The decisive failure of Oregon Measure 50, which sought to raise cigarette taxes with most of the money to go to child health care, is getting attributed in the early reviews to the most obvious fact of the campaign over the issue: The massive, swamping, super-expensive campaign by tobacco companies against it. Bill Lunch of Oregon State University was quoted in the Oregonian as saying, “It’s an example of an election being bought. It’s as simple as that.” The Oregonian‘s editorial on the subject this morning suggested a similar view.
Except that it’s not quite as simple as that. Look at 50 in the context of where it came from, what else the voters did in Oregon yesterday, and the face of money issues on the ballot recently otherwise, and you get a more complex picture.
To put this in context: We’re absolutely not arguing that the most expensive single campaign (by far) in Oregon history, one that rained endless TV ads for months and that drowned out its opposition with a 4-1 spending margin, wasn’t an important factor. Obviously it was. But some other factors had to be in play that allowed it to succeed as strongly as it did, and a bit of compare/contrast throws some of them into relief – and may help suggest what child health care advocates might want to do next.
To begin, reel your mind back to April 26, described at the time (by a Republican blogger) as “the most wild day ever seen on the House floor.” On that day Democrats were pushing the cigarette tax/child health legislation – the legislative version of Measure 50 – on the House floor, and the Republican caucus reaction to it was startling. It wasn’t just that the Republicans were opposed; they struggled this way and that in fierce determination not to vote on the bill. When it did come up for a vote, one Republican, John Lim, for hours declined to vote at all.
The reason for all that emerged in the debate of Representative Scott Bruun, R-West Linn, who favored state help for insuring children for health care, and could back a raise in the cigarette tax, but disapproved of linking them. He opposed the bill, he said, because “I owe my constituents more than just pushing the popular button. I owe them my best judgement.†The cigarette proposal, he said, “polls well.” And in fact it had been heavily advance-tested by its Democratic advocates, and found it winning easily. (One of the great ironies of this year is that Measure 49, on land use, was supposed to be the one that would have a hard time passing.)
Were the Republicans and the Democrats both wrong about the public’s likely take on what became Measure 50? Doubtful.
But then, when the idea was tested early this year, it was laid out in specific, all its pieces – and there were several moving parts – clearly delineated. An increase in the cigarette tax didn’t seem that objectionable. But what emerged months later before the public, in the course of the industry campaign and otherwise, was a tax increase, positioned as such with the add-on that although it might be narrow now, it could easily expand later. What also happened is a certain vagueness in where exactly the money would go: The idea was that it was supposed to help kids, but how exactly was that supposed to work? Where would the money go, and who would get it?
Remember that the same people who voted so strongly for Measure 49 – also backed by Democrats, and which logically should have drawn support from many of the same quarters – killed Measure 50. One key difference is that Measure 49 could be described as a “dial-down,” a reduction of activity (growing out of 2004’s Measure 37) that had generated a good deal of negative reaction; Measure 49 was complex too, but it was a new phase in an already-existing story. Measure 50 asked voters to buy into something new, and when that happens, especially where money is involved, voters want the details. They want to know – and rightly – exactly where all that cash is headed. The answers to that on 50 were available, but they were more complicated than most voters would want to readily deal with, or trust.
Put this in the context of another vote Tuesday, across the Columbia and then some, in the Puget Sound. One of the big problems in that area – nearly everyone there seems to recognize it as a huge mess that badly needs resolution – is transportation. A couple of years ago state voters did approve a big gas tax increase on that subject. But Tuesday they rejected a mega-billion funding proposal for transport (highway and public transit both) which had been backed by much of the governing Democratic establishment. That vote wasn’t, as Oregon’s 50 was, the subject of such massive campaigns that the advertising would have been decisive. But they rejected it anyway, however obvious the problem it was intended to solve. Why? We’d suggest a big part of it was uncertainty and confusion, by which we don’t mean voter ignorance: There were differing opinions about how much money would be raised, what the costs would be, what would be done under the program and what wouldn’t, what the environmental and other impacts would be.
There were too many moving pieces: Not the whole explanation for Proposition 1’s loss, but likely one piece of it.
A bunch of financial issues failed on Tuesday around the Northwest, even as a number of significant non-tax issues passed. That was probably not coincidental. And many of those money issues had some built-in complexity. In future, their advocates could take a lesson from Tim Eyman, who passed an initiative Tuesday (making legislative tax increases tougher): His proposals are simple enough to slap on a bumper sticker. Tax raise measures have to be just that simple too. Maybe more so.
One other thing. Voters have become aware who is in charge these days in Oregon and Washington: Democrats. And the thing that Republicans have most warned voters, especially independent voters, about Democrats, is that if you put them in power, they’ll raise taxes. It’s not too great a reach to see, as a slice of what happened in these money ballot issues, a little bit of pushback – “Careful what you’re doing with these money demands, buddy.” Not that Democrats can’t raise taxes at all, or can’t win support for doing that (and they got just that support for the 2005 Washington gas tax, for example), but that they need to exercise great care in this area.
Campaigns, even expensive ones, work mainly as accelerants; they usually can’t create a public mood or attitude completely from scratch. The Measure 50 campaign might have been enough to turn the tide as the central element, but not without a little help.
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