the exit polling data and election
results indicate that avoiding race may doom future pot legalization
measures. Blacks, Latinos, and Asians are usually more liberal than
whites on most social and economic issues. And many blacks and
Latinos, in particular, are suffering under the current system of
prohibition. Clearly, the stats show that the legalization crowd
needs to engage with them more if it ever hopes to win.