With 14 statewide ballot measures on the ballot, Proposition 4 is thankfully simple to understand.
If approved, Prop. 4 will repeal California’s general ban on public funding of campaigns and allow most cities and the state to establish public-financing programs if they so choose. That ban was enacted by voters as part of Proposition 73 in 1988, which sought to constrain the use of tax dollars in elections.
As proponents of Prop. 73, including the late Joel Fox, argued at the time in proposing the ban on public funding of campaigns: “Keeping government spending under control is hard enough. Imagine how much harder it will be to keep politicians from spending more tax money on the most important thing in their lives — getting elected and reelected.”
Such concerns are perhaps the chief reason to leave the ban in place.
While Prop. 73’s ban applies to the state and general law cities, charter cities — those operating under their own local constitution, or charter — are allowed to authorize public financing of campaigns if they choose to. Out of the 126 charter cities in the state, only Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and Long Beach have authorized such programs. However, Oakland’s “Democracy Dollars” program, while officially approved in 2022, has been postponed due to fiscal challenges in the city.
Proponents of such systems argue that such systems help rebalance the scales in local elections often dominated by special interests with deep pockets. Empirical evidence on the impact of such systems is limited, but some research has found such systems are associated with more candidates entering races and spending less time on fundraising.
As a real-world example, former Los Angeles Times opinion editor Mariel Garza notes, “Los Angeles’ public financing system provides a 6:1 match and likely helped Karen Bass win the mayor’s race in 2022 against her wealthy challenger, shopping-mall developer Rick Caruso.” In other words, the system simply replaced private funds with taxpayer dollars to tip the scales for an establishment political careerist over a private-sector outsider. Make of that what you will.
If there were more obvious benefits of such systems, one would expect to see broader implementation of them. Charter cities remain an option for experimentation, for better or worse. But it’s not obvious there’s a need to give a greenlight to every city in the state, or the state itself, to hand out taxpayer dollars to political campaigns.
Voters are indeed skeptical of Prop. 4, according to recent polling from the Public Policy Institute of California, which found that just 42% of likely voters support it while 53% are opposed, with the balance undecided. This includes the support of just 47% of people from the Los Angeles area and just 41% from the San Francisco Bay area.
Straightforwardly, Prop. 4 just doesn’t pass the common sense test. At a time when governments across the state are hemorrhaging money and turning to tax increases to sustain the services they currently have, why even allow politicians to set up programs giving tax dollars to their campaigns and the campaigns of their friends? While we’re sure politicians would prefer to spend less time fundraising, does that justify diverting finite tax dollars away from things that will directly benefit taxpayers?
If charter cities want to keep experimenting, fine, that’s already allowed. But should we lift the ban on public funding of campaigns across the state? We don’t think so.
Vote no on Prop. 4.