Eighteen percent. That's wacko territory. Which, all things considered, seems quite appropriate. Eighteen percent! 0.18. Less than one out of five. What county? Alameda County in the Bay Area of California.
That's not all. Marylyn M. Singleton (who apparently chose to run for Congress without the Republican label) got thirteen percent of the vote against Barbara Lee. She's probably not even as close to wacko-ness as Mitt Romney. Barbara Lee even got a higher percentage of the total vote (86%) in her district that did Nancy Pelosi (85%) in her San Francisco one.
What else did my county do? It looks like they voted for but defeated a measure to enact a parcel tax to give the Oakland Zoo more money (it would have needed 2/3rd to pass, and got 63%). On the very edge was a measure that would have raised the sales tax to fund transporation projects in the county. It also passed but failed with 66.34% of the vote (it needs 66.666667... which would mean thousands more aye votes net would have to roll in... very unlikely).
Perhaps the best news to me was the defeat of a sit-and-lie ordinance in Berkeley, CA. By 52% - 48%, city residents (myself included) voted against making sitting on sidewalks in Berkeley's commercial districts a crime. It was a close thing, and when I went to sleep on election night it looked like it would pass. One of the nicest things to find out when I woke up was that it was failing narrowly, and it's nay percentage has continued to increase with each successive tally. I would rather be asked for spare change occasionally than have people thrown in jail. Still, it's scary that even in Berkeley, CA there are forty-eight percent of voters who just want to see "them" go away.
Statewide, it looks like there will only by 14 Republicans in our Congressional delegation out of 53 (26%), whereas currently there are nineteen (36%). You can thank California for a good chunk of the increase in Democratic numbers in the House. Democrats will also control a two-thirds supermajority in both houses of the state legislature though what, if anything, they will do with it remains to be seen.
The US Government may soon have to step in and declare Republicans an endangered (sub)species in California. Or will Democrats screw things up badly enough, and Republicans figure out how not to treat the majority of California's voters like a pestilence, to make a comeback?