"Government workers are a voting power in Sacramento area"

Great to talk to Jon Ortiz of the Sacramento Bee for this article. 

Government workers will be potent voting blocs in all three elections, said Jessica Levinson, a campaign expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, particularly in this low-key election year. 

“They are a group more likely to turn out,” she said. “They’re more invested in the government because they’re a part of it.”

...

Some of the state’s largest public-employee unions have endorsed Pan, who is a regular at rallies and has carried legislation to curtail job outsourcing. Dickinson has written bills to expand civil-service protections, eliminate criminal-history questions on civil-service job applications and to move state employees out of the defective Board of Equalization headquarters. 

A cynic would say those worker-protection bills were pandering to the base, Levinson said. But simply because a measure is politically savvy doesn’t mean the politician doesn’t believe in it. 

“And given the electorate, in a sense, it would be stupid not to do things like that,” she said.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/the-state-worker/article3458000.html#storylink=cpy