We tell ourselves stories in order to live, Joan Didion famously wrote, and the one Democrats in California repeated for decades was Proposition 187.
Californians of a certain age can recite it by heart: A 1994 ballot initiative sought to make life miserable for undocumented immigrants, with proponents claiming that unchecked migration was destroying the Golden State by burdening social services and changing the demographics of cities. It passed with nearly two-thirds of the vote, despite opponents denouncing it as racist and protests across the state that drew hundreds of thousands.
That was the darkness before the light for Dems: While Republicans won the Prop. 187 battle, they ended up losing the war.
The ACLU and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund sued to stop the proposition from becoming law, and a federal judge eventually ruled it unconstitutional in 1998, with then-California Atty. Gen. Dan Lungren…
