By Dan Morain, THE SACRAMENTO BEE
Once again, California voters delivered a two-edged message, or so it seems.
Republicans nominated two deep-pocketed former chief executives who had spent heavily on their campaigns to be their standard bearers for governor and U.S. Senate.
At the same time, Californians sent two heavily funded initiatives backed by individual corporations down to ignominious defeat.
Proposition 16, backed by PG&E’s $47 million to the opponents’ $90,000, and Proposition 17, backed by Mercury Insurance’s $16 million to less than $1 million for its foes, lost by nearly identical margins.
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.
Both initiatives had powerful themes. PG&E was promising Californians the right to vote on issues related to government expansion into power generation. Mercury promised most auto insurance customers a break on their rates.
But once voters scratched below the surface, they were able to sniff out the true intent – corporate grabs to solidify and expand their markets.
“It’s hard to con voters into voting yes,” said Robert Stern, an initiative expert and president of the Center for Governmental Studies in Los Angeles. “The default position is ‘no.’ If voters are confused, they will vote ‘no.’ ”
Gale Kaufman helped organize the No-on-16 campaign by using $90,000 to pay for a poll and consumer activists. She didn’t have money for television, and instead bought Internet ads.
“There is a growing anger and huge skepticism about who is paying for what goes on the ballot,” Kaufman said. That attitude seems to be growing, especially as initiative promoters devise ideas that clearly benefit a particular company or industry.
Chris Lehane, who helped run the campaign against Proposition 17, said a change is taking place in the world of initiatives. Voters are relying less on traditional television advertising about ballot measures and are looking elsewhere for information, including news accounts and editorials in mainstream publications.
Voters also are becoming more attuned to bogus endorsements, he believes. In PG&E’s case, the company touted the endorsement of an entity that called itself a consumer alliance. But no one from established consumer groups had ever heard of it.
So what does all this mean for former eBay CEO Meg Whitman and former Hewlett-Packard chief Carly Fiorina? It might not be a good sign.
Whitman and Fiorina won in a closed Republican primary in which 1.7 million Republicans voted.
A far larger group of roughly 4 million voters including Republicans, Democrats and people who state no party preference voted down Propositions 16 and 17.
A look at how counties voted sheds more light. Propositions 16 and 17 lost big in Democratic parts of the state. In San Francisco and Yolo counties, for example, the initiatives were trounced by 2-to-1 ratios. Proposition 16 lost by 42 percent to 58 percent in Sacramento County, another Democratic bastion.
In the Republican areas of the state, including Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and San Diego counties, both measures won by significant margins. The pattern played out in much of the rest of the state, where counties that have Democratic majorities opposed the measures and voters in Republican-leaning counties approved them.
Republicans have nominated Whitman and Fiorina, but neither has won office in an election that includes Democratic voters and people who decline to state party preferences.
The general election campaign is now in its second day, way too early to gauge who will win. But at least on primary election day, voters took a very dim view of corporate interests.
dmorain@sacbee.com
Tags: big corporations, contributions, deceptive, Mercury, NewsStory, overcharges, Prop 17, surcharge, trust, voters
