Affirmative action push in Proposition 16 fails to win over California voters
Californians rejected affirmative action in Tuesday’s election, opposing the repeal of a 1996 ban on considering race and gender in public hiring, college admissions and contracting.
Proposition 16, placed on the ballot by the Democratic-controlled Legislature, was failing 56% to 44% as votes continued to be counted. It sought to repeal Proposition 209, which barred the state from discriminating against or granting preferential treatment to any person or group based on race, sex, ethnicity or nationality.
After a summer of civil unrest fueled by the police killing of a Black Minnesotan and a pandemic that underscored the country’s racial disparities, Democratic lawmakers said it was time to allow a new generation of Californians to revisit the question.
Arnold Steinberg, a strategist with the “No” on Proposition 16 campaign, declared victory on Tuesday night.
“We faced a daunting uphill battle against an initiative put on the ballot at the last minute by the state Legislature,” said Steinberg, who also worked as a strategist for the Proposition 209 campaign in 1996. “In a state hardly seen as conservative, voters rejected a repeal of the state constitution’s guarantee of equal treatment by race.”
Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez, D-San Diego, and Sen. Maria Elena Durazo, D-Los Angeles, argued Proposition 16 would create equal footing among Latinos and Blacks and increase racial and gender representation in higher education and in the public workforce.
“It’s unfortunate that we didn’t have a chance to explain it to more voters but we’re hopeful that justice works out,” Gonzalez said on Tuesday night.
In California, for example, Hispanic employees are under-represented in the state’s labor force despite Latinos representing the majority of the state population, according to the latest census data from the California Department of Human Resources.
Former University of California Regent Ward Connerly, the lead advocate for Proposition 209, helped lead the campaign against the effort to overturn it.
He and other opponents called Proposition 16 divisive and discriminatory and argued that diverse communities in California have already made strides in representation since its ban.
In July, for instance, the University of California system announced a record number of incoming Latino freshmen admitted to the fall 2020 semester, surpassing Asian American students for the first time.
Asian Americans in California were divided. Groups like the Asian American Coalition for Education and the Students for Fair Admissions, which sued Harvard University after claiming it discriminated against Asian American students in order to accept Latino and Black students, joined the opposition.
The “Yes on 16” campaign raised more than $16 million between January and October, compared to the “Californians for Equal Rights, No on Proposition 16” campaign, which raised about $1.5 million, according to campaign finance records.
Yet statewide polls conducted in September showed it had insufficient support among California voters.
As it trailed in the polls, lawmakers and advocates said not enough public opinion groundwork had been done for the measure to prevail. They said the issue got lost on a crowded November ballot during an unprecedented presidential election.
This story was originally published November 3, 2020 at 8:20 PM with the headline "Affirmative action push in Proposition 16 fails to win over California voters."