UPDATED: Statewide Ballot Initiative Landscape Set

By Dr. Jiggy Geronimo, JG Insights (commissioned by CA Donor Table)

Original story: June 28, 2024; Updated: July 11, 2024

At last, we have confirmed the final landscape of ballot initiatives that will appear on our November ballots! After an uncertain month of legislative maneuvering and behind-the-scenes negotiating, here are the initiatives that will appear on the ballot:

• PROP 2 | Education Bond — $10 billion to modernize and repair schools and community college facilities (vote YES)
• PROP 3 | Freedom to Marry — Repeals Prop 8, which says only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California (vote YES)
• PROP 4 | Climate Bond — $10 billion for safe drinking water, drought, flood, and wildfire prevention, extreme heat mitigation, biodiversity and nature-based climate solutions, park creation, and clean air programs (vote YES)
• PROP 5 | Affordable Housing + Infrastructure — Authorizes bonds for affordable housing and public infrastructure if approved by a vote of 55% instead of 67% (vote YES)
• PROP 6 | Abolish Slavery — Closes the loophole in the California constitution that allows involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime (vote YES)
• PROP 32 | $18 Minimum Wage — Sets the statewide minimum wage at $18 (vote YES)
• PROP 33 | Rent Control — Repeals Costa Hawkins to allow cities to enact rent control (vote YES)
• PROP 34 | Healthcare Spending — Requires healthcare providers to spend 98% of revenues from federal discount prescription drug program on direct patient care. Authorizes state to negotiate Medi-Cal drug prices on a statewide basis (vote YES)
• PROP 35 | Medi-Cal Funding — Makes permanent the existing tax on managed health care insurance plans to pay for Medi-Cal (vote YES)
• PROP 36 | Prop 47 Repeal — Undoes the progress of 2013’s Prop 47 and would balloon California’s prison population by allowing felony charges and increased sentences for certain drug and theft crimes under $950 (vote NO)

What Didn’t Make the Ballot: After a month of complicated negotiations and posturing, many initiatives were pulled off the ballot at the last minute. In a huge win for Californians, the state Supreme Court blocked the Taxpayer Deception Act from the ballot, claiming that its provisions amounted to a revision of the state constitution and could not be enacted via initiative. The Taxpayer Deception Act would have made it nearly impossible for voters and the government to raise revenue by requiring that all new state taxes which are approved by ⅔ of the legislature must also be approved by a majority of voters and that local taxes must be approved by ⅔ of voters instead of a simple majority. A measure intended to undercut the Taxpayer Deception Act (ACA 13) by requiring any ballot measure that increases voter approval requirements to also pass by the same margin has now been bumped to 2026. Additionally, Big Oil pulled their referendum to overturn a 2022 law that banned oil drilling near schools, hospitals, and neighborhoods. After failed attempts to convince Prop 36 proponents to pull their measure, the governor and legislature contemplated placing a retail theft measure on the ballot to compete with it but dropped the effort at the last minute. Other measures that will not appear on the ballot are a repeal of the Private Attorneys General Act (PAGA), an anti-trans youth initiative, a repeal of Article 34 that requires public approval of low-income housing, requiring a personal finance course for high school students, a children’s healthcare initiative, and a pandemic prevention institute.

Ballot Interplay: As always, the California ballot is bound to be long and complicated and we have much work to do to ensure that voters understand what these initiatives mean and the importance of their votes in shaping policy this November. To this end, we are supporting a multi-phase ballot measure interplay research project, led by JG Insights, to understand the entire landscape and opportunities for throughline narratives that could simplify messaging to voters and inform slate messaging and ballot guides. This project will start with focus groups to dive deep into how voters think about the initiatives when they are faced with all of them at once (as they will in November) and probe to uncover the organic themes that voters may identify across initiatives. Following the focus groups, we will conduct a messaging survey to test different approaches of thematic slate messaging for the initiatives and finish with content testing of a sample slate ballot guide. We aim to have initial messaging recommendations in August, just in time for statewide and regional civic engagement organizations to incorporate the findings into their GOTV outreach.