Yesterday was municipal election day in Denver (see results here). It’s not something I generally get excited about, since it’s such a leftist electorate (Democrats outnumber Republicans almost four to one). The battles for mayor and city council were mostly between mainstream Democrats (meaning semi-socialists of varying degrees of corruption) and challengers from the radical left. Six candidates were vying for two at-large city council seats, and I couldn’t bring myself to vote for any of them.
But we did have two significant ballot issues. Initiative 300 would have given the “homeless” who won’t use shelters or accept help getting off the street (a.k.a. vagrants, hobos, junkies) the right to camp as long as they want on any public property. Even most of Denver’s bleeding-heart liberals couldn’t swallow that. I guess they’d seen the news stories about “homeless encampments” with mountains of trash, the stench of urine and feces, and syringes scattered about. Or maybe they’d encountered feces or needles in their alleys or parks (someone took a dump on my garage apron a while back). It was rejected overwhelmingly (17% to 83%). Good.
Initiative 301 would have decriminalized possession and use of psilocybin mushrooms. I supported it, but expected it to fail bigly. It’s apparently failed, but the margin surprised me. The “magic mushroom initiative” trails by 48% to 52%.
UPDATE: 301 has apparently passed, with just under 51% of the vote (pending all the usual verification stuff). There was a surge of voting on election day, and those votes weren’t counted until this morning. Apparently, about 55% of election-day voters favored 301. I wonder where the nearest cow pasture is.
Here’s what’s interesting: the incumbent mayor, Michael Hancock, received 39% of the vote and thus faces a runoff. Magic mushrooms outpolled the mayor by 9 percentage points! So significantly more Denverites are OK with psilocybin than with the mayor. I guess they’re not as dumb as I thought.
I suspect some version of the shroom initiative will be back next year. The mayor’s future will be determined in June.