| THE BUZZ: HERE TO PROP YOU UP — Today we’re introducing POLITICO’s 2024 ballot measure guide, a (hopefully) less boring, less homework-y deep-dive into California’s ongoing experiment with direct democracy. If you’re anything like us, you’ve had the experience of sitting at a kitchen table with your ballot, googling around and trying to figure out what in tarnation any of these measures mean. Do I support taxing veterinarians who treat larger-than-average chinchillas one-third of a percent of a Spanish ingot to fund weevil research? I don’t know. Maybe. Do I? Ideally, you want someone to explain what all those words mean, in normal approachable English. But as a voter who cares about both the policy implications and the politics behind it, you probably have a lot of other questions, too: Who decided on one-third of a percent? Why couldn’t the Legislature just impose this tax itself? Are the weevil lobbyists behind this? Who wants to defeat it — and who calls the shots in a veterinarian-chinchilla coalition? I’m Will McCarthy , your Playbook co-writer today, and I compiled this guide with my colleague Emily Schultheis, the other half of POLITICO’s ballot measures team, as a way to help answer the kinds of questions we get each day on this brand new beat. Our goal is for this to read less like an AP Government textbook or an editorial page’s grave reminder to exercise your voting rights responsibly. We tried to do better than just rewording the ballot language and listing the top donors. We also wanted to dispense with the journalistic earnestness that often assumes every measure is written primarily to do what the official ballot arguments say it should. Instead, we wrote this for the savvy voter who actually likes and cares about politics, rather than one who sees it as a citizen’s dutiful slog. So we explain what would actually happen if a measure passes — sometimes the answer, honestly, is “nothing” or “lots of lawsuits” — and are direct about the motives behind the interest groups and donors trying to pass and defeat them. It doesn’t seem much use to tell you who supports or opposes a measure without explaining why. We have three major components for you to check out: We broke down each of the 10 statewide measures individually (and five notable city and county ones), touching on rent control, soda taxes, break-ins at Target, robotaxis, milk cartons and everything in between. We assume you are curious about the policy consequences of voting “yes” and the political machinations that put this on the ballot in the first place, so we anticipated those questions and answered them. We did our best to visualize and explain the shifting coalitions of the ballot measure landscape, and show how initiatives often produce strange bedfellows. This interactive shows how interest groups align and face off across issues on the same ballot, sometimes disposing of traditional red-blue dynamics in the process. We’ve also learned that while the statewide ballot is often shaped foremost by the legislature and deep-pocketed players, local measures can offer a keener perspective on what is actually on the mind of California voters. Here we see townies taking it to tourists, cities preparing for a new era of climate risk, and counties deciding how and whether they should grow. We also get, for better or for worse, strident debates about pickleball (seriously). We hope you find this guide to be original, surprising and maybe even funny. It’s also beautifully designed, which neither of us had anything to do with (shout-out to Abhinanda Bhattacharyya, Paula Friedrich and Anna Wiederkehr ) — if you click our heads at the top of the interactive, they spin, which is a real rush. We’re unveiling it today, just in time for a California ballot measures 101 event at the San Francisco Public Library, where Emily and I will be breaking down the big issues. Please do share it with anyone else you know who wants to be a more savvy voter — or should. GOOD MORNING. Happy Thursday. Thanks for waking up with Playbook. You can text us at 916-562-0685 — save it as “CA Playbook” in your contacts. Or drop us a line at lkorte@politico.com and dgardiner@politico.com, or on X — @DustinGardiner and @Lara_Korte. WHERE’S GAVIN? In North Carolina hitting college campuses for Kamala Harris as early in-person voting starts in the state.
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