In Michigan, it’s a battle over school vouchers. In Alaska the fight is over medical marijuana. Nebraskans are being asked to outlaw civil unions. In Colorado, Amendment 25 would impose a twenty-four-hour waiting period and antiabortion propaganda on women wanting to terminate a pregnancy. These are just a few of the dozens of state initiatives and ballot measures that voters will face on November 7.
The overwhelming majority of them are in the Mountain West and on the Pacific Coast–and most are rollbacks led by conservatives. “There are some good progressive initiatives,” says Amy Pritchard of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center. “But progressives are mostly on the defensive.” Because initiatives generally don’t get the same attention that candidates do, voters tend not to focus on them until the last minute, if they focus at all, making outcomes hard to predict.
Once again California is the bloodiest and costliest of ballot- initiative battlegrounds. As much as $50 million is being spent by both sides on Proposition 38, which would widely introduce school vouchers. Silicon Valley multimillionaire Tim Draper is bankrolling the pro-voucher forces, but stiff opposition from teachers’ unions and elected officials seems to be dominating. (A similar plan in Michigan could win, however.)
A similarly salutary role was not played by many of these same officials on another California measure. Cooked up by the bipartisan political establishment, Prop 34 would short-circuit real campaign finance reform by enacting a measure that is a reform in name only. In San Francisco, a creative Proposition L would close legal loopholes that allow dot-coms and other gentrifiers to turn low-income residential and industrial neighborhoods into gilded offices and condo villages. Prop 36, a measure that would reverse the logic of the failed drug war by substituting treatment for incarceration of nonviolent users, seems to be gaining the upper hand, with substantial support from several groups backed by financier George Soros. Opposition to the measure ranges from prosecutors to the otherwise liberal actor Martin Sheen.
Alaskans appear to be poised to approve a cannabis decriminalization law that would also grant pardons to people convicted under state marijuana laws and make them eligible for restitution. Nevadans, too, will be voting on whether to approve medical marijuana–as well as whether to ban gay marriage. In Arkansas and Massachusetts, conservatives are championing antitax initiatives.
Oregon’s menu of twenty-six ballot measures is a nightmare for progressives. The militantly antigay Oregon Citizens Alliance has collected more than $170,000 to promote Measure 9, which would ban public schools from teaching anything that promotes or sanctions homosexuality, but opponents have raised about six times that amount. Meanwhile, progressives are also having to spend resources to oppose measures 92 and 98, which would restrict the ability of unions to collect money to use for political purposes from more than 200,000 unionized workers.
The good news from the Northwest is that Oregon is one of two states (Missouri is the other) where voters have a chance to approve clean-money campaign finance reforms. In the past few years, four states–Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts and Arizona–have approved such laws. In each, the special-interest-funded opposition barely put in a showing, but that has changed. “We have always been David and the other side the Goliaths,” says Public Campaign executive director Nick Nyhart. “In the past Goliath never came to play. Now he’s out in force.”
An Oregon radio campaign tries to tar the reformers as fronts for eco-terrorists and neo-Nazis. In Missouri, corporate opponents are threatening to spend $2 million to defeat the measure; to date Anheuser-Busch has led the charge with a $25,000 contribution, followed closely by KC Power & Light, Hallmark and the Missouri Association of Realtors. “It’s crucial that these two measures pass,” says Nyhart. “Clean money is an idea that has been winning, and we don’t want to lose the momentum.” In both states, the battle is tight and likely to go down to the wire. (Readers who wish to contribute can contact Missouri Voters for Fair Elections at 314-531-9630 and the Oregon Campaign for Political Accountability at 503-796-1099.)
