Big Daddy and Dual Measures

Joe Mathews — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 16:09:00 -0400

For the weekend, here's a little bit of blockbuster democracy history, and a lesson about dual measures.

What do I mean by dual measures? It's a proven tactic in the ballot initiative game. If you oppose an initiative that's headed for the ballot, it may not be enough simply to fight the initiative directly. You may want to qualify your own initiative -- ideally, something that sounds similar and covers the same topic, but does something different than the initiative you oppose. Why bother with a counter initiative? Voters, faced with two like-sounding measures -- usually vote "no" on both. And so the initiative you opposed is defeated. The drug industry did this expertly in 2005 in California by qualifying its own, faux-drug discount measure to defeat a drug discount measure. For this June's ballot, cities and counties qualified a counter measure on eminent domain to counter a more aggressive initiative, qualified by property owners, that would restrict the ability of governments to take property for any sort of private use. (The LA Times sorts this out today).

But in his fascinating new biography of Jesse Unruh (the legenday California Assembly speaker known as Big Daddy), Bill Boyarsky tells a crucial and forgotten story of how this strategy backfired. Before 1952, California candidates for state office had been able to cross-file--that is, to run in both the Democratic and Republican primaries. This created a political culture of bipartisanship, but the minority Democrats didn't like it. So in 1952, they qualified an initiative, with financing from a Democratic oil magnate, to eliminate cross-filing. The Republicans in the legislature responded with their own measure to counter it, retaining cross-filing but forcing candidates to list their own party affiliation on the ballot. Boyarsky calls this a "strategic error" because instead of both measures going down to defeat, the Republican counter-measure won. The measure heightened partisan identification and helped Democrats, who had the lead in voter registrations. Within a decade, the Democrats had won back the governorship and broken the Republican grip on the legislature.