The Little Brown Reader

Fat chance. Schwarzenegger's win dramatically demonstrated the immovability of the major parties, and the absolute hopelessness of third-party challengers. The last-minute candidate not only received more votes, both in total numbers and as a percentage of the total electorate, than Gray Davis did in his re-election less than a year ago, but did so with a split Republican ticket, against a Democratic challenger who was widely (and wrongly) expected to lock up the Latino vote. (That Schwarzenegger, the pick of the statewide and national Republican establishment, was able to get a near-majority despite Tom McClintock's drawing more than a million hard-conservative votes should scare the Democrats even more than it discourages the third parties.)

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In the longer term, Schwarzenegger's surprisingly total victory points to some interesting trends in voters' views toward governance. In a post-election dispatch, Slate columnist Mickey Kaus said of the governor-elect, "If he's going to keep our loyalty it will have to be by producing actual results: a slimmed down government, a balanced budget, better schools, a better business climate, etc." Kaus is a consistently interesting commentator on Golden State politics, but such good-government pieties seemed laughably out of place in the context of the recently concluded circus. If people had wanted good government, they'd have voted for Tom McClintock. Instead they voted for Schwarzenegger, and logic indicates that they voted for him not in spite of his lack of political experience, but because of it.

On the principle that any day people turn against the government is a good day for liberty, Schwarzenegger's win was good news indeed. It also takes some of the sheen off the Republican Party. If the Republicans had not brought in a Hollywood ringer, we would almost certainly be hailing governor-elect Bustamante right now. It was only the presence of an actor/bodybuilder with a funny accent that kept the vote from splintering 135 different ways and propelling a true minority choice into office with a tiny fraction of the vote.