California was a lost cause in voting for the president, but there was still a little bit of good news.

Proposition 16 failed, by a huge 56% to 44% at last count, smacking down yet another effort by the state's far-left elites to foist affirmative action labeling onto California's diverse population.

Here's what Google had on its results (it doesn't link to anywhere) on a keyword search for "Proposition 16 results," citing the Associated Press:

This is a huge repudiation. 

A big reason is that California has a large Asian-American population, and very large numbers were aware that any newly instituted affirmative action spoils system was going to come out of their hides.  I wrote about that here.  Work your hardest to win some prize; watch it handed over to someone else who has the "right" color of skin as his main merit.

Presumably, underrepresented blacks and Latinos would benefit and Asians would lose, but here's the impressive thing: every last county in California rejected it save for the Bay Area counties (which include lily-white Marin) and huge Los Angeles County.  Every one — see the New York Times map here — and note that that includes Latino-majority and Latino-significant counties such as Imperial, San Diego, and San Bernardino as well as the counties in the lower San Joaquin Valley.  The Latinos, like anyone else, rejected this bean-counting measure that measures the worth of people by the color of their skin over all else.  They rejected the bad idea like a bad smell.

It's the third time these kinds of measures have come before voters, and every single time, they have failed.  Proposition 16 was put out to repeal Proposition 209, passed in the late 1990s to get rid of affirmative action.  There also was a measure in 2014 that Asians kept from getting on the books.

The Sacramento leftist elites had banked on Black Lives Matter to get the ball rolling again, but once again, they failed, because it just doesn't work in a state where whites are probably a minority now and Asians and other ethnic groups are the ones who are going to pay. 

If these creeps were really concerned about black and Latino minority representation, they'd ask themselves why black and Latino kids can't get a quality education based on teachers' union dominance.  They won't do that, so they target Asians instead.  Their gambit failed, even in the Age of Black Lives Matter.  Maybe there's some hope for California in that the crazies got beaten back for another day.

Image credit: Needpix public domain.