Marijuana won big in the 2020 election, adding four more states to the eleven that have currently legalized marijuana for all adults.
Legalization also out-performed the Democratic nominee for president, Joe Biden.
The presidential race is a nail-biter as we await final vote tallies in a few crucial states. One of those is Arizona, where Joe Biden holds on to 50.5% share of the vote to claim the state’s 11 electoral votes.
Marijuana legalization won that swing state with 60% of the vote.
Montana and South Dakota are both solid-red Trump states, where Biden only received 41% and 36% of the vote, respectively.
Marijuana legalization won those red states with 57% and 53% of the vote, respectively.
It was no surprise that heavily-Democratic New Jersey voted to legalize, but the 2/3rds support (67%), marking the greatest statewide support for legalization in any election was a nice bonus.
Biden only got 60% of the vote in New Jersey.
Hey, Democrats! How about campaigning on policies all voters support and your voters really support?
It’s beyond frustrating to watch Democrats continue to shy away from the issue of marijuana legalization.
It’s been a winning statewide ballot issue now in the past five congressional term elections (we’d all like to forget 2015’s Ohio Issue 3), yet not only do Democratic leaders reject legalization as a plank in the party platform, they go and nominate for president the #1 Drug War Democrat — Joe Biden, the man responsible more than anyone for mandatory minimums, mass incarceration, and creation of the Drug Czar’s office, who has only been dragged reluctantly to Kevin Sabet’s preferred policy of maintaining penalties for adult marijuana users to coerce them into drug treatment they neither want nor need.
We wait with bated breath as to whether Biden can eke out a narrow Electoral College win against the worst human being to occupy any elected office in any nation in the history of mankind. We can only imagine how many more voters a Democratic candidate who strongly supported marijuana legalization could have driven to the polls, considering that three-quarters of Democrats, two-thirds of Independents, and even half of Republicans support it.
It’s almost as if Democratic leadership is more interested in what certain corporate people think of marijuana legalization than what two-thirds of the human people want.
With the White House hinging on the results in Nevada, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia, just imagine how a president promising legalization would have resonated with shop owners in Las Vegas, or college kids in Atlanta and the Research Triangle of North Carolina, or social justice warriors in Philly?
Or consider that control of the US Senate will likely come down to two runoff elections in Georgia. Imagine campaigning in Atlanta and Athens as a senate candidate whose election would pass the marijuana legalization bills the Democratic president-elect has promised to sign.
After this election where marijuana and drug policy issues batted a thousand, the Democratic Party’s refusal to adopt a strong pro-legalization stance is political malpractice.
