I’d almost rather pay for a wedding than vote in the primary election. I might not be the only person who feels that way. There isn’t a lot of exciting stuff on the ballot. The choices are almost predetermined.
But, hey, at least no one is running unopposed!
You’ve got incumbent conservative 4th District Santa Barbara County Supervisor Bob Nelson running against “liberal” Krishna Flores—who’s basically running against development and to represent Los Alamos. You’ve got Republican Frank Troise running against 3rd District Supervisor Joan Hartmann, but doing it in a weird way, while Lompoc Mayor Jenelle Osborne also jumped in the race for funsies, I guess, as an independent without a lot of support.
There’s Proposition 1, a $6.4 billion bond to build housing units and rearrange the mental health care system—but it may take dollars away from local services in the process. With the state’s ever-ballooning budget deficit for the 2024-25 fiscal year, which recently jumped from $58 billion to $73 billion, I’m not sure we need to be taking out any bonds.
And while we do need affordable housing, we don’t even really know how successful all that money we spent during the pandemic on homeless housing has been yet. Maybe we better tap the brakes and collect some data before moving full steam ahead into debt.
In the race against U.S. Rep. Salud Carbajal (D-Santa Barbara), we’ve got a Republican toeing the party line who wants to close the borders and a Democrat who hasn’t really raised any money and wants to focus on world peace. Carbajal has outraised both of his opponents put together by about $1.2 million—so I can see the writing on the wall for that race. Boring.
Assemblymember Gregg Hart (D-Santa Barbara) is in the middle of his first term, and he’s already running again. He plans to save the whales—which is really great, don’t get me wrong—and fix this looming budget deficit (although he didn’t really specify how, other than mentioning that it would be difficult) while his opponent is planning an overthrow of California’s education system. Sounds interesting, right?
Wrong. Republican Sari Domingues from Santa Maria founded Santa Barbara County’s chapter of Moms for Liberty. The “parents’ rights” organization is very vocal about being anti-trans, anti-science, and anti-diversity. They want to throw out textbooks that mention the United Nations, global warming, LGBTQ-plus issues, and/or the realities of American history.
Domingues wants to focus on reading, writing, and arithmetic, you see? Nothing else should matter. Ethnic studies? Not cool, Domingues said.
“What they’re doing is teaching negative stuff about certain ethnicities and not pushing the positive of them,” she said.
I’m going to need you to elaborate, ma’am, but my assumption about what that means isn’t good. If you check out her website, which you absolutely should, you’ll see that she believes in the “Judeo-Christian Constitution.”
Is that a real thing?
I could go on and on and on. But I won’t.
However, I will vote on March 5, because I don’t have a wedding to pay for.
The Canary is just a complainer. Send thoughts to [email protected].
