Erik Chalhoub here, thinking about what’s next as the dust continues to settle from last week’s election. The results were nothing short of shocking: Texas and Iowa turned blue, Mississippi is now a battleground state, and Democrats flipped more Congressional seats than was widely expected.
But Democrats should not view the results as support for their policies and actions.
That was the overall message from some speakers during the Monterey Bay Economic Partnership’s State of the Region on Friday, Nov. 6 at CSU Monterey Bay, where government, business and nonprofit leaders from the tri-county area gathered to try to make sense of the election results while looking at the present and future challenges this region faces.
Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, D-Hollister, didn’t mince words, saying California’s political leaders lack the courage to do “crazy things” to solve affordability issues.
“We can’t look at this election as just a rejection of Donald Trump and an unconditional support of Democrats,” he said. “They [voters] don’t like us either. They don’t trust us. People are pissed because they feel like their government isn’t working for them on all levels. They are demanding results and some of it needs to change.”
Rivas said state leaders need to measure their success by whether housing becomes more affordable, whether residents can pay their bills and whether businesses are hiring more, not by “how many bills we pass or how many press conferences we hold.”
“We have the talent, we have the resources,” he said. “We now need the urgency and the courage.”
On the national level, whether Democrats will have any success in Congress is debatable, with a president who has vowed to become “Mr. Veto” to any Democrat-led legislation that comes to his desk.
But Ian Calderon, founder of Majority Advisors and former majority leader in the California State Assembly, has a suggestion: flatter Trump.
“He just wants to be told nice things,” Calderon said. “If you want to be liked, you need to restore these funding cuts, these cuts to health care. I think he’s not going to have a choice.”