Initiatives Lose (and What Else Is New?)

I have no particular insights about the gubernatorial or mayoral elections yesterday, but did follow the ballot initiatives in Ohio and California somewhat closely. Plenty of conclusions have already been drawn: the California results, in which eight initiatives lost, were a rejection of Schwarzenegger and a victory for unions; in Ohio, the defeat of a package of political reform initiatives including nonpartisan redistricting can be ascribed to a well-funded opposition that raised a lot of confusion about the measures. The defeat of an anti-gay measure in Maine is good news on that issue. An initiative in Washington that would have rolled back the state"s gas tax was also defeated, another sign that the anti-tax movement has run out of steam.

But there is a certain amount of over-analysis here. What all these results have in common is that they prove a basic rule: Ballot initiatives lose, most of the time. Complex ballot initiatives like non-partisan redistricting lose more often than relatively simple simple ones like banning same-sex marriage, raising the minimum wage or limiting school class size. The bias toward "No" on complex initiatives is enormous and seems to increase each year. 

And why should that be surprising? The idea of direct democracy is appealing, but faced with complex questions, most voters will react with a sense that they're not quite knowledgeable enough to evaluate all the possible consequences and weigh competing claims that they've only heard vaguely, and so the default option is to vote no, in favor of not messing with the status quo. That's particularly true in states that have "initiative fatigue," like California or Oregon. (In those states, early polling on an initiative needs to show close to 2:1 support before there's any real likelihood of winning.) But it's an easy emotion to invoke, even in Ohio where initiatives are not overused.

For years, liberals have wanted to play the state initiative game with the intensity of Grover Norquist on the right, particularly the ability to put multiple initiatives on multiple state ballots simultaneously -- tax limits, term limits, anti-gay and anti-gay marriage, the "paycheck protection act" which returned as one of Schwarzenegger's initiatives. There have been some liberal (defining that term broadly) successes, such as on minimum wage, on campaign finance reform, on medical marijuana, etc. In most cases, initial successes have been followed by defeats, so that the overall record is almost always mixed. (The best resource on all these results and the use of initiatives for progressive causes remains the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, which also has out a nice instant analysis of the 2005 results.) When traditional legislative politics seems deadlocked, static, irrelevant, out of touch, or wholly controlled by one party, the fantasy of going around it to The People remains ever-appealing.

But we don't play the game the same way the right does. We play it literally: We try to win the things we care about because we think they're good policy. The right sometimes does that, but more often they use initiatives as a way to fire up their base, to change the agenda, to force the other side to spend money, to break up liberal coalitions, or to achieve other goals that are incidental to victory. The win-loss record on many of the conservative initiave topics is equally mixed, but they have surely gotten more residual benefit from their losses.

In the future, I'd like to see a lot more creative use of initiatives that go directly to things people care about, that inspire groups of people who don't think politics speaks to them, that can split the right, and/or that are simple and basic assertions of our values, such as that no one should work for less than $5.15 an hour. And there should be much more wariness of strategies that call for using initiatives to achieve complex goals. And the fantasy that initiatives provide some way around the messy, frustrating fights of legislative politics is, sadly, just that.