At the ballot, finding your inner Terminator

Running for office in California is tough, but temporary. You win or you lose, and life goes on.

Sponsoring a ballot initiative is forever.

That lesson hit me while interviewing former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger during a global forum on direct democracy last week in Mexico.

Californians elected Schwarzenegger governor 20 years ago. His second term concluded in 2010. But he is still governing us, for two reasons.

First, because he is a singularly relentless person. Second, because he has been among the most prolific backers of ballot initiatives in the history of our state.

Getting voters to enact your ballot initiative is only the beginning. Every election brings new ballot initiatives that might affect or even cancel your ballot initiative.

So, you must defend it.

The best-known example of this is Proposition 13. Today, 45 years after Prop. 13’s passage and 37 years after the death of its sponsor, Howard Jarvis, there is still a Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association to protect Prop. 13 and its tax limits.

Schwarzenegger, 75, has been protecting and extending successful measures for two decades.

To understand his Sisyphean devotion to initiatives, consider Prop. 49, which Schwarzenegger convinced voters to pass way back in 2002, before he became governor.

Prop. 49 reserved a piece of the budget to fund after-school programs, a focus of Schwarzenegger’s charitable work. Back then, I was among political observers who saw Prop. 49 as little more than a showpiece to set up a future Schwarzenegger run for the governorship.

In retrospect, we badly underestimated Prop. 49, and Schwarzenegger. As governor, he defended the Prop. 49 funds for after-school programs, especially during the budget crisis occasioned by the Great Recession. Since leaving office, he has continued that defense work, while advocating for additional funding from other sources.

As a result, California offers more support for after-school programs than the other 49 states combined. Last fall, the Biden administration dispatched U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona to California to celebrate Prop. 49 — and to tout it as a model for other states.

The other two initiatives that Schwarzenegger guards like a junkyard dog are a matched pair of political reforms: groundbreaking 2008 and 2010 measures that changed state redistricting. Effectively, the measures stripped the state legislature of the power to draft district lines for its own members, and for members of Congress. Instead, the initiatives gave that power to a bipartisan citizens’ commission.

Those were hard-won victories for a governor whose early attempts at redistricting had failed. (After a failed initiative on redistricting in 2005, I wrote that he should give up the cause. He didn’t take my advice.) Those wins for Schwarzenegger also won him constant opposition from political parties and leading politicians trying to undo the measures in the courts.

Schwarzenegger has not been content to fight off these challenges alone. He’s successfully backed ballot measures to enact similar redistricting reforms in other states, among them Colorado, Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, and Utah.

I’ve long dismissed redistricting reform as too small a change to resolve California’s political problems. My columns have proposed instead wholesale constitutional change to replace our tradition of single-member districts in favor of proportional representation that would force the parties to share power.

But it’s easy for me to criticize. While speaking with Schwarzenegger, I found myself thinking about how hard it would be for reformers to turn proportional representation into a reality.

They would have to get someone to write an initiative, raise millions of dollars to qualify it for the ballot, and then somehow convince voters to adopt it.

And even if they managed to do those things, their work wouldn’t be done. They’d have to spend the rest of their lives, and beyond, defending the proposal against court challenges and other initiatives.

In other words, they’d have to find their own inner Terminator.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.

This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: At the ballot, finding your inner Terminator