California voters often wrong on policy but right on issues
Voters can be weird. They’re often dead wrong on public policy details but still instinctively arrive at a sensible conclusion.
Voters were asked in a survey by the Public Policy Institute of California to name the most important issue new Gov. Gavin Newsom and the Legislature should work on this year. The results were released Wednesday.
The most frequent answer was “illegal immigration.”
But the federal government, not the states, decides immigration policy.
However, after President Trump was inaugurated, the Legislature and then- Gov. Jerry Brown spent months debating and creating a so-called sanctuary state to protect undocumented immigrants from federal customs agents and did other things to help people living here illegally.
So immigration policy in some form is within Sacramento’s portfolio.
And voters have strong views about it — 62 percent oppose President Trump’s proposed border wall, with 90 percent of Democrats against, 81 percent of Republicans in support.
I started thinking about the voters’ distorted view of state government while reading the PPIC poll results. Pollster and President Mark Baldassare gave a budget test. Participants were read a list of state spending categories and asked which one ate up themost money in the budget.
The one most frequently cited was health and human services — welfare, Medi- Cal and the like — followed closely by prisons. K-12 schools were a distant third.
That’s nuts, I thought. K-12 is guaranteed roughly 40 percent of the general fund and Newsom is even proposing a slight bump. HHS is getting only about 26 percent and prisons less than 9 percent.
But then I remembered special funds — money comes from specific sources for specific projects — such as the gas tax for road repairs.
Looking at special funds, I discovered the voters were correct about HHS. When the entire $201 billion current budget is considered, more state money is spent on HHS than K-12 schools — roughly 32 percent compared to 28 percent. (But voters were way off about prisons — they get a little over 7 percent.)
Asked which program should be the highest priority for state dollars, the most frequent answer by far was K-12 schools. HHS was a distant second and prisons way down.
“People don’t pay that much attention to public policy in general,” says Jack Pitney, a government professor at Claremont McKenna College and a former Republican political operative. “People are guessing and sometimes their guesses turn out to be right.” The result at the ballot box? “It’s the same as driving blindfolded,” Pitney says. “You may get away with it for a while, but sooner or later you crash.”
But in the PPIC poll, 78 percent of voters said they should have the final say on tough tax-and-spend issues.
That’s not what the founding fathers intended, however, when they created a republican form of democracy. Their idea was that citizens would elect representatives to decide on routine matters of taxes and spending.
“If big decisions are to be made, people want to feel they’re part of it,” Baldassare says. “If they’re not, they feel alienated and left out. And some might decide that what the governor is doing is not in their best interests.
“If the governor is going to be on the 2020 ballot with something,” the pollster adds, “he’d better start explaining today. He’s dealing with a lot of people who have a very low knowledge.”
Newsom also could learn from the voters. They have an innate ability to be right even when they’re wrong.