What was measure 16 about?
Measure 16 was an effort to overturn California’s ban on affirmative action. And that ban was put in place in 1996 by voters. It was called prop 209 and it banned the government from considering things like race and sex and ethnicity in public hiring, awarding public contracts, and public university admissions. So Prop 16 would have overturned prop 209, thus allowing the state to consider those things.
And the fact that it didn’t pass, was that surprising?
Yeah… People who support affirmative action, have been really fighting to overturn Prop 209 since it passed like almost 25 years ago. And they really felt that because of the national dialog going on right now about race and social justice, that this was their moment to try and capitalize on it and get it out there for voters to see. And especially during a presidential election in California, where the voters are mostly Democratic, they thought it would just be like a natural thing for voters to go along with. But that didn’t happen. But so I think it was surprising that not only did it not pass, but it did fairly poorly in the polls.
In our society, we’re all very primed to think whatever we happen to achieve or are able to obtain is something that we deserve. But people just in their own lives don’t believe that that is really the the the overwhelming factor. So they’re not inclined to vote for something. They don’t think it’s really an issue anyway. So there’s that kind of psychological side of it. There’s also just the practical side that this was a really crowded ballot, a really crowded election. There were 12 ballot measures on the ballot propositions. And a lot of them really got a ton of attention.
So like Prop 16, the supporters of it, they raise thirty million dollars, which is a good amount of money. But someone told me, for instance, in California, it cost you four to five million dollars a week to run a TV ad. So it’s not it’s not going to get you very far. And the other issue is the timing.
The legislature put Prop 16 on the ballot in June. So election wise, that’s not a long time for the supporters to be able to gather all their resources, form coalitions, get an effective message and really start reaching out to people.
The ballot language, some people said, was a little bit confusing, so, for instance, just like in me explaining to you what Prop 16 is, it’s a proposition to overturn another proposition that bans affirmative action. So it’s just it’s something that it might take a few minutes to, like, figure out in your head. And when you’re going through 12 propositions, people already have a tendency, if they don’t understand a proposition, to just vote no because it you know, they figure no harm, no foul. I don’t understand it. Forget it.
What do you think this says about our state’s electorate?
So I think it’s interesting because we saw a couple of ballot measures this time around that were pretty progressive, like ending cash bail and things like that, and voters didn’t really go for it. You know, California is like progressive when you consider some of the other states out there. But we are also a very big state.
I think just the diversity of the state means that it’s a little bit more conservative than people actually think it is. In the end, it’s not like voters sometimes like to take a more middle of the road approach to some of these ballot measures.