GAVIN’S BALLOT SCORECARD — Of all the issue questions on the November ballot, Gov. Gavin Newsom ended up being the face of just one. It wasn’t Proposition 3’s amendment to enshrine marriage equality, the issue that shaped his early political career (although he did appear at a few events for the Yes campaign). Nor was it the tough-on-crime Proposition 36 , against which he railed in press conferences. Instead, in a break from his own party, Newsom’s face was plastered on ads and mailers advocating for a vote against the Proposition 33 initiative to expand rent control. It is an odd endpoint for a year in which Newsom played just about every role possible in California’s ballot-measure drama, from headliner of his own production to scriptwriter trying to write people in and out of the show to a heckler attempting to throw other performers off their lines without taking the stage himself. The box-office returns were mixed. Newsom’s efforts to shape the fall ballot yielded some major successes and one notable, humiliating failure, but his low-key entry into the Prop 33 battle may have proven decisive. “The governor killed rent control in California,” said Susie Shannon, a policy director and organizer for Yes on 33. Following a close call over his Prop 1 mental-health package in March, Newsom appeared intent on reducing the choices before voters in November in part so a few key progressive priorities would not get caught up in the year’s anti-establishment churn. He claimed some significant wins along the way. A Newsom lawsuit led the Supreme Court to throw a California Business Roundtable-backed measure off the ballot, and his team struck deals that kept initiatives on pandemic preparedness and a high-school financial-literacy curriculum from reaching voters. He was part of a campaign that helped scare away a referendum on oil wells . A constitutional amendment about changing voter thresholds was pushed to the 2026 ballot at Newsom’s request. There was also one notable, very public failure. Despite Newsom’s best efforts to strike a deal with the proponents of a tough-on-crime measure — and his quixotic, quickly abandoned effort to launch a last-minute competing measure — he could not stop the initiative that became Prop 36. Once the ballot was finalized, Newsom grew reticent about becoming too involved in the ballot-measure sphere. He staked out official positions on only three of the ten questions. “I haven’t come out publicly against it, but I’m implying a point of view,” he said at a press conference about one of the other seven. “Perhaps you can read between those many, many lines.” Newsom spoke out more forcefully against Prop 36, but largely within the confines of his existing schedule rather than campaign stops or media appearances organized by a No on 36 committee directed by some of his top political allies (like his pollster David Binder, one-time deputy chief of staff Lindsey Cobia and former spokesman Anthony York). Ultimately it was in the Prop 33 fight where Newsom emerged as a central figure. Newsom had come out against a previous iteration of the rent control initiative, and both sides made efforts to woo him when the issue returned to the ballot this year. The Yes on 33 campaign even delivered over 700,000 letters from renters to his office last fall, a stunt seen as an attempt to at least keep him on the sidelines. The California Apartment Association-backed No on Prop 33 committee ultimately won Newsom’s backing. Neither the governor nor campaign ever issued a press release to announce he was taking a stand, and he never joined a press conference or rally on its behalf. Instead, as ballots were going out in early October, voters just started seeing him in ads arguing the initiative would roll back Newsom’s achievements in affordable housing. “When a campaign gets an endorsement, they use it,” Nathan Click, a spokesperson for No on 33 as well as for Newsom’s political operation, said of the low-key rollout. At the time, public polling showed the race relatively even with a high number of undecided voters. Those on both sides of the Prop 33 conflict speculate that Newsom’s endorsement helped push a meaningful number of them away from the rent-control initiative. Other ballot-measure campaigns may have had the governor’s words on their side, but none claimed the resources No on 33 had to put Newsom’s endorsement before voters across the state. NEWS BREAK: Alameda County DA Pamela Price concedes in recall vote … Atmospheric river will bring rain, snow to Northern California … PPIC: California voter turnout sank in 2024. Welcome to Ballot Measure Weekly, a special edition of Playbook PM every Monday focused on California’s lively realm of ballot measure campaigns. Drop us a line at eschultheis@politico.com and wmccarthy@politico.com, or find us on X — @emilyrs and @wrmccart.
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