Monday, November 17, 2008
You've Gotta Be Bleeping Me
Oh jeepers! Colorado's M54, the anti-union-security initiative we narrowly defeated under the name of M64 here in Oregon, has passed! Note how the authors over at UnionNews seem to've conflated collective bargaining with "no-bid contracts."
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Where the hell did you find that blog?!? Criminy!
The best part is when you scroll to the bottom, he cites a quote by Einstein about "laboring in freedom," seemingly unaware that Einstein was a union member and a socialist.
Piece of work!
I was actually shocked by how close the vote was in Oregon:
The final margin was way closer than in the Senate race. Even scarier, if I am not mistaken, when I looked up the total vote counts (I can't find it anymore), then M64 received a higher total of votes than the other ballot measures, i.e. there was almost no undervote. So at least 10% of the people who voted for Obama voted for Sizemore's measure. That is disturbing.
In particular since there may be an election cycle with suppressed Democratic turnout, in which a similar measure might pass...
It behooves us to ask if the strategy of non-engagement with the actual substance of the measure was a wise one. Or, alternately, is the lesson here that you cannot attack Sizemore enough and that you should definitely claim that the measure would do things that it really won't do. (Loophole for Wall Street?)
Basically Defend Oregon decided that having firefighters and nurses say that Measure 64 would take away their voice and it was sponsored by Sizemore was all you needed. Normally, I wouldn't second guess success, but, as anon makes clear, there are good reasons to worry about this win.
I think we should also wonder if there were way too many ads. Did we lose some voters who voted for Measure 64 just because they got tired of the same organization telling them to vote "no" every thirty seconds for 3 months? If voters can be turned off by negative ads, can they be turned off by non-stop one-sided ads.
Nominally, the vast majority of Oregon voters don't really have a dog in this hunt. We outspent Sizemore $2.5M to $0 and barely won. This does not bode well for the future and tells me that public employee unions have a massive, massive, massive credibility issue with Oregon voters. Some thought needs to be put into how to turn this around. Are things cooking Lex?
I would be tempted to speculate that the anti-EFCA barrage might have impacted the vote on 64, except that the anti-EFCA stuff was largely aimed at Merkley, but there significant numbers of Merkley-Yes voters.
it continues: http://theunionnews.blogspot.com/2008/11/colorados-new-anti-corruption-law.html
It's a little different. The CO thing is the Howard Rich version. I thought 64 was your classic paycheck deception. The CO one is a ban on political action by no bid contractors. When you read it carefully, it includes public sector bargaining agreements as no bid contractors. But all the ads were about some state senator who got some deal involving the county fair.
Oh in addition to writing above, I disagree with the first anon, as I suspect a lower turnout election would have made Defend Oregon's voter education road a bit easier.
The difference here might be the anti EFCA ads that were running againt Merkley.
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