The California Civil Rights Initiative, a 1996 ballot measure also known as Proposition 209, ended affirmative action for women and minorities in California public education and contracting. It gained little attention when it was first written by two California academics, Thomas E. Wood and Glynn Custred, in the early 1990s. However, during their second attempt to put the initiative on the 1996 ballot, it won the support of Governor Pete Wilson and the financial backing of the state Republican Party. Both Wilson and the party saw it as a potent way for the Republicans to win California’s fifty-four electoral votes in the 1996 presidential election. They hoped it would become the same type of political wedge issue that the anti-immigrant Proposition 187 became in 1994, the year the Republican Party took control of Congress and nearly every state office in California.
Midway through the 1996 campaign, the conservative African American businessman Ward Connerly, appointed to the University of California (UC) Board of Regents by Wilson, became the chair and chief spokesman for the initiative. The language of the initiative and the campaign were both designed to take advantage of what polls have consistently demonstrated: that whereas in general a slight majority of Americans support affirmative action for women and minorities, the vast majority will oppose it if it is described as preferences for women and minorities. Both the initiative’s language and the political campaign to support it used the word preferences and omitted any mention of affirmative action.
The opposition campaign, run by a collection of grassroots organizations—the Feminist Majority, NOW, the ACLU, and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund—began its fight early, but never earned the political or financial support of the state or national Democratic Party. President Clinton, who visited California several days before the vote, never urged voters to reject the initiative.
In the end, the initiative won approval with 54.6 percent of the vote, including 58 percent of white women voters and 66 percent of white men. Although some voters remained confused on Election Day about the initiative’s intent, it was the use of the word preferences, and the public’s long aversion to affirmative action when described using this word, that insured the measure’s victory.
Moreover, voters who benefited from affirmative action or preferences no longer connected their success to these programs. White women, for example, had been the main beneficiaries of affirmative action or preferences, but polling by both campaigns showed that white women no longer connected their success to these programs and many believed that affirmative action hurt job prospects for their male children and husbands.
A Los Angeles Times exit poll showed that the initiative was rejected by 74 percent of African Americans voters, 76 percent of Latinos, and 61 percent of Asians. The Asian vote surprised some analysts because Asians are well represented at the state’s premiere universities, but their own experience of facing discrimination after graduating from college and the leadership of the late UC Berkeley chancellor Chang-Lin Tien encouraged Asians to support affirmative action.
The impact of the California Civil Rights Initiative has been tremendous. Latino and African American enrollment at UC Berkeley and UCLA has never recovered. State contracting for firms owned by women and minorities has dropped sharply. Copycat initiatives have failed in Florida and Houston, but succeeded in Washington and in Michigan.
