Ted Costa

Here's a link to the poll, which shows five of the six measures on the May 19 special election ballot with less than 50 percent support. Here's pollster Mark Baldassare's take on the results in the Sacramento Bee. And here's my upbeat prediction, via Fox & Hounds Daily.

That optimism is based on the fact that opposition to the measures is poorly funded, disorganized and late to the game. The Sacramento Bee, in this news story, suggests the opponents are coming together to fight Prop 1A, the spending limit. But the opposition is forming too late to make much difference on its own. The real problem is that people don't understand much about the measure other than its link to taxes. As Ted Costa, the anti-tax activist who is co-chair of one of the campaigns against 1A, said on a conference call yesterday, "We can beat this with just robocalls." 1A likely loses even without a campaign against it.

Just got off the phone with Ted Costa, the original proponent of the 2003 recall of Gov. Gray Davis that put Schwarzenegger in the governor's office.

Costa, who runs a small taxpayer group called The People's Advocate, hasn't made any decisions, but he expressed interest in the recall and said he had left a message for prison guards' union official Lance Corcoran offering to meet with CCPOA. When I asked him if he would support the recall of Schwarzenegger, Costa replied: "Anything's possible, including me support a recall. That's all possible. Yes it is."

Costa thinks that if a recall qualified for the ballot, Schwarzenegger could be in real trouble. Costa said he would expect potential successors who are planning runs for 2010 to run to succeed Schwarzenegger if he's recalled. "All they have to do is turn the signatures in, and the governor has to get more than 50 percent of the vote to stay in office. The other candidates only need to beat each other," Costa said. "You could get four or five candidates, you could wear them down."

"By no means do I see this as a slam dunk for the governor," Costa added. "He's pissed off everybody."

Costa said he thought the prison guards' union might have done better to wait a little before making public their interest in a recall. "They should have covered their bases before they went public, and maybe built a coalition," he said.

Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Weintraub writes today that politicians will lie to beat the redistricting reform initiative on the November ballot. But if Ted Costa's views are heard, they may not need to do much.

Ted Costa was the original proponent of both the recall of Gov. Gray Davis and of Prop 77, the failed redistricting initiative in 2005. In an email, he blasts the new initiative, Prop 11, as a "power grab," matching the rhetoric -- if not meaning -- of the measure's opponents.

Democrats and legislators have constituted most of the opposition to this point. But Costa is a Republican, and his argument, if it gets heard over the din of the presidential election and the gay marriage ban, could peel Republicans off the measure. Costa also betrays his own personal frustration with Common Cause and other backers of the measure; he's spent years trying to work with them on redistricting, and doesn't like their approach, from how the lines are drawn to the fact that Congressional districts aren't included. The measure only covers state legislative districts, and the districts for California's Board of Equalization.

Here's Ted's email:

Ted Costa, the Sacramento anti-tax activist best known as the original proponent of the 2003 recall of California Gov. Gray Davis, once told me that the recall was his second choice. He wanted to pass an initiative to strip California's state legislators of the power to draw their own districts. But the courts knocked a measure he drafted off the ballot. With the money he had raised for redistricting, he decided to launch the recall effort.

In 2006, looking back at all the political change his recall had produced, Costa looked back and said, "I would trade it all for a fair redistricting." Well, another redistricting initiative is headed to the ballot in California this November. And Costa doesn't like it at all.