By Tom Angell
While many politicians continue to treat marijuana law reform as an issue that’s not important enough to include near the top of their agendas, they might want to take a look at the results from Election Day.
Eight out of nine statewide marijuana initiatives were approved last week, and in several places they outperformed politicians at the polls.
Florida’s medical marijuana measure, for example, got supermajority support in every single county across the state, strongly outperforming President-Elect Donald Trump and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio:
Medical marijuana: 6,515,964
Trump: 4,615,910
Rubio: 4,833,429
In Nevada, a successful measure to legalize marijuana for adults over 21 years of age bested the performances of Trump and U.S. Senate race winner Catherine Cortez Masto:
Legal marijuana: 602,400
Trump: 511,319
Cortez Masto: 520,658
Maine’s marijuana legalization measure, although it barely won, still did better than Trump did:
Legal marijuana: 378,288
Trump: 334,838
In California, a measure to legalize marijuana outperformed incoming U.S. Senator Kamala Harris:
Legal marijuana: 5,366,521
Harris: 5,264,471
In Montana, a measure to restore the state’s medical marijuana law after politicians tried to scale it back got more votes than Trump or Gov. Steve Bullock did:
Medical marijuana: 284,530
Trump: 274,119
Bullock: 250,845
Of course, marijuana measures also got way more votes than the Republican president-elect did in heavily Democratic states like California and Massachusetts.
And even in places where marijuana law reform measures didn’t outperform the candidates, they still did very well, often coming close to the vote totals for elected officials. In North Dakota, for example, the successful medical cannabis measure got just 714 fewer votes than Trump did:
Medical marijuana: 215,486
Trump: 216,200
And in Arizona, the only state to defeat a marijuana ballot measure this year, U.S. Sen. John McCain only did slightly better than ending prohibition did:
Legal marijuana: 1,117,858
McCain: 1,241,083
National polls show that a growing majority of Americans support legalizing marijuana outright and that a supermajority of voters support medical cannabis. In many cases, cannabis is much more popular with voters than elected officials are. That’s something politicians might want to keep in mind when deciding how to vote on the increasing number of marijuana law reform proposals that are being introduced in federal, state and local legislative bodies.
Photo Courtesy of Allie Beckett.
