About Some of the Other Things America's Voters Wanted...

America, we are now being reminded, is a complicated place. At the state and city level—in states red, blue, and in-between—voters in the 2016 election used the levers of direct democracy to embrace stiffer gun regulations, looser marijuana laws, and lots of ballot initiatives aimed at providing more affordable housing. Two big transit measures, in Los Angeles and Seattle, passed, as did a passel of lesser ones. (More on that from my colleague Laura Bliss.) Also, Donald Trump is president-elect. Let us attempt to sort through this.

The biggest climate-change related action of the election failed at the ballot box in Washington State: I-732, which would have imposed a rising levy on fossil fuels, divided environmental groups and briefly brought the Sierra Club and Koch Industries on the same side; it lost with 42 percent of the vote. But in Florida, the anti-solar Amendment 1 failed to trick voters into supporting a utility-backed measure that would have limited homeowners’ abilities to install residential solar panels.