Elections 2003 & 2005 in California

Recent elections in California provide striking examples of the modern-day functioning of some of the Progressive Reforms, most notably the referendum, the initiative and the recall, and of how the intentions of the authors of the measures have been undermined.

Recall election October 2003
During 2003, a petition campaign succeeded in gathering enough signatures to set in motion the process of a recall election, in which the people voted to decide whether the Governor, a Democrat, should be removed from office. The Governor, Gray Davis, was on the whole neither a particularly excellent nor a particularly awful governor, but he had several disadvantages: he was a professional politician, having spent his whole career in various public offices, and was thus more or less automatically the object of some distrust; during his term, there was a major budget crisis, which came close to bringing the state's government to a halt, and there was a major crisis in electricity supply (linked to the collapse of Enron), which cut off electricity to various parts of the state, creating enormous discontent. Since one of the state's roles is to regulate companies, including those that supply electricity, discontent was naturally, though not particularly rationally, directed against the Governor.
The petition campaign was in fact mainly the work of a rich Republican, who had lost the election to the Governorship when Davis was elected. Taking advantage of the climate of discontent, he used his financial resources to hire young people to distribute the petition, which soon obtained the number of signatures required. He did not, however, run for office in the ensuing election.
Some one hundred and thirty-five candidates did run, including Mr Schwarzenegger, the Lieutenant Governor under Mr Davis, various other political figures, as well as a hundred or so other candidates, including a professional pornographic film actress and Larry Flynt, the publisher of Hustler magazine. In the carnival atmosphere that resulted, Mr Schwarzenegger's status as an "outsider", uncorrupted by previous contact with politics, and his image as a superhero able to bring about immediate change and stop evil in its tracks, won him the election as a Republican.
The election was unquestionably an example of a corruption and perversion of the obvious intent of the Progressives who originated the recall: rather than being an example of a popular movement in which the people were able to express a spontaneous upwelling of political conviction, unsullied by base financial interests, the election was set in motion by a single very wealthy individual, who was able to manipulate a constitutional measure and public opinion to create a semblance of democracy.
Special election November 2005
By 2005, Mr Schwarzenegger's honeymoon with California had become less sweet. In particular, he had encountered strong resistance in the predominantly Democratic State Legislature to his proposals for fiscal and budgetary reforms. In order to circumvent the legislature, he proposed his reforms to the people through the referendum procedure. As it happened, the measures were all defeated at the polls; some analysts pointed out that California had indeed elected a Republican governor, but mostly because of the unusual circumstances of the recall election, and that California is a "blue" state, i.e., votes Democratic in most major elections, such as the Presidency, not to mention the state Legislature. When Mr Schwarzenegger offered them Republican-style solutions to government problems, the people declined his offer. (It is worth noting, nevertheless, that Mr Schwarzenegger was re-elected in 2006 with some 56% of votes cast. His personal charisma, though it was insufficient to push through his proposals in 2005, is still a powerful force, even in California, which re-elected a Democractic US Senator with 60% of the votes cast.)

These elections are symptomatic of a growing problem in California: special interests and powerful financiers, whether elected officials or private interests, have taken control of the referendum and initiative processes, and submit innumerable measures to the public for decisions. Individual voters frequently vote for what they perceive to be their own interests, which frequently include more government services (e.g., a new school, a health center, etc.) but do not include higher taxes. Since measures for new services are frequently presented without parallel measures to provide financing, and since measures calling for tax reduction are often also presented at the same election, California seems to have reached a point in which budget crises are nearly a structural part of government. (This said, the Los Angeles Times reported on November 17, 2005 that higher-than-expected tax revenues had created a budget surplus this year. Mr Schwarzenegger will almost certainly take credit for this outcome, and use it as a component of future election campaigns.)