Numbers are current as of 5:50 a.m. on 11/7/07.

Some early election results this morning. These numbers will change  a bit, of course, as mailed ballots continue to trickle in…

  • In property rights: Oregon’s Measure 49, the partial antidote to Measure 37, was passing easily by 61 to 39.
  • In transportation: Puget Sound’s Proposition 1—the roads and transit propsal—looked headed for defeat by a margin of  44 to 56. (Full results here.)

There are a couple of lessons, I think, that we can glean from the results:

1. People hate regulatory takings laws. They really hate them. They’re fundamentally undemocratic; they breed unfairness and resentment; and they damage valuable community traditions.

2. For the first time, it appears that worry about climate may have tipped the scales in a transportation vote. In fairness, there was plenty of confusion and disagreement over the proposal’s climate impacts—mainly because no one conducted a full climate assessment of the measure — but it clearly weighed as a factor for a critical bloc of voters on both sides of the issue. (See, among others, the Seattle P-I (yes), The Stranger (no), the Yes Campaign, the Sierra Club’s No Campaign, Ron Sims (no), the right-leaning Washington Policy Center (no), and even the anti-tax/rail No Campaign, which kept trumpeting the Sierra Club’s opposition as a primary reason to vote no). In fact, Prop 1 may be the last of its kind: a Cascadian transportation proposal that lacked a climate accounting.

We’ll have more to say on each of these later.

Update: I don’t always write well at 5:30 in the morning. Some of the language above is changed, for the better I hope.