Selling Prop 30

Glass said that the California Federation of Teachers tested a number of different tax measures before negotiating with Governor Brown to create Prop 30. Its original idea, a “1 percent on the 1 percent” income tax on the wealthiest Californians, achieved 73 percent approval in test polling, though the Federation decided to discard it after determining that it did not raise enough revenue. A sales tax with no progressive element only garnered 44 percent approval in test polling. From these results, Glass and his colleagues concluded that progressive income taxes have much more public support than regressive taxes, and therefore that Brown’s Prop 30 messaging needed to focus on the fact that the measure was primarily a tax on the wealthy. “Once people understand that, they’re much more likely to vote for it.”

According to Glass, Brown resisted this message at first, perhaps out of a concern about alienating business-oriented supporters, but embraced it in the final three weeks of the campaign in which he held a statewide blitz of rallies at colleges, community centers, and union halls. (For an example of the messaging in a typical speech from this period, see “Brown on the stump”). Glass credits this reversal with turning the tide in Prop 30’s favor — before those final three weeks, polls had shown that approval for the measure had dropped to 48 percent.

The sales tax component of Proposition 30 called for a different approach. Brown’s campaign tried to make the sales tax less frightening, Dan Newman said, by showing that, in context, “it’s not very much.”  Throughout the campaign, Newman continued, Brown repeated that the tax amounted to “an extra penny on a four-dollar sandwich.”

Technique 3: Prove accountability

“We knew voters wanted to support schools…they understood the dire fiscal straits our schools were in. So then the main threshold question that they had was, ‘Will this really help our schools?’” said Newman. “They can’t feel as if their taxes are just going down a black hole.”

To reassure voters, Newman said, his team employed two approaches. First, it used advertising to inform voters that the revenue from Prop 30 “went into a special account for schools and that there would be regular audits that would be posted online.”

Second, it relied on Brown’s personal status as what Newman called a “trusted messenger” with a long-term reputation for having a frugal lifestyle. Brown burnished that reputation for frugality upon returning to office in 2011 by taking 48,000 cell phones and 7,500 “non-essential” cars away from state employees in all state agencies and departments; by vetoing a budget for the first time in California history “because it relied on the old duct tape and gimmicks”; and by pushing for draconian budget cuts.

Willie Pelote, a senior political and legislative director of the California branch of AFSCME International, a major union for public sector workers that supported Prop 30, agreed that the cuts made by Brown played an important role in earning the trust of voters. “A lot of people wanted Jerry [Brown] to come in here and talk about how he was going to restore funding…But he came in here and made hard choices that hurt a lot people,” he said. Pelote argued that by cutting spending before asking for more revenue, Brown demonstrated that “there’s no fat here” and made voters more likely to support higher taxes.

Technique 4: Timing

Two elements of timing appear to have played an important role in the success of Prop 30: the decision to put the measure on the ballot during a presidential election year, and the decision to run a relatively reserved campaign until the blitz of the final three weeks.

Mark Baldassare of the Public Policy Institute of California noted that “putting [Prop 30] on the general election ballot in a presidential year was huge…The electorate that will turn out for a presidential election is much different from the electorate in an off-year election.” Specifically, voter turnout among three groups who tend to have greater-than-average liberal leanings ­— young people, minorities, and poor people — is higher in presidential as opposed to off-year elections.

Willie Pelote believes that the timing of the campaign’s statewide promotional blitz in the final three weeks before the election was also important, since that was the period when “voters are paying the most attention…This was a great campaign. I think I got my first piece of mail three weeks out.” Pelote contrasted this approach with the more traditional campaigns run by his union, which he said usually start between six and nine months in advance.