I heard plenty of commentators pass off the defeat of Proposition 19, the marijuana legalization measure on the November 2010 ballot, with a condescending, “Even California isn’t that crazy.”  You would think these professional pundits would know by now that it is never a good call to underestimate the craziness of California.

Which leads up to my favorite election fact from the 2010 election:  More Californians voted to legalize pot than voted for Meg Whitman for governor. So we really are that crazy!

With the final votes yet to be tallied, Meg got 4,027,661 Californians to vote for her  while nearly half a million more, 4,502,657, voted to legalize pot.  You could almost double the population of North Dakota with the difference between the two tallies.  The Whitman campaign spent $163 million on her failed effort ($141 million of her own money and a mere $22 million in Meg-free campaign contributions), so each vote she collected cost her $40.47.  The much-derided Prop 19 supporters, in contrast, spent $4 million on their campaign, or $1.13 per vote.

More significant, though, is what running a social-reform proposition in California means to the rest of the nation, even if the proposition loses.  Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the pro-legalization Drug Policy Alliance, put it this way, “California’s Proposition 19 may not have won a majority of voters yesterday, but it already represents an extraordinary victory for the broader movement to legalize marijuana.  Its mere presence on the ballot … elevated and legitimized public discourse about marijuana and marijuana policy.”

Students for Sensible Drug Policy, another pro-legalization group, added, “One of the greatest hidden victories of the Prop 19 campaign was that it trained the emerging generation of marijuana reformers on how to run a legalization campaign, and left virtually all of them wanting to win on this issue in 2012.”

Colorado is a likely target, underscoring California’s continuing ability to influence American society, even if the state’s voters continue to vote as strangely as they did in 2010.