Endorsements and Ballot Measures

Emily Schultheis and Will McCarthy at Politico California Playbook:

For many years, ballot-measure campaigns eagerly awaited endorsement decisions from local newspapers. But when they began to trickle out last week — like the San Jose Mercury News urging voters to back Proposition 36 for its “thoughtful and tempered response” to crime or the Sacramento Bee endorsing Prop 3 as “more than just a value statement” on same-sex marriage — they hardly made a ripple.

Newspaper endorsements are losing their punch.

Where ballot-measure strategists would have previously worked to secure the backing of small- and medium-sized papers across the state to reach different segments of the electorate, they now focus on just a few big players. Even then, it’s more to generate fodder for TV ads than out of any expectation voters will read the papers themselves.

“I don’t think editorial board endorsements carry the weight that they once did,” Gil Duran, a former editorial page editor for the Sacramento Bee, told Playbook.

In “Democracy Derailed,” his 2000 book on ballot initiatives, the longtime Washington Post journalist David Broder described how strategists involved in the No on Prop 226 campaign in 1998 carefully planned which surrogates — top union reps, firefighters and the president of the California Teachers Association — to send to which newspaper to best convince them. In the end, wrote Broder, editorial boards’ rejection of the measure “sapped the vigor of the drive to pass the initiative.”

Only a handful of newspapers get much attention from the strategists running campaigns for this year’s slate of 1o state measures. There’s the Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, San Diego Union-Tribune, Bay Area News Group (which includes the Mercury News) and the McClatchy papers, primarily. A dwindling number of newspapers still invite campaigns to make their pitch directly — sometimes with just one or two people hearing it, and often by phone or over Zoom.