Gov. Gavin Newsom was brimming with confidence about Proposition 1 in January as he sat in a Costa Mesa Motel 6 room converted into housing for homeless veterans.
“I think she will win by a landslide,” the governor said in an interview with The Times. “Period. Period.”
Nearly two months later, Newsom's arrogance appears misplaced.
Despite millions spent by his campaign, Newsom's ballot proposal to increase care for drug addicts and fund more treatment beds has made little progress since the March 5 primary. Still very close to being officially declared more than a week after the election, preliminary statistics from the California Secretary of State showed Proposition 1 ahead by less than a percentage point.
Even with that uncertainty, the poorly funded opposition campaign acknowledged Tuesday morning that the measure was “almost certain” to pass.
“We were so close to eliminating the bear, but it looks like we will fall short,” the California Against Prop 1 campaign said in a statement.
Newsom's campaign said it was “optimistic” about the outcome, but there were still ballots to be counted. There are still more than 1.5 million ballots uncounted statewide in an election expected to exceed 7.5 million votes total, which could be one of the lowest turnout rates in state history.
The Associated Press, which member news organizations rely on to read results and call elections, said in a statement that “the race could flip if the answer ‘no’ is only 1.5 percentage points better among the outstanding votes.”
“The AP has determined that there is too much uncertainty to make a call at this time because the results across the state are uneven.”
Pollsters say Proposition 1 — and most Democratic candidates — underperformed on Election Day because lower-than-expected voter turnout inflated the Republican share of the electorate. Election results showed that inland counties and parts of Southern California opposed the measure, while a majority of voters in Los Angeles and the Bay Area supported the plan.
“It was about anger versus apathy,” said Jim DePue, a Proposition 1 consultant. “Republicans are angry and they showed up.”
Although Newsom's proposal received rare bipartisan support from Central Valley Republicans and San Francisco Democrats in the state Legislature, that political harmony did not extend to voters. The measure was criticized by civil rights groups on the left who were concerned about the implications for funding secure mental health facilities and by GOP opponents on the right who scoffed at the estimated $14 billion cost amid a massive state budget shortfall.
The first proposal would approve $6.4 billion in new bonds to support 10,000 treatment and housing beds and reshape a 20-year-old tax on mental health services to also fund substance abuse services. The plan is essential to Newsom's strategy to address California's homelessness crisis, a persistent hurdle for the state and the Democratic governor's political weakness.
Under mounting pressure to clean up the camps and get people into treatment, the governor has adopted a series of policy positions moving away from the liberal model of voluntary treatment to a more moderate approach to forcing people with severe mental illness and drug disorders into care.
Newsom signed a law last year expanding conservatorships to allow courts to appoint someone to make decisions for people with severe substance use disorders. Counties began implementing its CARE Court program, which gives families a chance to ask the courts for treatment of their loved one, last year.
A lack of treatment beds and places to shelter the influx of patients was the primary argument against Newsom's strategy. In her State of the City address days after the election, San Francisco Mayor London Breed noted that passage of Proposition 1 would provide “a real opportunity to add hundreds more” treatment beds.
“So when the state opens the pipeline to new beds, San Francisco is ready and first in line,” Breed said.
Civil rights organizations and disability community advocates opposed the measure and sounded alarm bells in 2023 over a last-minute change in Proposition 1 that would allow counties to use bond money on “locked facilities,” where patients cannot leave voluntarily.
The American Civil Liberties Union of California and the League of Women Voters of California urged voters to reject the measure, arguing that community mental health services are more effective than institutionalization.
“I think the governor and mayors often just want the encampments to disappear by any means necessary,” said Katherine Wolfe, a doctoral student in society and environment at UC Berkeley, who said she voted against the first proposal.
Wolf said she believes community-based programs that provide stability to some mentally ill Californians will lose funding if money diverts to forced treatment. Like the ACLU and the League of Women Voters, she also opposes forcing people into welfare.
“For them to sneak in at the last minute after promising all summer that the bond would only be used for community-based voluntary treatment, I think that's really disingenuous and I think they did it specifically to avoid objections from groups and people they knew would object,” Wolf said.
Newsom described the measure as an opportunity to get more people off the streets and into treatment. The measure addressed the most important issues for voters — crime, homelessness, drug use and mental health — and “checks 90 percent of the boxes that unite the vast majority of Californians,” he said in an interview with The Times.
Early polls seemed to indicate Newsom was right. For example, a November survey by the Public Policy Institute of California indicated that two-thirds of likely voters approved of Proposition 1, while 30% opposed it, and only 2% remained undecided.
But despite the governor's optimistic stance publicly, behind the scenes his campaign predicted that the final outcome would ultimately be much tougher than polls showed, and sought to lower expectations in the months and weeks leading up to the election.
Support fell to 59% among likely voters in a second PPIC poll conducted in February.
By the end of the month, the measure had swung just 50% in a UC Berkeley Institute of Government poll co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times. More than a third of voters opposed this, and 16% remained undecided. A large majority of Republican voters who responded to the Berkeley poll opposed the measure, raising concerns about how Proposition 1 would perform in elections with higher GOP turnout.
In a memo sent days before the election, David Bender, a pollster hired by Newsom's campaign, noted that PPIC polls were optimistic given low turnout and poor performance among Democrats.
“It is possible that although yes polls on Proposition 1 may have been in the low 60s when it was first introduced in 2023, the yes vote could end up in the low 50s, given the history of erosion in support for bond measures, taxes, and taxes,” Binder wrote. “Details on California's low turnout and disproportionate Republican turnout in March 5th election.”
Despite bipartisan support at the state Capitol, it's not surprising that Republican voters haven't rallied behind Proposition 1, said Mark DiCamillo, IGS poll director.
Republicans tend to oppose expensive ballot measures. He said voters of all political affiliations who are undecided in the final days before the election often end up voting against the measure if they are undecided. Complex measures, like Proposition 1, can easily confuse voters, too.
“One other difference that may have worked against it in this election is that turnout was so low that there were three times as many older voters as older voters, who tend to be more conservative than younger voters,” DiCamillo said.
Newsom's campaign said the governor deliberately chose to place the measure on the March ballot because he believed it could “hold up to more conservative voters and still pass on Election Day” and because of the urgency of the issue.
Anthony York, a campaign spokesman, said — and polls agreed — that the measure would have done better if it had been on the November ballot where Democratic turnout is expected to be higher.
But Sacramento Democrats are also eyeing several other bond measures related to housing, schools and climate to put before voters in November that could total tens of billions of dollars. As the state struggles to make up a budget deficit of at least $37.9 billion, bonds serve as a way for the government to obtain loans that are repaid over time to finance expensive policies.
Paul Mitchell, vice president of Policy Data Inc., said voting on Proposition 1 in March instead of November was a strategic decision that allowed Newsom to avoid a crowded ballot in the fall.
“If voters collect spending ballot measures, they will collectively start rejecting them,” Mitchell said.
Times staff writer Hannah Wiley contributed to this report.
