Mark, you are making a mistake that academics who are not into the real world nitty gritty of election campaigns sometimes make.   Your are judging an outcome of an election by substituting your academic perceptions for the voters perceptions, and therefore, your conclusion is wrong.  Maybe your perception is that Rose Bird failed because she was unwilling to follow the constitution (even though Bird famously once stated that her "role is to do what's right under the Constitution.   And if that's politically unpopular, so be it.").   However, that was definitely not the voters principal perception in 1986.  Voters are smart, but not so smart that they understand constitutional principles the way you do.  The "reasoning voter" works off of campaign advertising and other clues extant during the election campaign.  And what voters actually understood as the reason to reject Rose Bird was not a generalized perception that she did not follow the constitution.  Instead, it was understanding obtained from the advertising and other clues they received during the retention election, and that was all about Rose Bird's poor record on the death penalty and overturning convictions of criminals. 

The tenor of the campaign against her in 1986, lead by Judge Tony Raukaukas, now the DA of Orange County, was all about her position on crime, and themes about constitutionalism, if they could even be grasped by voters beyond that issue of her failure to employ the death penalty law, were very secondary.  Though opposed by Governor Jerry Brown, California reinstated the death penalty in 1977, and Rose Bird (who at one time actually was Jerry Brown's campaign driver) came to the bench systematically voted to overturn 64 death penalty sentences that came before her.  Bird perceived her judgments in these 64 cases as nevertheless constitutional.  Those actions however were the center piece of her retention election and the reason why she lost her seat, because as translated to and by the majority of voters who rejected her, she was perceived as "soft on crime."

-Jim Lacy

Read more: Rose Elizabeth Bird - Court, California, Law, Public, Office, and Supreme http://law.jrank.org/pages/4764/Bird-Rose-Elizabeth.html#ixzz148iQBx9T

Rightly or wrongly, the perception of Chief Justice Bird was that she was unwilling to follow the clear mandates of the California Constitution. It was not primarily a matter of a perception that she was "soft on crime."