Working people in California were not convinced by the arguments of union officials who went on a “No recall” drive to mobilize Democratic votes. They voted in large numbers for Schwarzenegger because of their hatred for Davis’s record in office. In this period of economic crisis, there is no ideological loyalty among working people to imperialist liberalism, which is what the Democratic Party stands for and what the trade union officialdom tries to tie workers to. The fact is that no significant layer of the population has loyalty to either big-business party in the United States.

Because Davis’s unpopularity was such a factor in the outcome, Schwarzenegger’s electoral victory doesn’t automatically translate into votes for President George Bush’s reelection in 2004. But the strength of the vote for the Republican candidate dealt a blow to the long-held assumption that certain states such as California are untouchable by one or the other major party, and that the Democrats have a lock on the votes of workers, Blacks, and Latinos.

Despite Davis’s very liberal record over the past two years, half of union households voted to oust him. Exit polls showed that among Latinos, only 52 percent voted for Bustamante while 40 percent voted for a Republican—31 percent for Schwarzenegger and 9 percent for Thomas McClintock. Even among voters who are Black, 23 percent voted Republican.

The election results were another sign of the slow shift to the right in bourgeois politics that goes back to the emergence of William Clinton and of the “centrist Democrats” as the dominant force in the Democratic Party, and which continued with the election of Bush as president. Democratic and Republican politicians above all keep workers and farmers within the bounds of capitalist politics by promoting patriotism. They foster the myth of “we Americans,” that is, the false view that working people and the employers—our exploiters—have common interests.

Despite what some pro-Democratic forces say, Schwarzenegger is not an ultrarightist. He is not even a right-wing ideological Republican like McClintock. He is a Republican who took established positions in his party on the main issues he spoke out on, such as tax cuts. He voiced positions on several questions—support for a woman’s right to abortion, for gay unions, for medical marijuana, and for gun control—different from those held by Bush.

This crossover of Democratic voters is not unique—it was the “Reagan Democrats” who helped elect Ronald Reagan as California governor in 1966 and then as president in the 1980s. It’s worth remembering that as governor, Reagan signed a bill liberalizing abortion laws in California four years before the Supreme Court decriminalized abortion in 1973.

Schwarzenegger’s victory had nothing in common with the 1998 election of Jesse Ventura as Minnesota governor. Ventura demagogically attacked both the Democratic and Republican parties as being part of the “establishment.” He ran as an “independent” and won support by promoting himself as a strongman figure, supposedly standing above classes, who would sweep out the political stables and use an iron hand, even at the expense of bourgeois democracy. As it turned out, Ventura’s Bonapartist-type role was premature for U.S. politics today and hit a dead end.

Virtually all the other candidates ran within the capitalist framework, including Peter Camejo of the Green Party, which as usual acted as the left wing of the Democrats.

The only revolutionary working-class voice in these elections was that of the Socialist Workers Party candidate, Joel Britton. Socialist Workers campaigners approached all political questions from the standpoint of the interests of the working class, including the need for working people to chart a political course independent of all the capitalist parties.

Britton and the other socialist candidates said: young people and militant-minded workers don’t have to accept a life of choosing one rotten bourgeois politician or another. The SWP offers you the opportunity to be part of building a communist leadership that can forge a revolutionary movement of workers and farmers to take on the ruling capitalists and bring our class to power. This is the life to be part of—the fight to bring down U.S. imperialism, which will remain the biggest threat to humanity until it is overthrown. Join us!
 
 
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