I live in a college town in CA. It is has a pretty high percentage of "Democracy is Life" AKA "Lib" (where both of those words mean pretty much the opposite of their original meaning).

So here I was, riding around town (I bike several times a week so that was not uncommon) and I was struck with how many people had political posts on their lawn. Indeed, it seemed that about 30%+ of the houses (in the area of town I was riding in) had political signs. As a college town (a "hippy town," only most of the hippies are dead, so pseudo-hippies) it is not uncommon to show your political preferences on your lawn. But in this case, I'd guess it was around two to three times as many people posting signs as was usual.

But here's the thing:

There was not a SINGLE PERSON giving a shit about the Governors Primary. Not one single sign, nor anything else on the state or federal level. Instead, every single sign was about a local measure. This particular measure has been pushed for the past few months by a well paid for (propaganda) "Yes" vote on the measure. Every week we get a new mailer showing how great that measure is, and I never saw a single mailer against it. Despite that, it seemed to me that about 60-65% of the political lawn signs I saw were "No."

For the past couple months it has been pretty clear to me that the measure was a corporate power land grab. It has all the hallmarks of another push towards their "perfect 15 minute city". As a CA college town this place has a lot of money, and they have been pushing that agenda for quite a while now. Despite that, and despite all of the money coming in to push the agenda, the agenda seems to have been failing (according to my informal polling during my ride). I guess I'll find out tomorrow what the final vote was (or maybe in 2 weeks from now when the "dead vote" comes in...).

Now, I'm not gonna lie: from my perspective their "utopian city" is not a bad thing. As I said, I ride a lot. So more riding infrastructure is nice. Lots of parks is nice. Low crime is nice. Lots of money is nice. But the cost of living is insane (gas, food, power, water, etc.) and housing is INSANE (I'm not going to say how insane it is, because it's grotesque). The taxes are over the top (like the measure being voted on). And the taxes ONLY GO UP. They are never "paid off." If we hadn't grandfathered ourselves into an apartment (been there for 12 years now), we couldn't possibly afford to live there (well, we could, but we would be in the "poor" category, even though we should be in the "reasonably well off" category). The only way the people of the city can survive is by either paying WAY too much for rent (a fair bit of it paid for by foreign (Chinese) students), quite a bit from other student's loans (that they will never be able to pay off and/or will be paid off by very rich parents), people who bought their house 20-30+ years ago, people like me who are renting (and have been for way too long), or by Blackrock (et al) (which is more and more of the town all the time).

The point is this:

Here, in this local political environment, where engagement is always high, people care both more, in general, and specifically about their town (related to the obvious corporate land grabs and taxes), than they care about the Governor of CA (which is a hop skip and a jump away from Pres.).

I've never seen anything like it.