Thomas D. Elias

During his first eight years as governor, Jerry Brown was so imaginative about what state government could do that he won the nickname Gov. Moonbeam. It took Mr. Brown, then in his 30s, to theorize that a state could launch its own communication satellite. And that a governor should deal person to person with presidents and prime ministers of foreign countries. Common sense ideas today, but visionary in the 1970s.

These are days of optimism, maybe even delusion, for the California Republican Party, which hasn’t won a statewide race of any kind since 2006.

Of all the issues in Prop. 46, an omnibus measure on the Nov. 4 ballot aiming to improve patients’ rights in several health care areas, money is the one that counts most. The central question boils down to: Should victims of medical malpractice and their lawyers get rich? Or should malpractice insurance companies stay rich?

It’s almost a foregone conclusion that the Prop. 1 water bond on next month’s ballot will pass easily: Every poll shows it with almost a 2-1 lead heading into the vote. The opposition has virtually no money for television commercials. Two other propositions are almost equally deserving of yes votes, 45 and 48. Prop. 45 is almost a ...

From the rhetoric Gov. Brown employed, you would think a law he signed early this fall would clean up the initiative process for all time. Not exactly. Like the so-called ground water fix he signed earlier, this one leaves untouched the chief flaws of the process it is supposed to fix.

Just like this fall, there was a desultory quality – some called it murky – to the way Gov. Brown campaigned two years ago for his pet Prop. 30, which raised sales taxes a smidgen while considerably upping income tax levies on the wealthiest to bail out schools and a few other state services to the tune of $6.5 billion a year. Sure, Mr. Brown campaigned. But in the last weeks, there were no ...

No candidate likes to admit in October that he has virtually no chance to win the office he’s running for. So it is today with Neel Kashkari, the Republican nominee – read: sacrificial lamb – who is Gov. Brown’s reelection opponent. Occasionally a seemingly sure loser shows enough fire and grit to establish himself or herself as a force to be reckoned with in the future. An example is Dianne Feinstein, then the Democratic mayor of San Francisco, who ran a fierce but losing campaign for governor against Republican Pete Wilson in 1990. Her effort demonstrated statewide appeal; she handily won a seat in the U.S. Senate two years later and has outlasted Wilson by more than a decade.

The outcome is rarely certain when state government asks voter permission to spend $7.5 billion of the taxpayers’ money. It also is unusual for a ballot proposition to win as wide a range of support as Prop. 1 already has more than a month before the Nov. 4 Election Day.

Few Americans need welfare and government support less than Elon Musk, the hyper-creative head of the Tesla Motors electric car company, the Space X rocketry and satellite hoisting firm and Solar City, a leader in renewable energy. Yet almost no one gets more government benefits and business.

It was lawbreaking, both proven and alleged, that ended the Democrats’ supermajority in the state Senate. Republicans and their efforts had nothing to do with it. Until state Sens. Roderick Wright of Los Angeles, Ron Calderon of Montebello and Leland Yee of San Francisco encountered serious legal problems, Democrats had more than two-thirds of the seats in both houses of the Legislature for almost the first time ever.