Ben Margot/AP Photo
An Instacart worker loads groceries into her car for home delivery in San Leandro, California. The passage of Proposition 22 will keep workers like her classified as independent contractors.
As a Californian, I have a love/hate relationship (mostly hate) with direct democracy. In this low-information state, the side with the most money typically can bend state law to its will by purchasing its desires at the ballot box. Prop 22, which creates an entirely new class of labor law for Uber and Lyft and DoorDash drivers, won pretty handsomely last night, and I can think of 200 million reasons why. (It was the most expensive ballot measure in U.S. history.) The money-to-victory conduit generally held up and down the state ballot.
That said, ballot initiatives do serve a role, and a rare one in our polarized political environment. Unlike California’s Uber-fest, most such campaigns don’t have venture capital dollars to sweep them to success. Most are not attached to a political candidate; one thing we had reconfirmed last night was the strong pull of partisanship. Ballot measures, however, can still prevail across party lines; indeed, they sometimes do an imperfect but decent job of taking the pulse of the public before it gets refracted through the red team/blue team prism.
The results on Tuesday’s ballot measures tell us that particularly on kitchen-table issues, people would be all too happy for government to provide some help with pressing challenges: getting a good job at a good wage, taking a day off from work in an emergency without risking termination, not being ripped off when they need financial assistance, finding good schools for their kids. And maybe ending the poison of the drug war and the imposition of law enforcement in their lives.
Let’s break some of this down. Florida needed a 60 percent supermajority to approve a $15-an-hour minimum wage by 2026, and they got just over the line with 60.8 percent. As many as 2.5 million workers are going to get a raise, and this is consistent with wage-hike wins at the ballot in places like South Dakota and Alaska. Since 1998, increasing the minimum wage is undefeated in voter initiative campaigns according to Ballotpedia, winning 23 times in a row.
In Arizona, supporters have declared victory on Prop 208, a surtax on the top 4 percent of wage earners to fund public education. It currently has 52.5 percent of the vote, with not much left to count. The tax comes out of the “Red for Ed” movement, and would finally bring needed funding to schools in the state, which have yet to recover from the cuts imposed after the 2008 financial collapse. Another tax increase for education (among other things), the commercial property tax hike in California known as Prop 15, has been trailing narrowly, but the late absentees could easily put it over the top. That would vanquish the ghost of Prop 13 and the tax revolt it inspired. Arkansas approved the permanent extension of a half-cent sales tax to fund roads. (In fairness, a progressive tax system failed in Illinois, although it was not tied to specific funding.)
Arizona also resoundingly passed the legalization of marijuana, one of four states where legalization was successful (Montana, New Jersey, and South Dakota were the others). Oregon decriminalized practically all drugs, D.C. decriminalized psilocybin, and medical marijuana got approved in Mississippi. All in all, a complete transformation of U.S. drug policy was ratified at the ballot.
On the heels of our family care issue, more victories were to be had. Colorado moved to a paid family and medical leave system that will provide 12 to 16 weeks off when needed, funded with a surcharge on payroll taxes. This was the first family and medical leave system ever enacted by ballot measure. Multnomah County, Oregon, (Portland) approved a graduated income surtax to fund a universal pre-kindergarten system.
You can keep going. Californians passed a complex online consumer privacy measure because online consumer privacy probably sounds good to them. Nebraskans voted in giant numbers to limit the interest rate on consumer loans to 36 percent, effectively vanquishing the payday loan industry, because they probably don’t want to get gouged anymore. (A similar measure passed in South Dakota in 2016.)
It wasn’t a clean sweep for tangible issues with personal impact, but it was a pretty good night for the liberal side.
These victories came in liberal states, conservative states, and states split down the middle. I think we should be humble about extrapolating too much from the results. But they do reflect something that, incredibly, has been lost in party politics: producing tangible results for people. I like to quote the New Deal–era congressman named Maury Maverick (via the great historian Rick Perlstein), who defined liberalism as “freedom plus groceries.” The idea was that all the high-minded ideals in the world mean nothing without some bread and butter. In more contemporary times, the late Paul Wellstone was fond of saying that politics is about the improvement of people’s lives.
It’s hard to believe that the Democratic Party has largely slid away from that, to make arguments about morals and character. It’s no surprise that mass media has pushed aside such trifles to focus on personality and conflict. But policy matters. Getting things done for the public usually leads to being rewarded with loyalty and admiration. Yes, the Democrats don’t have the luxury of running a minimum-wage measure for office; they’re stuck with human beings. Maybe the country’s too divided for such tangible gains to matter. But they can at least try to give people groceries.
