Earlier today, we discussed how one of the biggest losers of the 2020 elections might have been the public’s faith in the electoral process. Continuing on with the list of also-rans, the editors at the Washington Free Beacon dug into some of the ballot issues that were decided this week, along with the identity politics driving various demographics to the polls. Their conclusion is that one of the most damaged entities coming out of this race is the woke utopia envisioned by the Democrats’ furthest-left agitators, which seems to have been roundly rejected by voters even as they threatened to end the Trump presidency. And this effect was noted in some unlikely places such as California.

In a week of surprises, California’s rejection of a ballot measure that would have allowed the state to resume its affirmative action program was among the most significant.

The measure, known as Proposition 16, wasn’t defeated by shy Trump voters. Polling showed Hispanic and other minority voters evenly split on the measure, and on Tuesday it was defeated in California’s most Latino counties.

California’s result is just one piece of the mounting evidence that voters on Tuesday threw a wrench in the progressive plan to leverage a “coalition of the ascendant” and an “emerging Democratic majority” to turn the country into a woke utopia.

Prop 16 wasn’t the only referendum where voters in the Golden State appeared to turn their backs on their progressive betters. As we previously discussed, Proposition 22 also went down in flames, potentially rescuing the gig economy in California. And the voters did this despite a massively well-funded campaign by the state’s labor unions (who basically wrote the state’s odious AB-5 law that gutted rideshare services) to prevent the measure. Plenty of voters that California Democrats assumed were going to behave themselves like good little woke warriors obviously decided to turn to the Dark Side of the Force.

The signs of this effect went beyond basic ballot initiatives. The Democrats were relying heavily on support for their usual agenda of identity politics and race-baiting to fuel the anticipated blue wave. Many of their candidates, led by The Squad and their cheerleaders, encouraged this line of thinking and amplified it on the campaign trail. And yet, President Donald Trump, who was lambasted by progressives for four years as a racist, xenophobe, and every other name in the book surprised them all.

Trump turned out more minority voters than any Republican presidential candidate in decades. And as the Free Beacon noted, this wasn’t just seen among a group of right-wing Cuban-Americans in southern Florida. Trump won some of the most heavily Hispanic districts in the country. He also improved his margins with both Black males and females, which were already higher than nearly any Republican in the modern era.

Some House Democrats are surveying the wreckage and clearly seeing the writing on the wall. One of them already went public and told the press that her party’s lurch toward socialism in general and calls to defund or abolish the police, in particular, nearly cost them their majority And if Americans really find the slices of socialist pie that the Democrats were serving up so tasty, why are they almost certainly going to fail to take the Senate majority?

Even if Donald Trump has failed to secure a second term, it’s truly beginning to look as if he produced a very productive effect on the electorate. Even if too many voters were put off by his disruptive and frequently brash performances, he spurred his adversaries to try to shove a huge serving of their worst progressive impulses down the throats of the voters and an encouraging number of them wound up spitting it right back in their faces.