Posted 8:56 PM by Robert

Contra 1994 IV: Childless, Depressed Democrats?

The 50th Congressional District did not hold all of the interest in yesterday’s elections. Actor Rob Reiner's ballot initiative - Proposition 82 - to tax the "rich" (those earning more than $400,000 per year) to pay for universal preschool for four-year-olds was defeated yesterday in California by 61% to 39% - carrying only three out of 58 counties in the entire state. Why the big defeat?

Writing for Opinion Journal’s subscriber e-mail service Political Diary, John Fund explains:

Liberals like philanthropist Eli Broad and the Los Angeles Times editorial board turned against the measure when they realized their goal of universal pre-K coverage had been hijacked by the unions. Democrat Senate President Don Perata repudiated his early support of the idea, saying he couldn't justify subsidizing preschool for parents already paying for it. Even more significantly, parents with kids in pre-K, 80% of whom attend private facilities, realized the Reiner initiative represented a takeover of pre-K by the existing public school monopoly. While the initiative ostensibly would have offered parents a choice between public and private providers, the actual options available for the subsidies would have been determined by government education officials.

That's fine as far as it goes. But California voters have also rejected school vouchers more than once, even (perhaps especially) where the vouchers provided lots of real school choice. Rejecting school vouchers delivers every child whose parents cannot afford private education into the hands of those same school unions. So why the different result now? The dramatic fall of Proposition 82 is even more curious given the passage in 2004 by 53.7% to 46.3% of Proposition 63:

Should a 1% tax on taxable personal income above $1 million to fund expanded health services for mentally ill children, adults, seniors be established?

Why were Californians willing to soak the "rich" to permit the state to fund mental health services for "everyone" but not to provide services for pre-school children? It would be interesting to see a far more detailed breakdown of how voters reacted to Propositions 63 and 82 than I have seen. But in the mean time, one might ask the preliminary question: How would Propositions 63 and 82 be expected to appeal to core Democratic interest groups and constituencies?

It seems to make sense that Proposition 63 would naturally have a broad base of support. Many mental health services are often not included in medical insurance coverage. But mental health services might at least in principle be used and/or needed by anyone - although one's estimate of the likelihood that one will personally need them is likely strongly affected by one's general world view. Many more people - including family members - might see themselves as possibly or actually required to pay for such services for other people if the need arose. So its not too hard to see Proposition 63 appealing to a lot of self interest, especially of a broad class of people of modest means. Indeed, it's not hard to imagine that more Democrats than Republicans were drawn to this proposition by prospective or actual personal need, since some polling results indicate that Democrats are more prone to depression and less happy than Republicans, as suggested by this chart:



Republicans are happiest even when a Democrat is in the White House. They’re also happier regardless of income. The rich are happier than the poor, and church goers (who skew Republican, of course) are also quite happy. So there appears to be lots of room for Democrats to see themselves as potentially or actually in need of mental health services.

But what about Proposition 82? Here the most natural base of support is parents and prospective parents of pre-school children. In general, Republicans do not favor programs of the type Proposition 82 sought to create. But how many parents and prospective parents of pre-school children are Democrats? Married women generally lean Republican. Unmarried mothers doubtless lean Democrat, but by definition there is no husband to vote along side the mother.

And consider some rather substantial mostly Democratic groups: Unwed fathers and many deliberately childless people, including most homosexuals. Why would such people enthusiastically support a proposition that would provide services they will never use and that would not relieve them of any likely financial burden?

Is it possible that Proposition 82 failed so miserably because the Democratic Party now includes so few people that care about children?