Note: I’m hosting the KRXA 540 morning show from 8-10 today to discuss this and other issues. Special guest at 9 – Cleve Jones!

Prop	Yes	No	Undec.
1A	40	49	11
1B	40	49	11
1C	32	59	9
1D	40	49	11
1E	40	51	9
1F	71	24	5

In a poll result that should surprise no one, The Field Poll reports that Propositions 1A through 1E are all in negative territory with voters, although Prop 1F is (unfortunately) going to pass by a wide margin. Likely voter numbers to the right

What is really interesting are the partisan breakdowns on this. Generally speaking Democrats and independents are backing the initiatives more strongly than Republicans. For example, on Prop 1A, Dems support it 52-37-11, whereas Republicans oppose, 24-65-11, and independents are supportive, 47-40-13. Dems are evenly split on Prop 1E and opposed to Prop 1C (by a margin of 37-49-14). Republicans appear to be making the strongest “no on everything” argument, and independents tend to track the Democrats on this.

However, the overall numbers suggest that Republicans may be more likely to vote in this election, hence the seemingly likely failure of the first five. Democrats more strongly oppose Prop 1C, which as you know is the only one that makes any difference on May 20. That’s not a stance borne of ignorance – 58% of all voters believe that it is unlikely that Prop 1C would significantly increase lottery revenues.

The poll also suggests that the legislature’s lying ballot descriptions of Props 1D and 1E are having an impact. The wording in the sample ballot makes it sound like the money in those props is being shifted from one kind of children’s and mental health programs to another, when in fact that money is just being dumped into the general fund with no guarantee at all that the money would help kids or the mentally ill. Those who plan to vote yes on 1D and 1E don’t know this or don’t believe it’s true.

So what conclusions can we draw from all this?

• Democrats are more willing to give their leaders a chance. With Speaker Karen Bass, Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, the CTA and nearly every elected Democratic official stumping for the whole package, likely Democratic voters – presumably those more inclined to pay close attention to legislators and CTA’s ads – it’s not surprising that most of the props hold a narrow lead among Dems (no proposition has higher than 53% support of Dems, aside from 1F). Of course, 1C does not, which gives fuel to the fire of my own “they should focus on 1C” argument – and in any case Democratic voter support for these things is tenuous, not of a large margin, and in the case of 1D and 1E, based on incorrect information.

• The Republican base is even wingnuttier than their elected leaders. The poll confirms what we already knew, that Arnold Schwarzenegger has zero influence whatsoever over his party, where the real power lies with the Howard Jarvis Association and Grover Norquist.

• We can expect Steve Maviglio and others to repeat the “progressives who oppose this are allied with Republicans” argument, which neatly avoids the fact that the Yes on 1A coalition is getting a lot of funding from Chevron and is of course headed by Arnold Schwarzenegger. But that would ignore many weak points for the Yes side, including their inability to drive more Dems to the polls and the generally weak levels of support for these props from Dems (only Props 1A and 1D have higher than 50% support from Democratic voters) and the fact that Props 1D and 1E are only supported by Dems based on false information. In short, the leadership and CTA are having some impact making their case to the core Democratic voter bloc, but not in sufficient numbers among that group and certainly not among the broader Democratic voter universe.

The best case scenario for the Yes side is a pyrrhic victory, where Props 1A and 1B pass but 1C fails, meaning we now have a spending cap but a $13 billion deficit on May 20. And that’s where the poll’s most troubling finding of all comes in – that more and more Democrats support the concept of limiting government spending. If the outcome of this election is that leading Democrats and progressives have convinced the rank and file to back Republican policies, I’m not sure there’ll be anything to celebrate here at all.

Note: I am the Public Policy Director for the Courage Campaign

Last fall the Courage Campaign began picking up where our friends at SpeakOut California left off, producing a new version of the progressive voter guide that SpeakOut pioneered. The guide was a big hit last fall, getting downloaded thousands of times and passed around by California progressives as a handy method to help navigate the 12 propositions on the ballot.

Now the Courage Campaign Issues Committee has produced its May 2009 Progressive Voter Guide. One one side it includes a handy chart of how the Courage Campaign and eight other progressive organizations have endorsed on the six ballot propositions – including, of course, the Calitics endorsements. On the other side it includes a description of the initiatives and a list of who supports which position.

This guide is especially valuable, I think, given that California Democratic and progressive voters and organizations are not unified on their approach to this election. Our guide includes the recommendations of the California Democratic Party, Calitics, the California Nurses Association, SEIU California State Council, the League of Women Voters, the California Federation of Teachers, California League of Conservation Voters, and the California Teachers Association.

It includes the endorsements of the Courage Campaign, as decided by our members in an online vote that was begun on Thursday. Our staff recommendation was No on 1A, 1C, 1D, 1E and 1F – we made no recommendation at all on Prop 1B. Our members, however, decided to endorse a No vote on all six initiatives, and as a result that is now the Courage Campaign’s official position on the May 19 initiatives.

The guide can be downloaded directly as a PDF – be sure to pass it around to your friends and family. I already have my ballot sitting somewhere in the pile of mail on my kitchen table, so this is particularly well timed for those of us who already have our ballots, and valuable to anyone interested in casting a vote on these important measures.

Below is the email we sent to our members today.

Dear Robert,

The statewide special election is less than a month away — on Tuesday, May 19. Are you ready to vote?

You may have already received a vote-by-mail ballot for the May 19 election, but perhaps you haven’t made your choices yet. The six initiatives on the ballot are complicated. Progressives are divided on the issues. Therefore, we are giving you as much information as possible so that you can make an informed choice.

That’s why the Courage Campaign is providing our May 19 Progressive Voter Guide for the special election ballot. You’ll see not only the Courage Campaign’s recommendations, but also those of other leading progressive organizations like the California Democratic Party, the California Nurses Association, the California Teachers Association and the League of Women Voters.

Click here to download and print the Courage Campaign’s two-page May 2009 Progressive Voter Guide from our web site (or click the image below to download a printable PDF document directly to your computer):

On Thursday, the Courage Campaign asked our members to vote on the following propositions and decide our final recommendations.

The final Courage Campaign endorsements on the ballot measures, as voted on by our members, are:

• Proposition 1A — Spending cap: NO

• Proposition 1B — School funding: NO

• Proposition 1C — Lottery borrowing: NO

• Proposition 1D — Divert First Five funds: NO

• Proposition 1E — Divert mental health funds: NO

• Proposition 1F — Legislators’ salaries: NO

For explanations of our endorsements as well as the endorsements of eight other California progressive organizations, please click here to download our two-page Voter Guide from our web site:

http://www.couragecampaign.org…

With many vote-by-mail ballots already in the hands of voters, please help us spread the word to as many progressives as possible in California. You can start today by forwarding this email and Voter Guide to your family and friends.

No matter what the voters decide on May 19, we must be prepared on May 20 to fight for fair and progressive solutions to our budget and economic crisis.We will be contacting you soon to let you know what you can do to fix California’s broken government.

Rick Jacobs

Chair, Courage Campaign

In some respects the battle over the May 19 propositions is overblown. It’s important to kill the spending cap in Prop 1A, and Props 1C-1E represent some dangerous one-time budget solutions that will probably cause more problems than they solve.

But none of these propositions will change the fact that on May 20, California will again be facing a multibillion dollar budget shortfall. And in turn that raises the specter of default. California cannot go “bankrupt”, but we can find ourselves without enough money to pay those we owe. The state flirted with that possibility in February, and although John Chiang is confident that we will have enough money to last through the summer, the ongoing collapse of the global economy and its kneecapping of our state’s revenue have already caused our bond ratings to sink to the lowest in the nation.

We’re only able to keep the lights on through continued borrowing, and that has been helped by federal hints and proposals to guarantee some or all of our debt. But that may not be enough to resolve growing concerns among bond buyers about California debt, and as a result a high-stakes standoff appears to be developing, as Felix Salmon explains:

The more interesting response was, basically, “my moral hazard trumps your moral hazard”. In other words, it’s true that because California has insured itself against default, there’s moral hazard there: whenever anybody is insured against anything, the likelihood of that thing happening goes up. But at the same time, there’s a bigger moral hazard at play: the federal government will never let California default, it’s too big to fail. And so when push comes to shove, California will get a federal bailout before it defaults on its bondholders.

I suspect, however, that the moral hazard seniority works the other way around: the fact that California’s bondholders are insured means that it’s not too big to fail, and that in fact a payment default by the state would have very little in the way of in-state systemic consequences. (I have no idea what it might do to the monolines, but if they can’t cope with a single credit defaulting, they really shouldn’t be in the business they’re in.) The federal government might step in to mediate the negotiations between the monolines and the state, but it’s not even obvious why it would want to do that.

The basic issue here is what exactly would happen if California defaulted – who blinks first, who has to accept getting less than they are owed. As I see it the possible outcomes look like this, in order of increasing regressivity:

1. Federal government steps in to provide operating capital to California in order to both pay what the bondholders are owed and prevent the state from having to make crippling cuts. This is essentially what has been done with the big banks, and a solid argument could be made for doing it with CA – if we have to close schools or hospitals, the economic downturn WILL become a Depression.
2. Federal government makes the bondholders whole but demands California implement crippling budget cuts in order to repay the feds for the cost of helping insure the bondholders. This could be ameliorated with some form of cramming down the bondholders, but folks like you and I would get crammed down even more.
3. The feds take the Gerald Ford route and tell California “drop dead” – CA under law cannot fail to pay the bondholders, so we’re on our own. We could try and negotiate with them, or pay outright. This basically turns California into a Latin American IMF client, having to cramdown working people so the bondholders get paid.

It’s worth noting just how important that last point is. As David Harvey explained in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, the 1975 New York City default was a major turning point in economic history. Ford’s Nixonian advisers argued that NYC shouldn’t be bailed out in order to hit liberals and unions. As a result NYC had to negotiate with the bondholders and was forced to make massive spending cuts, reversing 40 years of policy of increasing services to help working people in the city.

Once the NYC strategy was rolled out and shown to be a success, it became the seed of the IMF’s “Washington Consensus” moves in the 1980s and 1990s to impose right-wing economics on nations that needed their aid. NYC was thus one of the earliest victims of the shock doctrine – California may well be next.

Someone is going to have to pay more to solve this mess. The question before Californians is whether the low- and middle-income will be the ones to pay, as we have been in the recent budget deals, as we have been in Asia and Africa and Latin America – or whether the federal government will do the right thing and protect our public services and those who depend on them.

Which is why the Zombie Death Cult is so insistent on forcing the state to go over a cliff. They’re salivating at the chance to shock doctrine this state, always have been.

As we enter the final weeks before the May 19 special election, the often blurry picture of the six initiatives and the broader politics surrounding them is coming into focus. Yesterday’s rejection of Propositions 1A, 1D and 1E by the California Democratic Party convention should not be surprising for two reasons:

1. Despite the rhetoric, none of these propositions will have a meaningful impact on the immediate budget mess. Prop 1A of course has no effect at all on revenues until 2011. Props 1D and 1E are drops in the bucket, especially considering that at minimum there is an $8 billion budget hole no matter what happens on May 19
2. Those three propositions were the most objectionable and obviously ridiculous proposals of the six. A spending cap is a huge price to pay, and Prop 1A doesn’t really offer much in return. As several folks eloquently explained on the convention floor, including Paul Hogarth, Props 1D and 1E are an indefensible attack on the most vulnerable and needy Californians. Democrats showed that they still had souls by rejecting those two measures.

With the likely rejection by voters of Prop 1A, Prop 1B is rendered moot even if it is approved (CTA looks like it will lose its multi-billion dollar gamble) and the irrelevancy of Abel Maldonado’s Prop 1F, that leaves Proposition 1C as the only thing about the May 19 election that has any suspense left to it. The February budget deal assumed $5 billion would be brought in from Prop 1C – which is optimistic at best but does mean that of all six propositions, only Prop 1C really matters over the near term.

Along with the rest of the Calitics Editorial Board I oppose Prop 1C – it’s a payday loan that is likely to leave the state on the hook for at least $2 billion out of the general fund when it becomes clear that people aren’t about to reverse the trend of buying fewer lottery tickets.

But if I can offer some free advice to the Democratic legislative leadership, they need to stop digging their hole any deeper, stop pushing for Prop 1A and start focusing solely on Prop 1C.

It’s possible that the legislative leadership could convince Californians that throwing shrinking lottery revenues to a bond market that hasn’t shown much interest in the proposal is something we have to do to prevent even worse cuts than those that are already likely to come down in June.

It would certainly help their cause if they stopped speaking as if those cuts were inevitable. Democratic legislators have tired to scare Democratic voters into backing the propositions and it hasn’t worked for Prop 1A in particular – all that fear does is reinforce the base’s anger at what appears to be capitulation to Republicans.

By now it has to be clear that the Democratic legislative leadership has badly miscalculated on these proposals. Aside from the flawed nature of the proposals and how they came onto the ballot, selling them as a single package was a disastrous move. If they want to salvage anything from this sinking ship, they could tell Californians why we should take a chance on borrowing against the lottery via Prop 1C, and how it will help our Democratic leaders more strongly resist Republican demands for massive cuts, instead of assume those cuts are a foregone conclusions. They could embrace demands for a majority vote budget, instead of dismissing it out of hand.

I still wouldn’t vote for Prop 1C. But if they want other Democrats, progressives, and the people of California to vote for it, following something like the above plan would assure those voters that the legislative leadership is willing to be realistic, and that they actually do have some sort of May 20 strategy that they can plug Prop 1C into. In the absence of such a strategy, Prop 1C is going down, and the leadership has nobody to blame but themselves.

I will be on KRXA 540 AM at 8 this morning to discuss this and other topics in California politics

Conservatives would have Californians believe that Prop 1A is in trouble with the voters because it would extend some temporary taxes for a couple more years. That may well be true for some voters. But it isn’t the full story.

In order to get the February budget deal done, Democrats agreed to put a spending cap on the ballot. But they knew that progressives would never support a hard spending cap along the lines of what Arnold wanted in Prop 76. So staffers from the Legislature and the Governor’s office got together to write what became Prop 1A – designed to accomplish all the effects of a spending cap, but with enough sleight-of-hand and possible loopholes to hopefully convince skeptical Democrats and progressives to back it.

And when that didn’t seem to be enough, they linked it to Prop 1B, a $9 billion carrot to CTA to back the budget package, despite the very real possibility that Prop 1A (whose effects will last indefinitely, whereas Prop 1B will run out around 2014).

Grassroots progressives are beginning to see through this, as more and more organizations join the No on 1A coalition. George Skelton quotes several of them in his column today:

“We see 1A imposing a spending cap that assures that California schools remain among the most poorly funded in the country,” says CFT political director Kenneth Burt.

And he adds, echoing what other public employee unions have complained about: “CTA went behind closed doors and cut a secret deal with the governor without talking to anybody.”

Another opponent is the California Faculty Assn. Education already “is in a hole,” says President Lillian Taiz. “Now they’re dropping a manhole cover on us” with 1A. “This is madness.”

The California School Boards Assn. also opposes 1A. Executive Director Scott P. Plotkin says a rainy day reserve would prevent schools from obtaining “adequate funding.”

What about the $9.3 billion the props would provide to schools? “That’s money we’re entitled to anyway under Proposition 98,” Plotkin says. Go to court and get it, he asserts.

Democratic supporters of Prop 1A, including legislators and their staff, have been working overtime trying to convince progressives, including yours truly, to support Prop 1A. Their argument has been that Prop 1A isn’t like Prop 76 (and they are correct), and that with a Democratic governor and a large Democratic majority in the legislature, its effects will either be blunted or simply irrelevant.

But that is asking voters to take an enormous risk with the government services they need to prosper and even to survive. Prop 1A DOES create a kind of spending cap, let’s be clear. It’s not at all certain that we’ll have a Democrat in the governor’s office in 2011 (and even if we did they may not want to raise new revenues anyway). Prop 1A immediately gives the governor the authority to make mid-year cuts, meaning Arnold could slash UC and CSU spending during an academic year, or a Republican governor elected in 2010 could do deeper damage.

Further, we have no idea yet how the idiotic redistricting plan set up in Prop 11 will affect the composition of the legislature in 2013 and afterward. Although I don’t see how California Republicans can make a significant comeback even with Prop 11’s gerrymandering, they might well be able to reduce Democratic numbers so that a 2/3 vote is not within reach even by cutting further deals.

Skelton argues that the problem with Prop 1A is its complexity, which confuses and therefore turns off voters:

The lesson: When writing a ballot measure, keep it simple. Make sure it can be easily grasped by voters.

Fast forward 36 years. The core measure on the May 19 special election ballot, Proposition 1A, suffers from a similar affliction: lack of simplicity. That’s because it has been burdened with so much Byzantine baggage that there’s no consensus interpretation of what the measure is all about….

But the product was not a prime-time package ready for the voters. The trade-offs that click inside a legislative chamber aren’t always easy to explain outside the Capitol. Voters tend to become confused or enraged.

And that may well explain how some voters approach the issue. But for many others, the concept of a spending cap that nobody really understands, and that progressives and Democrats are supposed to support on the faith that Democratic legislators will always be there in sufficient numbers to ensure this doesn’t destroy government, is just not something we can swallow.

Especially when you consider that the California Budget Project estimates that Prop 1A will lead to immediate budget shortfalls between at least now and 2012-13 (and could be as high as $21 billion that year), there really seems to be no case whatsoever for Prop 1A. Voting no on this one is an easy move for progressives to make.

Ultimately I have to wonder about the political wisdom of Democratic legislators campaigning on a “Yes on everything” platform. Schools will get their money, either via Prop 1B or via the courts. The only propositions that might affect the size of the existing deficit are Props 1C-1E, and though they have their considerable problems as well, they might fare better if they were decoupled from Prop 1A.

But that’s now what the leadership has chosen to do, and as a result, it seems likely the entire package will be shot down by voters. That wouldn’t be because of voter ignorance or confusion, either. It’d be because voters understand a bad idea when they see it.

The Stop 1D campaign takes their “this will hurt children – literally” argument to video, claiming that if Prop 1D passes child abuse preventing programs funded through First Five Prop 10 money will be cut. It’s a devastatingly effective ad:

I always though Props 1D and 1E were the most likely to go down of the bunch, and if these ads get much viewership around the state, then 1D in particular is likely to get crushed. Which is as it should be.