Dec. 6, 2012 — As we reported yesterday, the supporters of Proposition 30 (Prop 30), the California ballot initiative to raise income tax rates on high earners as well as sales taxes across the board, put together a highly successful campaign. But did the techniques used to sell Prop 30 carry with them the risk of undermining future efforts to bolster government services?
The downside of crisis messaging
Remapping Debate asked Prop 30 supporters whether a crisis was really needed in order to rally support behind a revenue increase for public services. “Not necessarily a crisis, but at least an extraordinary circumstance,” replied Dan Newman, a partner in SCN Strategies, the strategy firm that ran the “Yes on 30” campaign. “When you’re in the campaign business, you need to operate in a reality-based world and acknowledge and accept the inherent inclination of voters to want more services for less money.” The best way to work within the “reality-based world,” Newman said, is to be able to show voters a concrete, immediate need for revenue. This usually involves pointing to some type of crisis, like that which gave rise to Prop 30: Governor Jerry Brown and state lawmakers built $6 billion of “trigger cuts” into California’s most recent budget that would have gone into effect if Prop 30 failed. The majority of these cuts would have fallen on public education, devastating schools that have already been struggling.
Many progressives, however, feel that California’s “reality-based world” is one in which government funding has been chronically insufficient for years, even during those years when California did not face an acute fiscal crisis. (As Remapping Debate’s visualization shows, California’s educational spending per student has chronically lagged behind most of the U.S.) In addition, in the three years before Jerry Brown entered office in 2011, $18 billion was cut from primary and secondary education in California. During that period, 58 percent of school districts in the state cut instructional materials, 35 percent increased class size, 48 percent cut nurses, counselors, and psychologists, and almost half cut employee pay.
These advocates believe that the education crisis is merely one expression of what they call California’s longstanding unwillingness to pay for government services that benefit state residents collectively. “We believe that the underlying problem is systemic, and requires systemic solutions,” said Sabrina Smith, the deputy director of California Calls, a progressive coalition of community-based organizations and a partner in Reclaim California’s Future, the principal grassroots coalition in support of Prop 30.
Smith said that crisis messaging, while effective at getting Prop 30 passed, was counterproductive to the goal of ending the underfunding that has plagued California for a long time. “Pollsters and campaign consultants often develop messaging based on where voters are at — the most direct path to winning,” she said. “Unfortunately, messaging to win often works against our long-term goals.” For example, Dan Newman believed an important element to Prop 30’s success was that Governor Brown had already made all the budget cuts that could be “reasonably done” without devastating the school system and “harming our economy in the long-term.”
Fred Glass, communications director for the California Federation of Teachers, believes that crisis messaging, by emphasizing that action is needed in response to an uncommon crisis, risks convincing some voters that action is only justified in times of crisis. “And worse,” he said, “it makes it harder, then, to have a fully rational discussion that helps people to understand the bigger picture.” He acknowledged that effective crisis messaging, by definition, creates a sense of urgency, but argued, “It’s important for people to know a little bit more deeply how that crisis occurred.”
Moreover, while crisis messaging can motivate voters in a specific instance, Sabrina Smith said, it also “reinforces the deep cynicism that most people have about government. And that cynicism leads to apathy — why vote if the system is flawed and unfixable?” (For another example of this process, see bottom box entitled “Prop 25: Victory at what cost?”)
Crisis messaging is seen by some as yielding only “Band-Aid solutions.” According to Vanessa Aramayo, the director of California Partnership, a statewide coalition of community-based groups that advocates for programs aimed at reducing and ending poverty (and another partner in Reclaim California’s Future), “Prop 30 is a step in the right direction, but that’s all it really is. It’s a step…California has a serious revenue problem, and that is something that the legislature and the governor still haven’t addressed. We don’t have a spending problem. We have cut our way out of [budget deficits] for years. What we really need to focus on is…’how do we raise the revenues that are needed to sustain the programs that we want?’”
Needs still unmet
Aramayo told Remapping Debate that many of California’s public services remain dangerously underfunded, even after the passage of Prop 30. Health and Human Services is particularly underfunded and has seen dramatic cuts in the last six years, she said. “We’ve seen about $8 billion in cuts so far over the years, and none of those programs have been restored.”
Aramayo emphasized that the programs that have been cut most severely are those that have a direct impact on the state’s most vulnerable citizens: “We’re talking about in-home support services for disabled persons and the elderly. We’re talking about childcare for single parents who need assistance to be able to go to work…[about people] that are completely paralyzed from the neck down that require 10 to 12 hours of assistance at home, and that’s been cut to six hours.”
Aramayo believes that restoring funding to schools was an important first step, but that the ultimate goal should be “rebuilding a California that is successful for all of us. A California where we all don’t just have enough to survive, but a California where we all have enough to thrive…At the end of the day, our kids don’t live in schools. To truly help families become successful and to really get California back on track, we need to look at [repairing] the safety net.” She noted that, by providing a dedicated source of revenue for education, Prop 30 freed up some money in California’s general fund that could go toward restoring these cuts, but asserted that more is still needed.
Dim prospects for additional revenue
It seems unlikely that California Democrats will take advantage of the momentum behind Prop 30 to raise more revenue. Since the passage of Prop 30, Governor Brown has reaffirmed his campaign promise that “the only way to raise a tax is to ask the people.” But Willie Pelote, a senior political and legislative director of the California branch of AFSCME International, warned that voters are unlikely to approve another ballot measure for a general tax hike anytime soon. In doing so, he underlined the problem with selling a ballot measure as a response to an unusual and extreme crisis: “You can’t go to that well but once in a while,” he told Remapping Debate. Prop 30 advocates largely agree it will now be the responsibility of elected officials to complete the restoration of California’s government begun by Prop 30. “I think much of that…is going to have to happen without statewide votes of the people,” said Newman. “There’s plenty that elected officials [can] do without having to lead initiative campaigns.”
Nevertheless, Newman believes that a general tax increase passed by the legislature is unlikely. He told Remapping Debate that despite a Democratic supermajority in both houses of the legislature (the first since 1933), “It’s not as if every state senator and state assembly member with a ‘D’ next to their name are all universally in favor of more taxes. It’s a pretty diverse group…I don’t see them passing any tax hikes anytime soon.”
Advocates for more revenue are also skeptical that the legislature will raise taxes on its own, but they remain hopeful that they can persuade legislators to act by maintaining the organization and enthusiasm created during the Prop 30 campaign. “Whether [the supermajority] translates into action around [taxes] without holding legislators’ feet to the fire, I’m dubious,” said Fred Glass, communications director for the California Federation of Teachers. “I think we need to stay out there in the streets and be visible, and remind people that this isn’t the end. This is a way-station.”
Can tax increases be sold differently?
A key feature of any successful future push — in California or elsewhere — for further revenue, progressives agree, will be the use of aspirational messaging of the type deployed by Reclaim California’s Future in the “parallel campaign” that supported Prop 30. “Lifting up the value of government and its connection to our lives is critical to changing peoples’ perceptions about the role of government and taxes,” said Smith, and changing those perceptions is essential to rallying long-term support for progressive reform.
Asked for an example of aspirational messaging, Smith cited the emphasis by California Calls on what she called the “California Dream” narrative. “The California Dream was built on a system of public schools and colleges that gave every Californian access to the education needed to get ahead,” Smith told Remapping Debate. Systemic underfunding has put the California Dream in danger, the campaign argued, but Prop 30 was a “first step to re-investing in the future and restoring that Dream.”
Contrasting California’s present with its past is also effective, according to Aramayo. “There was a time when going to a Cal State or a [University of California school] was extremely affordable for a working family,” she said. “When we start to talk about where we were and where we are now, people start to get a vision of where we want to go back to…We want to go back to a California that really had its values at its core and didn’t take and continue to take from the poorest and the most vulnerable in the state.”
When asked how to convince more traditional political campaigns to move past crisis messaging and adopt a more aspirational approach, Smith told Remapping Debate, “I don’t think I have the answer to how to manage the tension between messaging to win [and] messaging to change minds. Pollsters and campaign consultants will continue to identify the path to winning.”
Newman, who largely used crisis messaging for the “Yes on 30” campaign, acknowledges that the tension Smith described between “messaging to win” and “messaging to change minds” is “a big, important question.” He said he would like to see campaigns rely more on aspirational messaging, but felt that “it would have to be [in the] relatively distant future…There’s just been so much successful anti-government rhetoric over the past couple decades. There’s a lot of work to be done to convince people that government does more good than harm.”
Fred Glass of the California Federation of Teachers agreed that it will be a challenge to fight back against what he describes as “the right wing paradigm…that no taxes anytime are good, [and] no government at any time is good if you can have the private sector instead.” He hopes, however, “that if we are able to just keep talking to people about the good that taxes are doing, that things could be different.”