San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
POLLS: CALIFORNIANS FOR RACIAL JUSTICE, LESS SO FOR PROP. 16
Support lagging for initiative to restore affirmative action
This summer, it seemed the planets might be aligning to repeal California’s 24-year-old ban on affirmative action.
Widespread street protests over the Memorial Day killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis had fueled a national reckoning with racism, discrimination and other social-justice problems. Poll after poll of public opinion showed rising acknowledgment of racial inequality and the need to address it.
The novel coronavirus was having a disproportionate impact on people of color.
And California was in a sustained demographic and political shift — more diverse, less conservative — away from what it was in 1996, when voters approved Proposition 209, a constitutional amendment outlawing racial or gender preferences in public employment, education and contracts.
Now’s the time, state legislators decided. They put a measure on the Nov. 3 ballot, Proposition 16, that would again allow affirmative action in government decision-making.
“The ongoing pandemic as well as recent tragedies of police violence are forcing Californians to acknowledge the deepseated inequality and farreaching institutional failures that show that your
race and gender still matter,” said San Diego Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, the lead author of the bill authorizing the ballot measure, earlier this year.
But if two recent polls are any indication, there’s a difference between Californians acknowledging a problem and voting to fix it.
Proposition 16 is favored by 31 percent of the voters, with 47 percent opposed and 22 percent undecided, according to a survey by the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank based in San Francisco.
Similar numbers surfaced in a poll at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies, the oldest public policy research center in the state. The measure was backed by 33 percent of the respondents, with 41 percent opposed and 26 percent undecided.
“Before seeing the polls,” said Thad Kousser, chair of UC San Diego’s political science department, “I would have thought that the state’s demographic transition, the overall liberal trend in California, and the intense focus on social-justice issues was going to push this into the winning column.”
With five weeks until Election Day, Proposition 16 proponents enjoy a large money advantage over opponents, and spending down the stretch may affect the outcome. But Kousser said it will take a “historic” turnaround for it to win.
Part of the problem is that people are paying so much attention to the presidential contest they don’t have much time or interest in down-ballot races, he said. It doesn’t help that wording around affirmative action can be confusing, and that voters are being asked to reverse something they enacted before. It typically takes multiple tries for a doover to succeed, he said.
And then there’s this: For more than 50 years, Americans have overwhelmingly expressed support in principle for racial equality. In practice? Not so much.
Whose civil rights?
The arguments for and against affirmative action today aren’t that different from what they were when Proposition 209 was on the ballot.
Proponents say it’s necessary to create more opportunities for under-represented groups who historically have been discriminated against. Improved diversity, they add, helps to dismantle structural racism and sexism, leading to more equality.
Opponents say affirmative action replaces one kind of discrimination with another and ignores advances in equality in recent decades. A truly color-blind system should reward meritocracy and not perpetuate stereotypes, they add.
In 1996, Proposition 209 was backed strongly by Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican who had his eyes on the White House and made ending affirmative action a cornerstone of his campaign. He’d won re-election in 1994 in part by supporting Proposition 187, which made undocumented immigrants — called “illegal aliens” on the ballot — ineligible for public social services. It passed, with almost 59 percent of the vote, but was ruled unconstitutional in federal court and never went into effect.
In 1995, in his role as president of the UC regents, Wilson helped push through a decision to end race-based preferences in college admissions. The idea was expanded a year later with Proposition 209, whose backers called it “The California Civil Rights Initiative.”
It prohibited government agencies in the state from discriminating against, or giving preferential treatment to, any individual or group “on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting.”
The proposition passed, with 54.5 percent of the vote. It did even better in San Diego County, with 63 percent approval, winning in every local municipality except National City.
Twenty-four years later, both the state and county are different demographically and politically.
Whites were the majority in California in the mid-1990s, and 63 percent of them supported Proposition 209, according to exit polling. Today, no race or ethnic group constitutes a majority; Whites trail Latinos as the single-largest group, followed in order by Asians and Pacific Islanders, Blacks, and Native Americans.
Republicans made up 36 percent of voter registrations statewide in 1996, and 80 percent of them backed Proposition 209. Today, Republicans are at 24 percent of registrations. Democrats — they opposed Proposition 209, 69 percent to 31 percent, according to exit polls — saw their registrations drop slightly (47.1 percent to 46.3 percent) as the number of “No Party Preference” voters soared.
In San Diego County, Whites were 59 percent of the population in 1996. In 2019, it was 45 percent. Latinos went from 25 percent to 33; Asians from 9 percent to 13; Blacks 6 percent to 5; and Native Americans from 0.9 percent to 0.6.
Republicans made up 43.2 percent of voter registrations in the county in 1996. Today: 27.7 percent. Democrats went from 37 percent of registrations in 1996 to 40 percent today.
Those shifts are part of the reason affirmative-action backers thought the time was ripe to try again.
The UC regents endorsed it in a unanimous vote in June, and last week approved a “no quotas” policy aimed at convincing Californians that a return to affirmative action doesn’t mean the system will set aside certain slots for different groups of people.
Instead, the regents said, race and gender will be two of several factors considered during application reviews.
Mixed results
In the recent Public Policy Institute survey, conducted earlier this month, Californians were asked how they think race relations are going in the country. Almost 60 percent said they are worse than they were a year ago, and only 9 percent said they have gotten better.
That’s a sharp change from 2019, when 45 percent said they thought things were getting worse and 20 percent thought things were getting better.
Almost 40 percent of those polled said they believe police in their communities treat all ethnic groups fairly only some of the time or almost never.
Despite those concerns, Proposition 16, which aims to address racial inequities through affirmative action, did poorly in the same survey. Only 31 percent said they plan to vote yes.
Republicans again are overwhelmingly opposed, with only 9 percent planning to vote yes, and Democratic support, 46 percent, failed to cross the majority threshold.
Only 26 percent of Whites said they are in favor, and approval from other ethnic groups barely crossed the 40 percent mark. Other research by the institute shows that while Whites make up 41 percent of California’s adult population, they comprise 55 percent of the likely voters.
Those results — acknowledgment of racial problems, but a reluctance to endorse a specific remedy — weren’t surprising to Zoltan Hajnal, a political science professor at UC San Diego who studies race in U.S. elections.
“The reality is that affirmative action is not in general a popular policy,” he said. “In most circumstances, American voters don’t support special favors or anything that smacks of racial preference.”
In this particular case, he said, there are also factors that may make Proposition 16 confusing to voters, and confused voters often vote no.
The measure it would repeal, Proposition 209, was billed as a civil rights initiative in 1996. If you vote to repeal it, are you against civil rights? You may be in favor of equality — but whose equality?
Kousser, his UC San Diego colleague, also noted that voters are hesitant to undo something previously approved. “On complex issues that force voters to make really demanding choices, sometimes it takes a couple of elections,” he said, pointing to “three strikes” criminal penalties and term limits as examples.
Hajnal said Proposition 16 may fit into a “broad historical pattern” that’s unfolded since the civil rights movement of the 1960s: “Americans are overwhelmingly supportive of racial equality in principle, but on specific policies designed to create racial equality, Americans, especially White Americans, are less supportive.”
With all that’s gone on in 2020 — the social-justice protests, the COVID-19 racial disparities — “we may be in a moment that’s different,” he said. “It’s too early to tell.” He said campaign spending in the coming weeks by Proposition 16 proponents may generate more support for the measure.
“When it comes down to it, are Californians willing to go the extra distance, to vote for special favors?” he asked. “This will be an important test.”