Similarly, the Prop. 17 campaign referred to itself as “Californians for Fair Auto Insurance Rates,” but a more accurate name would have been: “Mercury Insurance for Unfair Profits.” That’s because the only “Californian” who donated any significant amount of money to the campaign was Mercury Insurance Company, the sponsor of the initiative.
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Leading up to last week’s primary, Pacific Gas and Electric Co. spent more than $46 million in support of Proposition 16, while Mercury Insurance backed Proposition 17 with $16 million. Both measures failed by slim margins. Proposition 16 would have shielded PG&E from competition by requiring that public utilities obtain a two-thirds vote before they could expand. Proposition 17 would have allowed insurance customers to take their loyalty discounts with them to a new carrier.
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Mercury “got taken for a ride” by political consultants, said Jamie Court, president and chairman of Consumer Watchdog and a board member of its CCR affiliate. Prop 17, which lost by a 4% margin, was never going to pass, he said.
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Proposition 17 was an initiative concocted by Mercury to undermine the insurance consumer protection system put into place by Proposition 103 of 1988. Of the $13.56 million in cash raised to promote Prop. 17, $13.5 million came from Mercury, whose founder and chairman, George Joseph, has turned the punching of holes in Prop. 103 into a personal obsession. That spending may make Mercury a cheapskate by PG&E standards, but by any rational standard of democratic process, the scale of it was obscene.
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Mercury Insurance’s statement was equally obtuse, as they continued to play it as a blow to consumers. The company issued a statement Tuesday night which read in part, “Proposition 17 was a pro-consumer initiative that would have lowered auto insurance rates for millions of California drivers.”
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Why does the effort to dump AB32 have the least chance of passage, at least at first glance? One reason is that voters who want to say no to AB32 will have to vote yes on this proposition. That kind of confusion never bodes well for ballot measures. Another is that while Mercury Insurance and Pacific Gas & Electric Co. outspent opponents of their pet propositions this spring by a margin of about 500-1 – and still lost – the oil companies and others who oppose limiting greenhouse gases will not be alone in the financial field.
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Voters had to work hard to sift through the “obfuscation” and “deception” employed by PG&E and Mercury Insurance, said Doug Heller, executive director of Consumer Watchdog, whose political action committee ran the opposition campaign to Prop. 17. “They had to resist an all-out attack by special interests,” Heller said, “and they managed to go to the newspapers and blogs and editorial boards and pick through the rubbish.”
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Big money didn’t produce the desired results for Pacific Gas & Electric Co. and Mercury Insurance. Voters saw through their fake concern for consumers and shot down two special-interest ballot measures.
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PG&E and Mercury join a select few corporations that came up with way-too-clever concepts, then tried to sell them to a supposedly disengaged electorate notorious for deciding weighty issues based on 30-second television ads, only to find out that we Californians aren’t so gullible after all.
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The success achieved by the underfunded activists at the opposing campaigns — No on 16 and Stop Prop 17 — is all the more impressive considering the minuscule amounts of money they spent relative to the corporations that financed the measures. Put simply, the myth-busting worked, even in the face of millions of dollars.
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