By Emily Schultheis and Will McCarthy

Presented by Fix LCFS

Proposition 6 would ban involuntary servitude from the state constitution, meaning incarcerated people couldn't be forced to work. (AP File Photo/Eric Risberg) | AP

GETTING THE MESSAGE OUT — A ban on slavery and involuntary servitude seems like it should be an easy sell in a progressive state like California.

So why does it look like voters may reject Proposition 6 next week?

The measure, which would amend California’s state constitution to ban involuntary servitude in an effort to eliminate forced prison labor, faces no formal opposition. But its backers are struggling to explain it to voters with limited resources at their disposal. Their efforts are complicated by a louder debate about another crime-related measure, Prop 36, on which voters appear inclined to back a tougher approach.

Prop 6 would eliminate the so-called “slavery loophole” in California’s constitution. Like the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, it bans slavery and involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime, a provision that has allowed prisons to force inmates to work.

Supporters of Prop 6 argue it’s both a moral issue and a public safety concern: By forcing incarcerated people to work, prisons are keeping them from participating in the kind of rehabilitative programs that will help ensure they don’t end up back in jail after being released.

But public polling finds the California electorate skeptical. Only 41 percent supported Prop 6 in an early October survey from the Public Policy Institute of California , down five points from PPIC’s September poll. In the October survey, 56 percent were opposed.

The title and summary drafted by the attorney general’s office — which includes the phrase “involuntary servitude,” rather than “slavery” — makes that task harder, said Esteban Núñez, who runs communications for one of the Yes on 6 committees. Voters understand what slavery means, but involuntary servitude ends up confusing many of them.

“Once [voters] understand what the initiative does, they completely agree with it,” Núñez said. “It’s just a matter of getting them to understand what involuntary servitude is.”

As a result, the Yes side realizes its best chance at victory is to explain the measure to as many people as possible. Formerly incarcerated “ambassadors” are sharing their own personal experiences in prison and making a pitch to voters in the hopes that concrete examples will get their point across.

Hanging over the entire campaign is Prop 36, the high-profile initiative that would increase penalties for repeat offenders of certain theft- and drug-related crimes. Even though the two measures aren’t explicitly connected, Prop 36’s strong support among the electorate suggests California voters are stepping back from the interest in decarceration that helped make the state a leader in criminal justice reform during the 2010s.

“I am not overly excited about how they became intertwined — any time you hear someone say Yes on 6, then they also say in the same breath, No on 36,” Sam Brown, a Prop 6 ambassador who drafted the measure while serving a life sentence in prison and has been advocating for it since his release, told Playbook. “And I don’t know if that really serves Prop 6 really well because of how well Prop 36 has polled, due to all the attention and the money that’s behind it.”

A message from Fix LCFS:

GOVERNOR NEWSOM AND CHAIR RANDOLPH, VOTE “NO” ON THE LOW CARBON FUEL STANDARD! The LCFS remains broken, rewarding polluters and ignoring the health impacts of dirty fuels on marginalized communities. Environmental justice, labor and clean air leaders are asking California Air Resources Board (CARB) members to vote “NO” on the LCFS! Learn more about how we can FIX the LCFS!

NEWS BREAK: Gov. Gavin Newsom makes a rare endorsement in a Dem-on-Dem race, backing Evan Low in CA-16 … California caravans take to door-knocking in Nevada and Arizona … Arson at West Coast ballot boxes raises election integrity concerns.

Welcome to Ballot Measure Weekly, a special edition of Playbook PM every Monday focused on California’s lively realm of ballot measure campaigns. Drop us a line at eschultheis@politico.com and wmccarthy@politico.com, or find us on X — @emilyrs and @wrmccart.

A highly subjective ranking of the ballot measures getting our attention this week.

1. PROP 36: Opponents of the crime-fighting initiative can bop their heads to the year’s top ballot banger as they enter the final week with an unexpected financial edge over the Yes campaign. Filings showed No on 36 with $2 million available as of Oct. 19, compared to $700,000 for the Yes side (a reversal from earlier in the summer). And a community-based canvassing network called the Million Voters Project also dropped a choir-core campaign anthem.

2. MEASURE G (LA County): Supervisor Lindsey Horvath stars in one of two new ads promoting a charter amendment to reshape the powerful five-member board on which she sits. (The other ad is narrated by an LA-based nurse.) Horvath and her board colleagues are taking the lead to get the message out about the reform measure, as Emily detailed in a deep dive on it.

3. PROP 32: It appears the $18 minimum wage initiative has enemies lurking in the vineyards (or at least in the villas of the people who own them). Grape cultivators like the Sun-Maid Growers of California and the California Association of Wine Grape Growers began throwing in midsize contributions to the No on 32 campaign last week, joining grocers and restaurant business groups in opposition to the measure.

4. PROP 34: After spending $15 million of his organization’s money to defeat the initiative targeting his political spending, AIDS Healthcare Foundation President Michael Weinstein finally jumped into the fray himself, ponying up a $2,000 individual contribution last week to beat back the California Apartment Association’s revenge measure.

5. MEASURE A-24 (Morro Bay): The company aiming to build a controversial battery storage facility on California’s central coast announced it will abandon the city permitting effort that has become the target of a local citizen’s initiative to block it. (Texas-based Vistra Corp says it would instead apply to the state for permission to build.) That move appears a concession of defeat even as a No on A-24 (not that A24) campaign has emerged, arguing the citizen’s initiative is anti-green energy and restricts too many future uses of the land.

6. PROP 35: A few more groups have joined the meager opposition to an initiative headed by some of the state’s top healthcare interests to lock in a tax on certain health care plans. The Western Center on Law and Poverty, the California Black Health Network and ACCE Action are speaking out about how Prop 35 would curtail what they see as much-needed flexibility in the state budgeting process.

7. PROP 4: Pacific Gas and Electric, the ubiquitous state utility responsible for its share of forest fires, threw in a quarter-million-dollar contribution to help pass the $10 billion climate bond last week. In addition to clean water investments, the bond would also help pay for wildfire prevention and response.

A message from Fix LCFS:

As the days tick down toward Nov. 5 — and your friends and family continue to bug you about what any of these ballot measures actually mean — please share our contribution to the robust literary genre of California ballot measure voter guides. Our goal was to produce something that will be useful to voters but less boring and less homework-y than what we’re used to seeing.

We put together three cool pieces you should share:

1. A guide to each of the 10 statewide measures (as well as five notable city and county ones), written for the savvy voter who actually likes and cares about politics rather than one who sees it as a citizen’s dutiful slog.
2. A fun interactive that visualizes the shifting coalitions of the ballot measure landscape , showing how initiatives often produce strange bedfellows. Can you guess which questions unite Democrats and Republicans and which ones split business interests?
3. A roundup of what’s on local ballots across California, drawn from having relentlessly tracked every county and local measure throughout the year. You’ll find statewide trends like cities reckoning with a new era of fire risk and townies taking it to tourists, along with idiosyncratic one-offs like a strident debate about pickleball.

ON OTHER BALLOTS — Votes for a ballot measure to expand medical marijuana access in Arkansas won’t be counted. The state Supreme Court invalidated it too late to remove it from the ballot … An abortion-rights amendment looks poised to pass in Arizona and hand a setback to anti-abortion groups who had hoped the state’s 15-week “compromise” would pass muster with voters, POLITICO’s Alice Miranda Ollstein details in a dispatch from Phoenix … Voters in Uruguay rejected a referendum on Sunday that would have overhauled the country’s pension system …

Some big elected names are playing in issue politics: Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker is diving into the battle over South Dakota’s abortion-rights amendment, with his group Think Big America giving $500,000 to aid the measure as polling shows it at exactly 50 percent support … Florida’s Ron DeSantis is staking his political future in part on his public opposition to two ballot measures, one that would legalize marijuana and another to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution … Gov. Newsom is holding his fire on some of the year’s most controversial California measures, but is all-in campaigning against a conservative hedge fund executive’s effort to repeal Washington state’s landmark carbon pricing program …

And the Washington Post may not be weighing in on the presidential election, but its editorial page did have the courage to take a stand on Initiative 83 to implement ranked-choice voting in Washington, D.C.

… CLOVERDALE — The Bay Area’s northernmost city wants to double in size, but it doesn’t want to grow.

Such is the goal of Cloverdale’s Measure CC, an initiative that would vastly expand the geographic size of the 8,000-person town in an effort to control future development.

Cloverdale has always been defined by being on the outskirts, at once tethered to and disconnected from bustling San Francisco and Oakland. Although considered both the northern and western edge of the Bay Area, the Sonoma County town also has a decidedly small-town feel, an old stagecoach stop that still retains traces of that heritage. The sleepy downtown today sits just off Highway 101, a stopover point for travelers heading north into the redwoods.

Its location has inspired a worry that at some point Cloverdale could suffer the fate of other, previously languid agricultural areas at the megaregion’s periphery, like Dublin and Livermore, that now face sprawling developments and congestion. Mayor Todd Lands said he has seen indications such growth could come to Cloverdale, including new affordable housing developments built in areas he would rather see left untouched.

Measure CC, which was placed on the ballot by Lands and the city council, aims to preempt that possibility by expanding the city’s urban growth boundary and annexing Cloverdale’s western hillside to preserve it “from significant new development.” The area is primarily undeveloped rolling hills and woodland consisting of designated open-space pockmarked by a few private properties and an adult dependency home.

“We’re based on small-town charm, where the vineyards meet the redwoods,” said Lands, who pushed for the initiative in the city council. “We don’t want someone else to rip those out and put in apartments.”

Sonoma County, which currently controls the land, has no stance on the annexation. The private property owners living in the hills have indicated that they’re supportive of joining the city, and no organized opposition has emerged elsewhere.

“No one can control anything forever, but I will give it all I have to make sure we preserve this land,” Lands said.

A message from Fix LCFS:

CALIFORNIA CANNOT AFFORD TO ADOPT A BROKEN CLIMATE POLICY! Regulators failed to fix one of California’s oldest climate programs. Our common-sense updates to prioritize zero-emission, electric technologies that clean up pollution from vehicles were ignored.

CARB has an opportunity to try again. We can include jet fuel in the program to cut emissions from one of the state's dirtiest industrial sectors. We can limit the glut of out-of-state biofuels and end junk factory farm gas offsets that reward polluters and harm communities of color.

The state failed to fix the LCFS but we can start again. Learn more about why CARB must vote "NO" on the LCFS!

Prop 34, the California Apartment Association’s brazen attempt to kneecap Weinstein and the AIDS Healthcare Foundation’s political spending via ballot initiative, has few precedents in California history. Rarely are ballot initiatives, intended as a citizen’s tool for direct democracy, so narrowly aimed at specific individuals or entities.

But there are examples, including over a decade ago in the small town of Apple Valley on the edge of the Mojave Desert. In 2013, the town council sent voters a measure that would amend the city’s development code to allow for the construction of a new Walmart Supercenter — a privilege that Walmart essentially paid the town to move forward with.

In response, a private citizen named Gabriel Hernandez filed a lawsuit against the town, arguing that the ballot measure was unconstitutional because it inappropriately benefited a single corporation. Like Prop 34, which does not name AHF or Weinstein, the initiative didn’t explicitly identify its target, but it was colloquially known as “the Walmart measure” and identified as the “Wal-mart Supercenter Ballot Initiative” on council agendas.

Weinstein has already challenged Prop 34 on similar grounds, with the state supreme court deciding it would wait until after the election to rule on its constitutionality. If the initiative passes, the sides are likely to be back in courts, resurfacing arguments from Hernandez v. Town of Apple Valley. There, the courts sided with Hernandez, but sidestepped the question of whether a ballot initiative’s reward or punishment violates the constitutional prohibition on “bills of attainder.”

Instead an appeals court overruled the Apple Valley initiative on more prosaic grounds: the town council had violated an open-meeting law.

… YES ON 5 — Ballot-measure committees are a vehicle for disparate interests driving toward a common goal. Here’s our look at the coalitions, consultants and cash coming together to power them.

AT THE WHEEL: The Non-Profit Housing Association of Northern California’s NPH Action Fund, a Bay Area organization that advocates for affordable housing, launched the committee to pass the constitutional amendment lowering the voter threshold to approve local bonds for housing and infrastructure. It serves on the Yes on 5 campaign committee alongside the California Professional Firefighters and California Alliance for Jobs, a coalition of construction companies and building-trades unions advocating for public projects.

RIDING SHOTGUN: Ned Wigglesworth of Spectrum Campaigns, a ballot-measure veteran whose most recent win at the ballot was 2022’s Prop 28 for arts and music education funding, serves as lead strategist. Spectrum’s Sydney Page runs day-to-day operations as Yes on 5’s campaign manager.

UNDER THE HOOD: David Binder, also polling for the campaigns to pass Props 6 and 35 and defeat Prop 36, leads Yes on 5’s public-opinion research.

IN THE GARAGE: Newsom allies Ace Smith, George Ross and Alaina Haworth of Bearstar Strategies are making Yes on 5’s ads, while Amelia Matier, formerly of the governor’s press office, handles communications. Stephanie Ross of Trilogy Interactive is in charge of digital strategy for a campaign spending more than $1 million per week on online advertising placed via the Washington, D.C.-based Polaris Strategies.

RIDING ALONG: The Million Voters Project Action Fund, a grassroots field organizing group, has been canvassing for both Yes on 5 and No on 36. Sonoma Mayor Sandra Lowe is leading Yes on 5’s coalitions work.

FUEL SOURCE: The measure’s biggest donor by far — to the tune of $6 million — has been the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the organization funded by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Other major donors include unions like the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and AFSCME.

DECALS: Groups like Habitat for Humanity, the League of Women Voters and the California Federation of Teachers are backing Prop 5.

HOOD ORNAMENT: Democratic Assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry sponsored the legislation that became Prop 5.

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