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Looking Down the Ballot: Remember, A Lot of Important Non-Trump Things Happened On Tuesday

By Vivian Kane | Politics | November 10, 2016 |

By Vivian Kane | Politics | November 10, 2016 |



I’m not personally in a place yet where I’m ready to look for bright sides or silver linings to Tuesday’s Presidential election. Hopefully someday soon, I will have optimism again, but today is not that day.

That being said, I’m assuming most of you who voted took part in the full democratic process available and checked more than just one box or punched one chad or whatever. Because there were a lot of officials and measures up this week, and a lot more happened than just some horrible man taking the White House. Here are a few of those things.

—Our Senate now has four times the women of color it did prior to Tuesday. Depressingly, that number last week was one: Japanese-American senator Mazie Hirono. Kamala Harris, Tammy Duckworth and Catherine Cortez Masto have now also joined those ranks. Masto is our very first Latina senator.

—California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada all legalized pot, with Arkansas, Florida, and North Dakota all legalizing medical marijuana.

—Colorado, Washington, Maine, and Arizona all raised their minimum wage.

—Colorado became the sixth state to legalize physician-assisted suicide.

—Washington, Nevada, and California don’t want to take your guns, but they did vote in some awfully reasonable guidelines. In Washington, you can get a court order to temporarily stall the sale of firearms to people who may be a danger to themselves or others, and California & Nevada was pretty much like “hey, let’s make sure background checks are a thing we do.”

—One of the most prominent ballot measures in California was the proposal to make condoms mandatory in all porn scenes. While at first thought that might seem like a good idea, it was opposed by pretty much everyone except the flat-out anti-porn Bible thumpers. The measure didn’t pass, so porn gets to keep on keeping on for those CA dollars.

—I’m having trouble seeing if final results for Colorado’s Amendment T are in, which was supposed to finally, officially do away with slavery. Slavery. In 2016. Apparently it’s still technically legal in the case of a person having committed a crime. The optimists seem to be thinking it’s not passing because people just straight-up didn’t know this was still a thing.

—California had two plastic bag propositions on its (incredibly long) ballot. The plastic industry tried to get us to direct our 10¢ per grocery store bag fee to environmental groups, but we were cool with just doing away with single use bags entirely instead.

Also, there’s this. Its exact validity is being challenged— this may be from the same pre-election polls that told us we lived in a mostly sane country— but I choose to believe.

This list is, obviously, partial. It’s also California-heavy since, admittedly, that’s my personal horse in this race. Please add your own below: what candidates and measures and props were important to you?