Bad news for California progressives – political pundits predict even lower turnout!; voting absentee; suggested SF and CA progressive voter guides

Even though the sun is shining very brightly on election day morning here in San Francisco there’s more bad news for progressives and liberals – today’s California election turnout is now expected to be even lower than previous predictions…The SF Chronicle this morning reported on the Field Poll’s prediction of an even lower turnout in CA’s election today [51%] than the Secretary of State’s Office prediction of 55%. More

The expected low turnout could be bad news for [Democratic Gubernatorial challenger] Phil Angelides and other Democrats because the people most likely to vote are older, richer, better-educated and whiter than the state's registered voters as a whole, factors that tend to favor Republicans.
Voters 50 and older make up 40 percent of the state's registered voters, but they are expected to be 59 percent of those voting in today's election, DiCamillo said.

New trends - I am one of the nearly 45% of voters that will be using our absentee ballots to vote.

An estimated 45 percent of California's 15.8 million registered voters are expected to use absentee ballots for this election, up from 27.1 percent in 2002 and 40 percent in last November's special election.

My partner and I usually fill them out the night before the election. After walking my 1st grader to school this morning I brought our absentee ballots to our polling place at our daughter’s school.

On Voter Guides and Other Cheatsheets – to help with voting on long and complex ballots like today's – we usually use a number of local voter guides including the San Francisco Bay Guardian http://www.sfbg.com/ , Harvey Milk Club slate card, League of Independent Voters/Young Voters guides and info from Mobilize the Immigrant Vote – Chinese Progressive Association, PODER, Filipinos for Affirmative Action and others.

To help with statewide issues – see the list of excellent voter guides listed by Frank Russo at the CA Progress Report Liberal/Progressive Voter guides

After the last ditch GOTV [get out the vote] work today, we will probably be joining
many of the labor and grassroots campaigns [SF's Prop F and H, Chris Daly for Supervisor, Pride at Work, Mobilize the Immigrant Vote, Chinese Progressive Association and PODER’s Progressive Electoral Project, Young Workers United, etc.] at the ‘Victory Party’after 8pm tonight at
Medjool - 2516 Mission St @ 21st, San Francisco’s Mission District.
Hopefully it will be an actual ‘victory’ party, but that all depends on our work today to turn out the vote, especially in immigrant and low income communities of color throughout the City - and to try to prove the pundits wrong about San Francisco Values and voter apathy in our state.