This election cycle has left many progressives across the country disillusioned and fearful of what a second Trump administration will mean to our safety and civil liberties. While California’s Democratic leadership is gearing up to challenge Trump’s extremist policies, the irony is that some of the most regressive, right-wing policies were just passed in our state before Trump has even stepped foot in the oval office…again. Californians are now staring down the consequences of the failures of statewide ballot measures that would have slightly alleviated some of the harshest inequalities.

While more than a dozen California races remain too close to call—a reality of the state’s comprehensive vote-by-mail system that ensures every voice is heard—one thing is already crystal clear: corporate money dominated this election cycle’s ballot measures.

An analysis of the election funding that propped up tough on crime policies tells a troubling story: massive corporations and carceral interests like the prison lobby spent millions to pass archaic policies — despite the fact that research shows the implementation of these policies will detrimentally harm the majority of Californians, and their underlying principles do not align with most Californians’ values when informed, according to polling from Vera Action.

The passage of regressive Prop 36 expands the likelihood that more people will get locked up, and for longer. Under current law, most non-violent property crimes under $950 are treated as misdemeanors, but Prop 36 lowers this threshold to $400 and mandates jail time for repeat offenses. The proposition’s funders were corporations like Walmart, pro-business special interest groups and statewide law enforcement agencies, who poured nearly $17 million into the proposition. Their campaign capitalized on the media-manufactured anxieties from “smash and grabs” that egregiously ignored historically-low crime rates in our state and across the nation.

While California’s violent crime rate did increase slightly in 2023—up 1.7% to 503 crimes per 100,000 residents, according to state justice department data—this narrative ignores crucial context: our crime rates remain far below their historic peaks of the 1990s.

Rather than address root causes of crime, Prop 36′s corporate backers and law enforcement supporters manipulated Californians’ feelings of financial insecurity to scapegoat people suffering from houselessness and substance use, a familiar MAGA playbook currently employed to blame migrant people for the economic woes of the nation. Their barrage of well-funded propaganda convinced a large swath of the electorate in CA to vote against our own interests and ignore the reality that corporations are jeopardizing public safety by keeping wages down, rents high and our jails and prisons packed.

Prop 33– an expansion of rent control—didn’t pass, which will keep housing more expensive in many jurisdictions. Currently, California’s rent control law caps annual increases at 10% for buildings over 15 years old. Prop 33 would have lowered the cap to 3% and expanded protections to newer buildings. The opposition to this statewide prop was backed by real estate and landlord lobbyists, who outspent supporters like Unite Here Local 11 almost three to one, to the tune of over $126 million dollars. Analyzing these campaign contributions illustrates that the real estate lobby will pay any amount at the ballot box to keep landlord profits high at the expense of poor and working class people.

Also consider the opponents to Prop 32, a statewide proposition that would have raised minimum wage over time to eighteen dollars per hour. California’s minimum wage currently stands at $16 per hour—below what economists calculate as a living wage for every major metropolitan area in the state. When juxtaposed with rising costs, which reporting from the California Legislative Office shows have skyrocketed up 20% since 2020, this small raise for wage laborers would have only been an incremental step towards remedying glaring income inequality—which strongly correlates to racial inequity. And yet, corporate interests like the California Restaurants Association and California Chamber of Commerce opposed the measure by investing $855,000 to kill it this cycle.

There is an inextricable link between low wages, lack of affordable housing, and “law and order” policies that contribute to the historical war on the poor in this country. In Los Angeles County, a District Attorney who has shared plans to criminalize survival acts like living on the street, sex work, and navigating serious mental illness, creates a toxic cocktail of policies that criminalize our devastating economic reality. When the poor are punished for being poor, it’s no wonder that public safety issues like lack of affordable housing and well paying jobs force people into a deeper cycle of economic precarity and criminalization. This war on poor Californians will undoubtedly balloon the jail and prison populations across the state— especially in Los Angeles County, which is home to the largest jail system in the world.

How grassroots movements are winning despite the odds

What is the antidote to this corporate and conservative repression? Grassroots political education and organized people power. Amidst the heavy losses, grassroots organizing delivered significant progressive wins in Los Angeles. Building on the historic election of the first public defender to the Los Angeles Superior Court in 2022, the La Defensa Justice PAC claimed victory once again by supporting the election of two new career public defenders to the bench – Ericka Wiley and George Turner. These progressive judicial candidates received nearly 60% of the LA County electorate’s votes, a strong show of confidence for change in the judicial system.

But these victories did not happen overnight. Over the last 5 years, La Defensa has systematically built public awareness of the otherwise opaque judicial branch by creating and expanding judicial watchdog programs like Rate My Judge and CourtwatchLA, establishing the base of informed voters that secured our electoral victories the past two cycles. Alongside our partners at LA Forward, we recruited and trained a diverse group of attorneys to run for judicial office, creating the pipeline of future judges from under-represented groups.

Angelinos can also celebrate the election of tenants rights attorney Ysabel Jurado to the LA City Council, who mounted an extraordinary grassroots campaign that unseated disgraced City Council member Kevin De Leon. Other progressive victories include: the passing of Measure A, which secures long-lasting funding for affordable housing, establishing a $250 million annual fund for housing development; the election of Karla Griego, a special education teacher, to the LA Unified School District; the election of community organizer Sade Elhawary to the State Assembly; and the reelection of State Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, a community organizer and one of California’s biggest champions for decarceration, authoring legislation that reduced prison sentences for non-violent offenses and expanded voting rights. These local wins are beacons of light in an otherwise bleak landscape. They signal that even in the toughest political landscape, progressive wins are possible when a clear message is delivered through grassroots campaigns.

Californians will be fighting right-wing policies on two fronts – at home, and against the federal government. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to unleash a local-cop-fueled migrant deportation machine that threatens the lives of millions of Californians. CA Prop 36 will only serve to do Trump’s bidding by funneling more people into the carceral system, exposing them to deportation and family separation. According to immigration advocacy group CHIRLA, contact with the criminal justice system triggered 68% of deportation proceedings in Los Angeles County last year.

As an organization built by immigrants and the daughters of immigrants, La Defensa is mounting an effort to claw back our progressive wins here at home alongside partners like Initiate Justice Action, Ella Baker Center and VERA Institute for Justice. We’re also expanding our court watching efforts into federal immigration courts in the new year, to ensure the mechanisms of accountability we’ve employed at the LA Superior Court level can operate at the federal level.

It felt devastating to wake up on November 6 to the harsh reality that many of us and our loved ones may be criminalized, deported, or further economically disenfranchised by election outcomes. The only way to resist this feeling of despair — and put a check on these very real consequences — is to collectively fight back. The way we fortify ourselves to fight for the world we deserve is to grieve, to process, and then, to double down on our strategies to defend our communities.

Join us in the fight at ladefensa.org. We will see you in the struggle.

Ivette Alé-Ferlito (they/them) is a queer migrant movement leader, and the Co-Founder and Executive Director of La Defensa. Ivette has been organizing and leading anti-carceral campaigns in California for nearly a decade, securing historic victories including ending LA County’s $3.5 billion jail expansion plan in 2019 and the passing of Measure J in 2020.