Nathaniel, what is going on over your left shoulder? I'm glad that you asked, Galen. So in 2004 at the DNC and the RNC, they gave out Republican and Democratic branded macaroni and cheese. The Republican one has elephant shaped macaroni and cheese. I don't know if you can see. And the Democratic one has donkey shaped macaroni and cheese. They're not edible anymore, right? I mean, I would never eat them because they are my prized possessions. But yes, at this point, I would not recommend eating them.
How much would I have to pay you to get you to eat that mac and cheese? A million dollars, Galen. Dear listeners, we're going to have to start a GoFundMe to get Nathaniel to eat his Republican and Democratic 20-year-old mac and cheese.
Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druk. The plan for today's podcast was originally to talk all about ballot measures. Why, when voters are asked to weigh in on specific policies on the ballot, they somewhat frequently vote against the lawmakers that they put in office. But before we get to that, we have some special election results in Alaska to unpack.
After all the votes were tallied and processed according to Ranked Choice Voting, Democrat Mary Peltola has won Alaska's at-large congressional election, beating Republicans Sarah Palin and Nick Begich. The final tally was 51% Peltola, 49% Palin. Here with me to discuss is senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich. Hello, Nathaniel. Welcome to the show. Hey, Galen. Good to be here as always.
I know we got some some more special election results. I know it never ends. Such an exciting time in politics. I should say that senior politics reporter Monica Potts is also going to be joining us later in the show to discuss ballot initiatives. But for now, Nathaniel, how much of an overperformance is this for Democrats in Alaska?
So it's hard to say because Alaska is using that's our favorite 538 answer, by the way. Yeah, for sure. So Alaska is using this new system of ranked choice voting, which makes it pretty hard to make an apples to apples comparison with other special elections, which are obviously just kind of your the typical first past the post Democrat versus Republican races that most of the rest of us are used to.
So what happened was in the first round, so well in ranked choice voting, as folks might know, voters rank all the candidates on the ballot. So they'll say this person's my first choice. This person's my second choice. This person's my third choice. And then basically what happens is that candidates get successively eliminated from the bottom and then their voters are redistributed to whoever their voters ranked second or third or whatever.
whatever. So in the first round of the special election, you had Democrat Maripel Tola at, I believe, 40%.
Republican Sarah Palin at 31% and Republican Nick Begich at 29%. That meant that Begich was eliminated. His votes were redistributed. Most of those votes went to Palin, but a fair number of them actually went to Peltola. And because Peltola already had built up a decent lead in the first place votes, it was enough to put her over the top 51 to 49, as you mentioned, Galen. So how do we kind of measure overperformance? So you can go by the first choice votes, right?
It's kind of like a generic ballot question. It asks people, who's your first choice? What is your preferred party? And if you total up Begich and Palin, you get about 60% of voters in Alaska said they wanted some Republican to represent them, and only 40% wanted the only Democrat on the ballot.
Peltola. That would be a five point overperformance for Republicans. On the flip side, once the votes were redistributed, obviously the Democrat won. This was a major event. It was the first time a Democrat had won a statewide election in Alaska since 2008. I don't think we can throw that out either. And also, of course, Mary Peltola is the first Alaska native to ever represent the state in Congress. Yeah, good point. The first ever in Congress. And yeah, that's certainly a big deal as well. Don't want to lose sight of that.
So when you look at the margin in the final round, Peltola beat Palin by about three points, and that would represent an 18-point Democratic overperformance. Now, it's also worth noting that Sarah Palin, the kind of de facto Republican nominee in this last round, is very unpopular. She, of course, kind of left the Alaska governorship very abruptly, went to kind of
seek fame and fortune in the lower 48 she was on the masked singer which i don't know galen do you watch the mass singer i feel like you would oh my god that's so that's offensive no i do not watch the mass singer but i know that sarah palin was on the masked singer because it happened the day that like everything shut down and the nba canceled their season that trump barred
flights from Europe, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it was also that night that Sarah Palin was unmasked when COVID was hitting the fan in the early days of 2020. But like that was pretty that was pretty well after her resignation from the Alaska governorship. Right. She moved to she bought a house in Arizona. She was on Wife Swap with Joan Rivers. I missed that one. Do you watch Wife Swap?
That I'm more inclined to watch than The Maths Singer. And I did watch the episode where Joan Rivers goes to Alaska to live with the Palins. And I think Sarah Palin's daughter goes to either Los Angeles or New York to live with Joan Rivers' daughter, Melissa Rivers. It was incredible television. Definitely worth watching. Recommend. 10 out of 10. I am going to have to check that out right after the podcast.
Anyway, so Palin is not popular is what we're saying in Alaska. In so many words. And basically, you know, it's not surprising that when you have a Democrat facing against this unpopular Republican that the Democrat was able to win. Alaska is red, but it's not super red.
So, yeah, so you have all of these different factors at play. There's confusion about which votes we should be looking at in terms of judging over performance. There's a question about whether it was just due to Palin being a weak candidate and Begich maybe would have won. I personally think he probably would have. Wait, wait, pause for one second. So...
If Begich in the first round of voting had come out in second instead of Palin, do we know what that vote likely would have looked like? Would Begich have won? Yeah.
Yeah, I think we have a pretty good sense. So the most recent poll of this race ended up absolutely nailing the final margin. It was from Alaska Survey Research. It found that if in the event of a Peltola-Palin final matchup, Peltola would win 51-49. And it also surveyed a Peltola-Begich matchup and it found Begich winning 55-45. So I do think that you can see basically right there in black and white the effect that candidate quality had on the race.
So basically what I'm saying is that it's not clear whether this kind of fits into the pattern that we saw in New York last week where Democrats overperformed in two special elections. It seemed clear that that was due to enthusiasm and kind of a backlash to the Dobbs decision that the race in the 19th district was, or the Democrat framed that race around abortion. That
may have factored in here in Alaska. It also may have, this may have just been due to local factors, but at the same time, it doesn't necessarily change our, the broader notion, which is that we want to look at a bunch of special elections. Special elections since Dobbs have been good for Democrats and kind of regardless of what number you use in Alaska, that doesn't change that.
Yeah, Nathaniel, this leaves us with something of a choose your own adventure slash choose your own analysis. On one hand, the final result, you can point to it and say Democrats overperformed by 18 points. That's enormous. You can also look at the poll that you just cited and say, you know, if Nick Begich would have won by 10 points, that would still be a five point overperformance for Democrats.
Or you can look at the first round vote where Mary Paltola got 40% and Republicans got 60% and say that's an underperformance for Democrats. Of those three options, which do you think is the most sort of
dutiful to the reality of politics in Alaska today, the partisanship of Alaska today? I don't know. You know, my instinct would probably be you got to look at them all together. Maybe this is quick and dirty, but you can average them. You know, maybe the baggage
Peltola theoretical matchup, you know, would be most accurate because that's kind of the one in the middle, you know, not on either extreme, but also that's a theoretical matchup that was just from a poll. We don't know for sure that that would have happened in real life. Yeah. So I don't know. But again, kind of the thing about special election analysis is that you never just want to look at one special election and draw a conclusion about, you know, broader trends, the national environment, the midterms based on that. You want to look at the aggregate of special elections. And as we talked about last week,
Since the Dobbs decision, you know, there have now been five federal special elections, including Alaska. In the other four, Democrats clearly overperformed kind of their base partisan levels. What was the average, like six points? I think it was nine points in those four elections. And kind of depending on how you count Alaska, the new average is either a Democratic overperformance of between seven points and 11 points. Again,
Between seven and 11 points is just generally speaking, we're talking about a good environment for Democrats. Still the same caveats from last week apply. Things can change. There's still two months till the midterms. I mean, a lot of voters clearly are tuned in, but after Labor Day, there will be this change where more voters do tune in. Of course. Pollsters will start switching to likely voter models, which typically favors Republicans. So a lot of ground to cover still. Let me ask this a slightly different way.
How should we think about the competitiveness of Alaska's at-large district this fall?
Yeah, that's a great question too. The Cook Political Report moved it to toss up, which I think is fair if only because we just don't know that much about it. I mean, I guess we just got an election result that did tell us something. But I think, again, Palin beat out Begich for the second slot and basically the chance to take on Peltola head-to-head in the final round by only two points. And you could
You could easily see some Republicans being like, well- Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on you. Exactly. We lost when I ranked Sarah Palin first. So maybe I'm going to switch to Nick Begich, do some strategic voting. Maybe he...
beats her out by two points in the general election. And then if he faces Peltola head to head, then maybe he beats her because he's less of a flawed candidate. At the same time, Peltola is an incumbent now. You know, if I were her, I would certainly very quickly kind of start moving to build a brand, build an independent brand, kind of similar to how people like Don Young, former Dean of the House whose death caused the special election, kind of created
an independent brand for himself. And so maybe she, Peltola, will do even better in the general. Yeah, we just don't know. How should we assess Alaska's first general election conducted via ranked choice voting? In the sense of
Advocates say that this is a system that is more likely to land on a broadly appealing candidate, not a fringe candidate. It's likelier to appeal to the most Alaskans possible. It looks like in this case, both what the actual first round preferences were and what the final result were, were the same. But on the other hand, it looks like
when you compare that 60-40 Republican versus Democrat, that maybe Alaskans didn't get what they wanted. Yeah, it's interesting. There were a good number of voters, Begich voters specifically, who only voted for Begich and didn't bother to rank a second choice. And you can say that maybe to your point that that indicates that there were people who
wanted a Republican in office, but just didn't bother to vote. But also a lot of those people may have just left it blank in protest out of Sarah Palin. So maybe they were like, I want a Republican, but I don't want Sarah Palin and like let the chips fall where they may, even if a Democrat gets elected. So there's that. I think, you know, it's interesting because in terms of there's a sense that it kind of creates consensus and helps like more centrist candidates in the middle. And I
Sarah Palin came within three points of winning, and I think she is not someone you would consider in the middle. And in fact, the final round came down to the two candidates on either end. And Begich is kind of the median candidate ideologically, but he was eliminated first. And I think this is a flaw of ranked choice voting, which is that he was probably the second choice of, or first choice of the vast majority of
of voters, probably most Peltola voters ranked Begich second and most Palin voters ranked Begich second, but he didn't even get the chance to advance to the second round and kind of become a consensus candidate because he lacked the kind of passionate base. And that said, some rank chair supporters would argue that that is a feature of the system, that it wants to get a candidate who is both broadly acceptable and also a strong following themselves. You don't necessarily want a candidate who has zero first choice votes
But is everybody's second choice to win? Because I guess we can argue whether that's kind of democratic or not. The other interesting thing is, you know, people say that ranked choice voting can create kind of more collegial campaigning and it kind of gets like half credit on this score, I think. I thought it was really interesting that during the campaign, Begich and Palin really were going at each other because they basically knew that one of them was going to finish last and be eliminated. So they had to beat
the other one, but they both played nice with Peltola because, well, I don't know why. She wasn't really a threat to them, I guess. And so that was kind of interesting. You probably wouldn't have seen that if it had been a traditional general election where Palin and Peltola, say, had faced off. They probably would have gotten quite negative with each other. So I don't know. In conclusion, rank choice voting is interesting.
All right. Well, I'm glad we could round that up a bit before getting to our second topic of the day, which is ballot measures. American Giant makes great clothing, T-shirts, jeans and more right here in the U.S. Creating jobs in towns and cities across the country. Support America's workers and get 20 percent off your first order at American-Giant.com with code STAPLE20.
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When Kansas voted by a nearly 20-point margin to keep its state right to abortion through 20 weeks in early August, much of the analysis centered around the backlash to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. And it's pretty clear that there has been a backlash. But there's something else to the story as well. It's another example, among many, of a state voting against its overall partisanship when it comes to ballot measures.
The voters voted in a way the lawmakers that they elect almost certainly would not.
This is a trend we've seen in Republican states passing minimum wage laws, marijuana legalization, or Medicaid expansion through ballot initiatives. We've also seen Democratic states reject liberal priorities like affirmative action and mail voting. So what is going on here and what kind of ballot initiatives can we expect to see across the country this fall? Also joining us now is senior politics reporter Monica Potts. Welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me.
You recently wrote about this for the website. So let's get right to it. Why can voters behavior on ballot measures seem significantly out of step with the lawmakers that they vote into office when they have the opportunity to vote for politicians?
Yeah, this was something that I was interested in because especially in a lot of elections, they're actually in the same election voting for a ballot initiative that the candidates they're also voting for wouldn't support. And part of the reason is that I spoke to three political scientists, Jay Barth and Janine Perry, who are both in Arkansas at two different colleges, and Craig Burnett, who is at Hofstra University.
And part of the reason why is that there's a lot of evidence that voters just actually don't know a ton about ballot initiatives before they go into the voting booth. There are some states that have really detailed booklets that they send out to voters, but that doesn't happen in every state.
In a lot of states, the ballot initiatives are kind of complicated. In some cases, they're about simpler questions that voters might have already firm ideas on. But in other cases, they're kind of about complicated or detailed matters. And so voters just don't really think about them a lot. And so they also don't match them up with the stances that the candidates that they're voting for take. Wait, so explain that a little bit further. Low information about a ballot initiative leads to...
less partisan behavior?
On those issues, yeah, I think so. So there's also a component to where a candidate might not be incentivized to take a stance on a specific ballot measure because they have a sense that it's popular, it might pass, and there's no real reason for them to say, I don't like this particular ballot measure or I think this is something that voters shouldn't vote for. They can just say, I support the will of the people. They can vote for what they want. This is their choice.
And so it's partly just that, yeah, voters don't know a lot about what ballot initiatives they're going to see in the voting booth. And so they decide once they get there.
And they also don't compare the stances that their candidates take on those issues or the parties that their candidates belong to take on those issues. And those particular candidates also might not decide to weigh in on those issues if they know their voters are going to see them on the ballot and might have ideas about them. Yeah, I found this really interesting in the piece that you wrote, which folks can read on the FiveThirtyEight website. One of the points of analysis from the political scientists that you spoke to was that,
This is part of a trend, I don't know if it's recent or not, but in American politics of sometimes voters disconnecting policy from politics or partisanship. I'm curious, Nathaniel, if you have thoughts on this in terms of
Other examples where we see that sometimes policy preferences and partisan politics don't quite match up. Yeah, they definitely don't always. You know, the parties are obviously different.
very polarized and people don't always fit into those kind of neat buckets of fiscally conservative and socially conservative or liberal and everything or something like that. To the point in Monica's story, you've seen red states have passed things like marijuana legalization or Medicaid expansion at the ballot box. And while I think Monica's points are well taken, the way I think about it is that
Maybe they haven't seen those ballot initiatives a lot before, but I think that that doesn't necessarily mean they're not informed on the issue, but just that they don't associate it with their partisan cues yet. Right. The issue hasn't been politicized or partisanized for them. So when they go into the ballot booth and read it for the first time or when, you know, the day before the election, when they're looking it up in the voter guide or something like that, they think, huh, like Medicaid expansion, like that sounds crazy.
find to me because they don't have those cues of Republican politicians saying this is socialism, this is Obamacare or something like that. And so as a result, you know, those things are popular. And I think that we see parties and partisanship are a lot more, I think, about culture and vibes. And as our dearly departed colleague Claire Malone used to say, partisan pheromones. Whereas when you ask somebody to just vote on one issue that is somewhat
divorced contextually from partisanship, they are willing to be a little more liberal or a little more conservative than their voting record might otherwise indicate. And I think we've seen with something like a candidate like Donald Trump, he came along and because he was able to tap into issues that Republican voters really cared about on things like immigration, he was able to stand in the face of Republican orthodoxy on issues like entitlements or trade or something like that and revealed that
you know, actually a lot of people who we think of as very conservative, you know, might actually hold some views on issues that we think of as more liberal.
and vice versa. Hold on one second. I absolutely take your point about partisan pheromones and the parties basically being a collection of policy stances that oftentimes voters don't subscribe to from top to bottom or oftentimes don't even make sense logically internally. But
When it comes to voters not being primed about the partisanship of an issue, we spent a whole decade talking about how Medicaid expansion was socialism and Obamacare. We've talked about
abortion in the most sort of extreme partisan terms for 50 years. I mean, affirmative action, which Californians rejected by 15 points, is a pretty high profile liberal issue, especially in the 2020 election when voters were voting on it. I have to think voters know where their parties stand on abortion, marijuana, the ACA, affirmative action. No. No.
They might know it logically, but are they in that mindset when they vote, I think is the question, right? When you see some very anodyne legal language on a paper in front of you, you know, about Medicaid expansion, like, are you thinking about that in culture war terms and like associating it with, you know, Barack Obama and
and all the things that you hate about him. And to your point about affirmative action, I mean, there was a lot of other stuff going on in 2020 in California. I don't think a lot of Democratic candidates were being like, yes, vote to support affirmative action in this ballot measure. I could be wrong about that, in fairness. But I don't think, to Monica's point, that a lot of politicians were issuing strong cues on these issues.
Yeah, I think that's right. And I think on a lot of issues, too, where they might know where their parties stand on it, but when they see it in isolation in the voting booth, it's just it's like what Nathaniel said. It's not what they're thinking about is the last time they heard a Republican candidate that they're familiar with talking about why they shouldn't expend Medicaid. It's just it's not what they're thinking about. The other thing is that some of these issues have
grown and they've changed in recent years. And so, you know, the Affordable Care Act was passed in 2010. The voters looking at these things in their states now aren't necessarily thinking about the debate that happened in the immediate wake of that when they vote on those issues. Things like medical marijuana legalization and even recreational marijuana legalization
legalization. Attitudes on that have changed a lot over the years. Attitudes on the minimum wage has been discussed for decades and there hasn't been any federal action. And so voters go into the booth and they're like, you know what, this seems fair. It's not something they're thinking about the 20-year debate that we've had on that on the federal level. So yeah, I think that's right too. A lot of the measures that we're talking about, we think of them as progressive issues, but
but they're either also just popular or unpopular, separate and apart from how the parties talk about them. - I do wanna ask about that. When voters go and vote on these ballot initiatives and vote against the partisanship of their state, for example,
Is it usually just matching up with the overall popularity of the issue? Like, I think we do know at this point that marijuana is broadly popular. Obviously, you'd have to look in each specific state to see how popular it is there. But even on things like
Should we take the revealed preferences of Californians to mean that ultimately affirmative action isn't popular or the revealed preferences of New Yorkers to mean that ultimately a lot of people don't really trust mail voting? How does this compare with maybe the broader polling that we have on the issues? I think it varies from issue to issue. I do actually think there was a Pew survey from April, and I do think they found that 74 percent of the people they asked
didn't think that race and ethnicity should be a factor in college admissions. They thought grades and test scores should be more important. So there's a lot you could unpack there, but just when you ask people about affirmative action, it doesn't seem like it's super popular even among people who might otherwise identify as progressive or who say they might actually care about or who say they care about racial justice issues.
And I think that also one of the criticisms of ballot initiatives is that it does seem like it is an opportunity for big national groups to come into states and to fund an initiative and to campaign on it. And I think in the California issue, you saw there wasn't really a local champion on that issue at the time. That's one of the criticisms that people in the state had then.
And on New York not passing broader voting measures, that was an off-year election that was otherwise good for Republicans. It wasn't a high turnout election. It was 2021. So it wasn't even a midterm election. So one of the things that people say is that these national groups sort of know what their advantages are politically and know how to pick the right time and the right moment to put the issues on the ballot together.
to get the outcome that they want. And I think there's some truth to that in some instances. That's been one of the criticisms. You are based in Arkansas and dug into some of these examples in Arkansas because it's the rare Southern state where ballot initiatives are more popular or easier to get onto ballots. Have we seen that in Arkansas as well? Because I know that has been a criticism. They're currently trying to make it harder to get initiatives on the ballot because
because Republicans in the state say, you know, these big outside groups are coming in and spending a bunch of money to say, raise the minimum wage or expand Medicaid or make marijuana legal.
Yeah, that's one of the things that they say. And there was an effort in 2020 to change the signature requirements. There are a lot of technical and really obscure ways that rules to follow if you're trying to get an initiative on that ballot. So in some sense, it does take a group that knows what they're doing and can commit the money to hire a staff to navigate those rules and gather signatures.
A lot of times that has to do with how many signatures total and also from how many counties those are. And so different states, Arkansas among them, have tried to alter those rules to make that process a little bit harder in ways that you might not pay attention to as a regular voter. And then in November, we will see a ballot measure that will ask us whether we want ballot initiatives in general to meet a 60 percent vote threshold to pass.
for both constitutional amendments and new statutes. We can pass both in Arkansas by ballot initiative. So that's part of what they say. I remember a few years ago, I'm in very rural Arkansas. I remember getting a flyer in my post office box that said, stop Little Rock liberals from imposing their will on the state or something like that. I haven't found
anywhere that that's documented online. But that's from my memory. And I think that that's sort of been the argument is stop these big money liberals from changing the way Arkansas decides things or changes the way Arkansas runs. And so you see stuff like that. And I'm sure in other states, there are sort of more particular efforts like that as well. We saw that in Kansas with the abortion ballot measure, the kind of pro-life side was...
airing ads about I forget the exact language, but it's something like, you know, stop the socialist Democrats pouring money to buy this election and something like that. Yeah. Let's set specific ballot initiatives aside for a second. For people who think about democracy and good governance, what are the pros and cons of ballot questions like these?
I think the pros are fairly obvious. It lets people weigh in directly on an issue that for whatever reason their representatives aren't willing to do. It lets people put things on the ballot themselves. It's a grassroots-y type of thing. And then the cons are, as Monica mentioned at the top, people may not know a lot about these issues. They may not be
qualified. I hesitate to use that word, but they may not have the necessary information to make an informed decision. And big money kind of campaigns from out of state or interest groups or something can influence their decision. Yeah, I think, Monica, you cited a poll where in Arkansas in one of the recent elections,
only a third of voters could name even one of the initiatives on the ballot. So this is something that voters by and large are not read into when they're heading into the ballot box. Yeah, I think it was even a little less than that, 24 to 30 percent. And and that was a that was a survey in which they asked them to name one off the top of their head. They didn't just say, you've heard about this ballot initiative, right? Or yes or no. They said, OK,
can you remember a ballot initiative? And so they don't know a lot about it. But I should say also that that's probably okay. You know, I'm not trying to say that voters are acting badly there. There are some states in which voters are really asked to do a lot. Like that is not their job necessarily to do a ton of research on something that might not affect their everyday lives. That's part of the reason we have representative democracy, right? Is that we elect people who do that job for us.
Also, you know, Janine Perry, who is a political scientist here in Arkansas, I spoke to her and one of the things she pointed out is that most of the time you can use
broad partisan heuristics to say, you know, this person shares my values, this person, this candidate will probably do the things that I would do if I were elected. And so most of the time that works, most of the time that's good enough. But yeah, I think the arguments for them are pretty obvious, including that there are all kinds of reasons that legislatures might not get around to doing something that their voters want them to do that aren't necessarily about partisan politics or
any kind of duplicitous action on the part of politicians. It's just, it's not something that they're incentivized to deal with. And ballot initiatives are designed to get around that process, to give another tool for people to enact legislation that they think is important, that for whatever reason is not happening in the legislature. Yeah. It's more elections.
who doesn't like elections? I remember back in 2016, someone mailed me like through snail mail, the book that all Californian voters received ahead of the election describing all the different ballot initiatives that they were going to vote on. And I think some people have criticized the way that ballot initiatives function in California, which is that like,
Yes, to exactly the point that you said, you can, with a lot of money, get a bunch of signatures, get something on the ballot and sort of like spend your way sometimes to ballot measure victory.
On the other hand, I've heard the argument that in countries even that have nationwide ballot measures, like, you know, you can take Ireland for an example, where Irish citizens voted as a nation on whether they wanted same-sex marriage to be legalized, whether they wanted abortion to be legalized, that taking those hot-button partisan issues out of the legislative sphere makes their representative politics less kind of like hyper-partisan and conflictual.
Do you guys buy that or do you have any actual, you know, evidence that would suggest that's real? Because I don't know. I mean, I guess I look at states that have ballot initiatives. I'm not really sure if their politics are all that different.
Yeah, that's an interesting question, Galen. I hadn't considered that. I can't say I know enough about comparative politics to say one way or the other. I will say that in general, I think that people overestimate the impact that kind of structural reforms would have on abating partisanship.
You know, things like ranked choice voting, you know, maybe it helps a little bit, but I think a lot of partisanship does come from the voters themselves and and the fact that they hold kind of increasingly polarized and hostile, even hostile to the other party views. And so I'm not I don't think it would be a panacea, I guess, is what I'm saying. But but would it help? Maybe that's a curious question I'd be curious to look into.
I think there's some evidence in California that ballot initiatives have sort of, or maybe not even in California, but just across the states, across history, that a ballot initiative passes and then state legislatures take up that issue because they can see that it's something that their voters want. I think in Mississippi, voters passed, they legalized medical marijuana a couple years ago. And because of a technicality, the Supreme Court of that state threw out that ballot initiative. It's
It required it to pass in all five congressional districts, but they only have four now because of redistricting. And so it was not a real reason. It was a technical reason to throw out the results of that ballot initiative. The Mississippi State Legislature picked up all three ballots.
of the reforms that had passed by ballot initiative and passed them all over the next two years. So it was something that they, I think maybe otherwise it wouldn't have passed, but because they saw that their voters wanted it and that this, for technical reasons, this was thrown out by the Mississippi state court, state Supreme court, they decided to pass those initiatives.
There are other examples, I think, of state legislatures doing the opposite, which is like seeing voters pass an initiative that doesn't jibe with the partisanship of the state or the partisanship of the legislature, at least, and trying to undo them. What have been some of those more high profile instances and how easy is it for a legislature to sort of like thwart the will of the initiative voters?
Well, sometimes when ballot measures pass their constitutional amendments, state constitutional amendments, and so those are enshrined in the state constitution. And that is a lot harder, if not impossible, for the legislature to change. But other times, ballot measures are just statutory and they can literally just repeal them. So, for example, I'm thinking of in South Dakota, there was kind of an ethics reform bill that passed via ballot measure. And the legislature was like, nope, we're going to repeal that.
And in Utah, the Republican legislature there watered down a couple of ballot measures there to expand Medicaid and then also to create an independent redistricting commission. It basically made that commission toothless, which enabled them to gerrymander the state this past cycle. And then in Florida, a high profile example was voters there passed a
a law to give voting rights back to certain convicted felons, but the legislature kind of wrote in, kind of imposed a bunch of additional penalties or just like additional steps in the process of getting that vote back that basically this was going to affect some huge number. I forget how many, but approaching like a million, I think, convicted felons were going to get their vote back.
Yeah, just to add to that, that's totally right that a lot of state legislatures have just outright repealed these measures passed by their voters. But another part of it, too, is that the state also the state government also is charged with enacting these these laws that are passed. And so there are different ways they can chip away at it in which people might not really exactly notice.
how they're doing it and how it's going into effect, this law that they supported. And there are real questions, I think, if the press doesn't pay attention, if reporters don't pay attention, if people don't pay attention, you know, how do you know that they're really following the real will of the people when they decide how those measures are going to be enacted? So that's another question to answer.
So we are going to have time in the coming months to talk about some of the ballot initiatives that voters are going to be voting on this fall. But just to give a little primer before we wrap up today's podcast, what are some of the states and ballot questions that folks should keep their eyes on? So I think the biggest ballot measure of the year, if it makes the ballot, is going to be the one that would protect abortion rights in Michigan.
Michigan, right now, the situation regarding abortion is very confused. There is a pre-Roe ban on the books, but it's kind of the Michigan Supreme Court is mulling over whether it is valid or not. There have been dueling court cases from lower courts being like, yes, it is. No, it isn't. You can't prosecute. You can prosecute. And this ballot measure is seen as a way to kind of settle the question.
That said, this week, so this ballot measure collected a huge number of signatures. It was recommended to make the ballot by kind of the people who counted the signatures and handle all that stuff. And then it went before the
Michigan Board of Canvassers, which is this bipartisan body that has to actually put it on the ballot. And the two Republicans on that board voted not to put it on the ballot because of these technical reasons like confusing language and the fact that there weren't spaces between some of the words, which apparently confused the people or they said that it did. But anyway, very controversially, as you would imagine, this ballot measure that
that got well exceeded the necessary number of signatures, did not make the ballot. Supporters of the initiative say they are going to sue and ask the Michigan Supreme Court to put it on the ballot. So we haven't heard the last of that. But I think clearly there's already been a lot of passion and controversy around this initiative. And if it makes the ballot, that will certainly continue.
And then the other one I want to give an honorable mention to, I'm sure Monica has some of her own that she's watching. But as an election nerd, speaking of the Alaska ranked choice voting situation, there is a ballot initiative in Nevada that would basically bring the same system to Nevada. It would be slightly different. It would change to a Nevada to a top five primary and then a ranked choice voting general election. Alaska is a top four primary and a ranked choice general election. But
Given the fascinating patterns that we've already seen in Alaska and Nevada being, of course, a swing state, this could have a big impact on future elections in Nevada if it passes.
Arkansas will have on the ballot medical, sorry, recreational marijuana. But it's a question of whether those votes were count because that ballot measure was challenged or wasn't accepted by the state board. But that decision is being challenged. So that'll, to me, be personally interesting just because it is, I think, one of those ways in which Arkansas is particular and I think fascinating as a state because it's kind of on the border between the South and the West. And
And so it's both very conservative in a lot of ways. And then you see it's kind of liberal, libertarian leanings. And also just in general, I think recreational marijuana is one of those things that the states is leading on because there's a lot of popular support for changing the way that we view that use of marijuana on the federal level. And that just isn't happening on the federal level. So it's you see the states decriminalizing marijuana.
and legalizing medical marijuana and recreational marijuana. So if that happens in Arkansas, I will be fascinated. Arkansas and Arizona also, too, are both considering making it harder to pass ballot initiatives themselves. Colorado also has something on the ballot that will change the way ballot initiatives
passed, but it's a little bit different. So yeah, whether or not Arkansas makes ballot initiatives itself harder, I don't think they will. It's not very popular. I think 53% said that they weren't going to vote for that ballot initiative in the only poll that I know of about that issue. So I think that that's another one that I'll watch.
All right. Well, let's leave things there. Thank you so much for chatting with me today, Monica and Nathaniel. Thanks, Galen. Thanks, guys. Thanks, Galen. Thanks, Nathaniel.
My name is Galen Druk. Sophia Leibovitz is in the control room. Chadwick Matlin is our editorial director and Emily Vanesky is our intern. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet at us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple podcast store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening and we'll see you soon.