Election Results Suggests Conservatives Can Use Referenda to Push Their Priorities in Blue States
Following this month’s elections, most observers have focused on the political comeback that saw Donald Trump win re-election and Republicans capture control of the House and Senate in Washington. But outside the Beltway, another trend emerged that conservatives must heed: Thanks to direct democracy, their agenda won support in locations people might not expect.
Sources as varied as Politico and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal have noted the phenomenon of conservative outcomes in ballot referenda across the country. While by no means uniform, the results point to a key way in which conservatives can advance their agenda, even in the bluest of locales.
Favorable Trend
In some cases, voters acted in a conservative manner by rejecting ballot measures advanced by leftists. Voters in seven states rejected various ranked-choice voting measures, and Alaska may have narrowly repealed its own ranked-choice process. (Ranked-choice voting did advance in the District of Columbia.)
Likewise, proposals to remove restrictions on local rent control and weaken the state’s property tax cap, failed in California. California and Massachusetts also rejected efforts to raise the minimum wage — the former could be attributed to the consequences of the Golden State’s $20 minimum wage for fast-food establishments — while ballot measures on the minimum wage succeeded in Arizona, Missouri, and Alaska.
In other cases, conservatives achieved actual policy wins, rather than just stopping further liberal assaults. Witness Proposition 36 in California, which restored penalties for crime that a 2014 ballot measure had weakened. This year’s ballot measure won in every California county, demonstrating just how fed up Golden State voters are with rampant lawlessness under Democrat supermajority rule. The trend also explains why George Soros-backed Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon lost his re-election campaign by nearly 20 points.
Whither Conservative Efforts?
In its analysis of the ballot measure results, Politico noted that referenda have to date represented a key part of the Left’s tactics to advance its agenda:
Progressive groups have long seen direct democracy as a potent tool for bypassing reluctant state legislatures and taking issues like Medicaid expansion, minimum wage increases, and cannabis legalization directly to the voters. In the wake of 2022’s [Supreme Court] Dobbs [v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization] decision, ballot measures have played a pivotal role in abortion-rights activists’ efforts to protect the procedure from Republican-led efforts to restrict it. This year’s results raise questions about how Democrats and progressives shut out of power at the national level will use ballot measures to push back in the coming years…
But there’s another big question that Politico (perhaps unsurprisingly) didn’t ask: Particularly given their many successes on this year’s ballot measures, why aren’t conservatives taking the initiative (pun intended) and using direct democracy to advance their priorities, particularly in Democrat-controlled states?
I first raised this question roughly 18 months ago, having become sick of playing defense against state referenda to expand Medicaid and enact the pro-abortion agenda. As the saying goes, the best defense is often a good offense, and conservatives need their equivalent of an organization like The Fairness Project, which supports leftist efforts on issues like Medicaid expansion, abortion, the minimum wage, and paid sick leave.
Conservatives have plenty of good issues on which they can run successful ballot campaigns, including:
Work Requirements: As it happens, South Dakota approved a measure on this issue this month, one year after an advisory referendum on work requirements won nearly 80 percent support (no, that’s not a typo) in Wisconsin. If as many as four in five voters in a swing state approve of this policy, why not try to export it to places like California?
Energy Mandates: When it comes to fuel economy standards, California is leading the way with mandates galore, all of which raise the price of gasoline. Instead of allowing Gov. Gavin Newsom to export those efforts elsewhere, why not advance a measure to repeal many or all of those standards — what would amount to a de facto referendum on whether voters support $6 per gallon gasoline in the Golden State?
School Choice: Granted, efforts in this realm suffered disappointments on Nov. 5, with a constitutional amendment guaranteeing a right to school choice failing narrowly in Colorado, another school choice referendum failing in Kentucky, and Nebraska voters repealing a tuition scholarship program. But with the Republican Party increasingly competing to attract working-class voters of all races and colors, conservatives should not be afraid to continue this fight and force Democrats to explain why they want to keep poor children stuck in failing schools — for the benefit of the teachers’ union Mafia.
As the saying goes, you fail at 100 percent of the chances you never take. This month’s successes show why conservatives must — must — start organizing to place popular and winnable measures on future statewide ballots. As a national movement, we cannot consign people in Democrat-run states to years or decades of failed policies, when there is a tool in our arsenal staring us in the face that can help fix the problem. Let’s get to work.
This post was originally published at The Federalist.