Proposition 40 fiasco by the numbers

Proposition 40 is a measure to retain new state Senate districts. The California Republican Party, several GOP Senate campaigns and a handful of others paid more than $2 million last year to put it on the Nov. 6 ballot. So they’re in support, right? But wait -- when they succeeded, and their political re-mapping referendum actually got on the ballot, their objective was to get you to vote no. So they’re in opposition. Right? Well, yes. And no.

The Republicans were countered early on by one very wealthy supporter of their own party, Charles T. Munger Jr., who gave almost $600,000 to a campaign to block the referendum. So if they were working against each other and the GOP was in support, Munger was opposed. Right? Kind of. But not really.

Why do campaign documents list both Munger and the GOP as being in support if they shelled out their money to fight each other? If the Republican Party changed its mind earlier this year, dropped its opposition and now wants you to vote yes -- which it does -- why did it recently give another $10,000 to the committee it helped form to get you to vote no?

ENDORSEMENTS: The Times’ recommendations for Nov. 6

What do these people want?

It’s official: Proposition 40 is confusing. You can’t follow just the money or just the fine print. You need both.

First, though, let’s cut to the chase. Regardless of how much money everyone threw against each other, they all now like Proposition 40, a measure to uphold a new map of the 40 state Senate districts drawn up last year by a citizens commission. Republicans, Democrats, newspaper editorial boards, government reform groups -- they all say to vote yes. If that’s enough for you, stop here. If you want to figure why it’s such a mess, keep reading.

Retaining the Senate district map would be a good move. It would send the message that Californians meant what they said when they took redistricting power away from the Legislature -- meaning the majority party, Democrats -- when they created the commission in 2008 (Proposition 11), when they gave it additional powers in 2010 (Proposition 20) and when they turned back the Democrats’ attempt to scrap the commission, also in 2010 (Proposition 27). The commission was formed, did its job, drew the lines and adopted them in August 2011.

So why another ballot measure? Are the Democrats complaining again about losing their redistricting powers?

Not this time. It’s true that the Democrats formerly drew up these political maps themselves, so they expected to hate what the commission came up with. But when they saw the map they loved it, because they believed the reshaped districts would help them elect more Democratic senators, and maybe even capture two-thirds of the house -- enough to pass tax hikes. The magic number is 27; they currently have 25.

But Republicans, who thought they would love the state Senate district map, saw it, hated it and formed a committee to raise money to hire petitioners to gather signatures to get a referendum on the ballot to throw out the map and start over. The committee is called F.A.I.R. – Fairness & Accountability in Redistricting Ballot Measure Cmte. (the full title is even longer), and funds came from several GOP senators who were planning to defend their seats this year or in 2014 and were hoping for more favorable lines.

The campaign for Mimi Walters of Orange County re-gifted more than $75,000 to the committee. Tony Strickland of Ventura County was planning to move up to Congress but put in $25,000. Bob Dutton of Rancho Cucamonga is about to leave the Senate and is running for Congress, but he also had amassed a treasury to run for San Bernardino County supervisor in 2014, so he loaned $100,000 from that account to the petition effort.

From August through December of last year, the California Republican Party -- already millions of dollars in debt -- quickly made cash and in-kind donations and loans totaling about $1.67 million. Ballot petition drives aren’t cheap.

In official state campaign finance reports, F.A.I.R. is registered as being in “support” -- support, that is, of getting a referendum on the ballot.

Now there are a few things to know about referendums (or referenda, if you must). In various places around the globe, the word “referendum” means any question submitted, or referred, to the people. It’s a plebiscite. A ballot measure.

But in California, where ballot measures pile up and sometimes seem to breed, “referendum” means one very particular type of proposition. The word applies only to that type of measure that asks voters to keep or reject a law already adopted. This is as confusing as it is important because it stands the usual voter question on its head.

In all other cases a yes vote means you want to do something, like end the death penalty, for example, or adopt Marsy’s Law, cap property taxes, modify term limits. But if you’re backing a referendum you don’t want a yes vote. A referendum is successful when a majority of people vote no. That’s because the ballot question is not, “Do you want to overturn the law?” but rather, “Do you want to keep the law in place?”

Another thing about referendums: They often have an impact even before the vote because simply gathering the signatures and qualifying the measure for the ballot usually suspends, until after the election, whatever law the petitioners wanted to overturn.

So the proponents of Proposition 40 -- the state Republican Party and all the other people who disliked the Senate map -- wanted the map, and therefore their own measure, to be defeated. The campaign committee that raised and spent all the money was in “support” of getting the referendum on the ballot; but to complete the rejection of the Senate map, they wanted you to vote no, so they were opposed to Proposition 40.

Meanwhile, you should know that the very wealthy Charles T. Munger Jr. was one of the primary funders of those earlier measures to grab redistricting away from the Legislature in the first place. Yes, he’s a Republican, and may have been as disappointed as anyone else in his party that the Senate map appeared to favor Democrats. But he was less a partisan for the GOP than he was for government reform. He wanted to defend the commission, and therefore defend the map.

When F.A.I.R. submitted its signatures, Munger went back to his old Yes on 20/No on 27 committee from the 2010 battle against the Democrats, renamed it and this time pumped it full of money to fight the Republicans. His committee’s official position was “oppose” -- because he was opposing the referendum. He didn’t want the question to appear on the ballot. But last July the committee’s position was changed to “support” -- because Proposition 40 was already on the ballot, and Munger wanted to keep the map, so he wanted people to vote yes.

So you’re keeping up, right? The California Republican Party, the major donor to F.A.I.R., was in “support” of getting a referendum to challenge the Senate map, and when it succeeded it wanted people to vote no. Munger, the major donor to a committee now renamed Yes on 40-Hold Politicians Accountable, was “opposed” to a referendum, but when it got on the ballot anyway, he wanted people to vote yes, so on officials findings the committee changed from “opposed” to “support.”

And that was the easy part.

Remember that when a referendum qualifies for the ballot, the law is suspended pending the vote. In this case, the law was the one that adopted the independent commission’s Senate map. For the Republicans, that suspension was the whole point. They figured that by spending the $1.67 million and gathering the signatures, they would force the courts to suspend the map and go forward in November with Senate districts shaped by the old map, which the Republicans thought was more favorable to them.

But the state Supreme Court didn’t suspend the new map. A year ago the justices rejected a direct challenge to the map, and in January, after signatures were gathered, they ruled that the election should go forward with the redrawn lines, and that only after the election, if voters rejected Proposition 40, would they consider what to do next.

That disrupted the whole GOP game plan. After the ruling the party and other donors stopped giving money to their committee, and then finally gave up the whole campaign. By the time of the party’s fall convention in Burbank on Aug. 10-12 -- and yes, I know that August is not in the fall; tell that to the Republicans -- delegates had decided not only to abandon their no campaign but to actually embrace the new map and, what the heck, endorse Proposition 40.

So why do campaign records show that the GOP, right before its convention, gave yet another $10,125 to F.A.I.R.? Were they actively campaigning against Proposition 40 right before changing their position? Or was the committee that got the measure on the ballot and then prepared to fight against it now going into battle in favor of it?

Neither. The GOP hasn’t given any money to back Proposition 40. It’s just paying off some leftover expenses from the petition drive.

If you checked the contributions without checking the stories, you’d conclude that the GOP, Munger and everyone else were always on the same side, in support of Proposition 40, and that together they’ve donated $2,896,086. That’s a lot of money to get the word out about a measure that hardly anyone has heard of or understands.

But of course the numbers alone fail to tell the story. That almost $2.9 million was not in fact spent on the same side. It was a fight primarily between the California Republican Party and Munger, normally one of its wealthiest and most politically active supporters. The party, already in debt, picked a fight, took a gamble it couldn’t afford, and it lost.

But even the stories, alone, don’t tell the story. So the Republicans pushed a ballot measure and dropped it. What did it cost them? If the party and Munger had not split, would they have had more to spend on joint enterprises like passing Proposition 32 and defeating Proposition 30? Note, for example, that Munger recently gave more than $10 million to the Small Business Action Committee PAC, which was organized with Propositions 30 and 32 in mind; but that committee just recently re-gifted $83,664.80 to the Yes on 40 campaign. To really know the story, you need to see the numbers. And to read really long blog posts.

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Endorsements: The Times’ recommendations for Nov. 6