| | | |  | | By Will McCarthy and Emily Schultheis | | Presented by |  | | | RECALL AND RESPONSE — Californians are reveling in the recall — the most personalized, vindictive weapon in direct democracy’s arsenal — just as politicians ask them to change it. In November, Oaklanders watched as both their mayor and county district attorney were recalled by voters. Just this month, Bay Area voters will decide whether to grant San Mateo County supervisors the right to remove a “rogue” sheriff. Efforts are afoot to recall both the mayor of the state’s largest city and the governor who survived a recall attempt just four years ago. Even a Palo Alto school-board member is facing recall for eliminating a freshman honors biology class. It may be Californians’ last chance to use the recall as they have known it for more than a century. (The institution was created via a 1911 ballot measure.) Next year, voters will consider a constitutional amendment that would permanently reform recalls for the state’s top officials — drafted, inevitably, by a once-recalled lawmaker. Introduced by then-Sen. Josh Newman in 2023, the amendment would eliminate simultaneous recall and successor elections for all statewide officers. Instead, the governor would appoint a successor, or if the governor himself were recalled, the lieutenant governor would fill the job for the remainder of the term. “The goal is to restore the question of a recall to its original intent, which is a question of whether this person is suited for office,” Newman told Playbook. “Lets vote on that, not also have a mini-election as well.” Over the decades, voters have made frequent use of the recall at the state level, although rarely successfully. Although the process has been employed 180 times since 1913 — with the governor being the most-often targeted official — just 11 of those efforts qualified for the ballot and only six ultimately resulted in a recall. Arnold Schwarzenegger famously entered office in a special election featuring 135 candidates after Gray Davis’ recall — the first successful removal of a governor in the history of the state. Newman’s constitutional amendment grew out of hearings in the senate elections committee following the 2021 attempt to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom. Newman says he watched recalls be exploited by opportunists who wanted to take advantage of a low-turnout special election. The presence of a successor election can motivate voters to support a recall, he pointed out, by dangling the possibility of replacing a politician they hate with one they love, rather than that governor’s second-in-command. “In any other situation, if the governor dies, gets elected to something else, then the lieutenant governor would be the governor for some period of time,” Newman said. “Why should a recall be any different?” Newman’s measure passed through the legislature and was referred to the 2026 ballot last September. But voters may not be considering his proposal in a vacuum. Newsom is facing another recall effort, and there is much talk in Los Angeles about channeling the post-wildfire anger toward Mayor Karen Bass into a recall effort there, too. A 2021 report from the Public Policy Institute of California found that voters overwhelmingly backed the recall while believing the process was in need of changes. Will those views on abstract governance questions be colored by the personalities and partisan dynamics if tangible recall efforts are front of mind for voters? A similar situation arose in Alameda County last year, where voters were asked to sign off on changes to the county’s recall processes in a March special election while a high-profile campaign to recall District Attorney Pamela Price was underway. At the time, both opponents and supporters of the Price recall alleged that the county was trying to interfere with the process by changing the rules midgame. But voters ultimately supported the reform by a 60-point margin in March and went on to recall Price later that year. “If you could do one thing to make California’s recall system better, fairer, less vulnerable to political pressures, this would be it,” said Newman, alert to the ways that convincing voters of that may soon grow harder. “If you muddy the waters with another recall effort going on, that could change things.” NEWS BREAK: California’s Public Utilities Commission considers cutting credits to homeowner solar panels … Apple commits to investing $500 billion in United States operations … Court upholds Elizabeth Holmes’ conviction in Theranos fraud case. Welcome to Ballot Measure Weekly, a special edition of Playbook PM 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.
| | | | A message from Instacart: Donate to LA schools affected by the fires: Support students and teachers as they begin to recover. Instacart's Classroom Carts feature lets you donate much-needed supplies to 28 affected public elementary, middle, and high schools—supporting nearly 15,000 students. Delivery and service fees are waived for every donation. Together, we can make a difference. Donate now. | | | |  | TOP OF THE TICKET | | A highly subjective ranking of the ballot measures — past and future, certain and possible — getting our attention this week. 1. Gubernatorial pardons (2026?): A constitutional amendment introduced by Republican state Sen. Steven Choi would prohibit governors from pardoning themselves, their children and essentially their entire extended family (even the grandparents of a governor’s spouse would fall under the prohibition, should they take to bank heists or somesuch). A clear shot at President Joe Biden’s last-minute pardons of family members, Choi said the measure would allow voters to “ensure there is a system of checks and balances.” 2. Fire safety bond (Los Angeles, 2026?): Momentum to borrow for fire-station funding appears to be quickly fading, after the Los Angeles City Council voted against fast-tracking an analysis of the bond. After the January wildfires, councilmembers Traci Park and Monica Rodriguez introduced a motion asking city staff to prepare a report on the measure within two months, readying it for a June 2026 election. Instead, study of the bond was lumped in with 12 other potential measures. 3. Voter ID (Huntington Beach, 2024): The state’s effort to defeat a controversial voter ID law is getting a do-over. Although California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s lawsuit challenging the ordinance was initially dismissed by the Orange County Superior Court, last week a state appeals court instructed the court to reconsider that decision, which it called “problematic.” The Orange County Superior Court will hear the case again tomorrow. 4. Measure Z (Santa Cruz, 2024): The American Beverage Association spent nearly $200 per vote in its failed effort to defeat a soda-tax initiative in the small beachside city last year, according to new campaign-finance filings. The almost $3 million investment reflects the financial and legal headache the tax will represent for its leading players Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Keurig Dr. Pepper. Santa Cruz was the first locality to challenge a statewide preemption on soda taxes, and the measure’s passage will almost certainly prompt a lawsuit from the beverage industry. 5. Ballot summaries (2026): A constitutional amendment coauthored by Democratic state Sen. Tom Umberg and Republican state Sen. Roger Niello would fundamentally alter the ballot measure paradigm by shifting responsibility for writing titles and summaries from the attorney general to the Legislative Analyst’s office. The bipartisan measure serves as a counterpoint to a forthcoming proposal by Assemblymember Carl DeMaio, who wants proponents to be able to write their own language. 6. Judicial-retention elections (2026?): Democratic Assemblymember Gail Pellerin is looking to do away with the current system of retention elections for appellate judges, including those on the California Supreme Court. Her newly filed constitutional amendment would require voters to file a petition asking for a judge’s name to appear on the ballot; without it, an incumbent who declares for another term would be “deemed elected.” 7. Housing bonds (2026?): California’s housing crisis may finally end up on the ballot after being crowded out by other bonds in 2024. Assemblymember Buffy Wicks and state Sen. Christopher Cabaldon have introduced a pair of bills that would place a $10 billion affordable housing bond on the 2026 ballot, intended to fund supportive housing for the homeless and lower-income rentals. A separate, smaller proposal, introduced by Assemblymember Alex Lee, aims to direct $950 million in bonds to publicly developed, mixed-income homes known as social housing.
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| | | | | ON OTHER BALLOTS | | The group behind an abortion-rights amendment hoping to qualify for the 2026 ballot in Idaho is suing state election officials for assigning the proposal what they say is a misleading and prejudicial ballot title … Less than four months after an effort to repeal Alaska’s ranked-choice voting and open primary system failed narrowly at the ballot box, the state’s lieutenant governor has cleared another repeal attempt to gather signatures … Democrats in the Florida statehouse introduced legislation to prohibit state funds from being spent on ballot-measure campaigns, a response to Gov. Ron DeSantis spending tens of millions of taxpayer dollars to oppose 2024 measures on abortion and cannabis … Opponents of Utah’s new law banning collective bargaining are considering launching a ballot-measure effort to overturn it. An Arizona petition-carrier has been indicted for allegedly submitting fake signatures for last year’s amendment to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution … A Missouri judge struck down licensing restrictions for abortion providers, clearing the way for implementation of an abortion-rights amendment voters approved in 2024 … A group of Louisiana voters filed suit against state election officials, hoping to halt a tax-related constitutional amendment on next month’s ballot that they say misrepresents the measure’s impact … And Colorado election officials approved ballot language for a 2026 initiative to repeal the state’s wolf reintroduction program, which itself had been the product of a 2020 ballot measure.
| | WHATEVER HAPPENED TO ... | | STEM CELL RESEARCH INITIATIVES — A South San Francisco office park may stand as one of the last redoubts of cutting-edge biomedical research in California after the Trump administration freezes billions from the National Institute of Health budget. That’s because the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine was established by ballot measure: Prop 71, which in 2004 established a constitutional right to stem-cell research and issued $3 billion in bonds to support it. In 2020, voters approved Prop 14, with $5.5 billion more in bonds to replenish the institute’s budget. “What that means is scientists funded solely by CIRM are secure while their federally supported colleagues down the hall are scrambling,” health reporter David Jensen observed recently in his California Stem Cell Report newsletter. Although CIRM’s $5.5 billion in total funding is dwarfed by the nearly $50 billion the National Institutes of Health spends on medical research each year, in recent weeks the board has been discussing how it can fill the void left by the federal government. The institute has claimed credit for over 100 clinical trials and the advancement of numerous regenerative therapies, including vision loss and spinal cord injuries. When the first measure was introduced, stem cell politics split along cultural lines, with social conservatives opposing the use of embryos for anything other than natural procreation. President George W. Bush in 2001 struggled to strike a compromise, vowing to use federal funds only for experimentation on existing stem-cell lines without growing new ones. That tentative arrangement left many in Silicon Valley convinced their state needed the ability to support its own research agenda. Social conservatives, led by Focus on the Family and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, aggressively campaigned against Prop 71, which received 59 percent of the vote. Prop 14 passed by a much narrower two-point margin, against no organized opposition. (Supporters spent $24 million, opponents $1,350.) Now the threat to biomedical research comes from DOGE-style austerity. Since much of the state’s other medical research takes place at universities supported by federal grants, the institute — increasingly focused on gene editing and gene therapy — could find itself standing alone. The institute anticipates an increase in applications for the $4 billion it currently has on hand. “As far as we know there's no analogue to CIRM anywhere else in the country,” institute president Jon Thomas said in an interview. “We’re in a position that's a luxury, courtesy of the voters.”
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| … KELSEYVILLE: Since his inauguration, President Donald Trump has sought to expand the reach of presidential power through sweeping executive orders. One of them has started a domino effect that complicates an already fraught effort to change the name of a small town in a rural, forested county 100 miles north of San Francisco. Last November, voters across Lake County were asked if Kelseyville, an unincorporated community of about 4,000 on the shores of Clear Lake, should change its name to Konocti, the Indigenous name for a nearby volcano. The non-binding question was placed on the ballot after Pomo and social justice advocates in the town raised concerns over the dark record of Andrew Kelsey, a pioneer who historians believe brutalized the local native population leading to an 1850 massacre. Current Lake County residents were not swayed by that argument, ultimately voting by a 40-point margin to keep the Kelseyville name. But that vote had no legal force, and a month later the county’s supervisors nonetheless voted 3-2 to recommend the name change. The board advocated for the change to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, an obscure federal body whose responsibilities include naming unincorporated communities, writing in a December letter signed by chair Bruno Sabatier that “what seems remote events to some reverberate quite meaningfully to the present day for their neighbors.” The board has had a policy of removing names of places and landmarks if they contain language deemed a slur and typically approves changes recommended by local governments. But doing so in Kelseyville grew complicated on Jan. 20, when Trump issued an executive order directing the board to prioritize “contributions of visionary and patriotic Americans in our Nation’s rich past” and to “update its principles, policies and procedures as needed to achieve this policy.” It is unclear if Kelsey, a little-known Lake County settler, fits Trump’s definition of “names that honor American greatness,” as the order put it. But Save Kelseyville, a local group that led the campaign against the name change, quickly seized on Trump’s order, calling the county supervisors’ decision an “absolute betrayal and disappointment to our community.” The fate of Kelseyville will not, however, be the most controversial issue facing the federal board in 2025. In January, the board was also tasked with renaming Mount McKinley, which it now recognizes as Denali, and the Gulf of Mexico, which has now been dubbed the Gulf of America.
| | | | A message from Instacart: LA Fire Relief: Support students and teachers. Use Instacart's Classroom Carts to donate supplies to 28 affected schools and nearly 15,000 impacted students across LA. Every donation helps support students and teachers as they begin to rebuild, recover, and reconnect in the classroom. Delivery and service fees are waived for every donation. Donate now. | | | | | THAT TIME VOTERS ... | | … LIT UP: Californians have seen ballot measures on a wide variety of smoking-related questions, including to: Decriminalize the possession or production of marijuana for adults’ personal use (1972, failed) … Ban smoking in workplaces, schools and hospitals (1978, failed) … Designate smoking and non-smoking areas in enclosed public places (1980, failed) … Ban smoking in public places with the exception of bars, separate sections in restaurants, gaming and bingo establishments, private boxes at sport facilities and to regulate the location of tobacco billboards and vending machines (1994, failed) … Decriminalize the possession and use of marijuana for medical treatment (1996, passed) … Increase the cigarette tax by $2 per pack (2016, passed) … Legalize the use of recreational marijuana (2016, passed) … And uphold a law banning the sale of flavored tobacco products (2022, passed). | | | | Subscribe to the POLITICO Playbook family Playbook | Playbook PM | California Playbook | Florida Playbook | Illinois Playbook | Massachusetts Playbook | New Jersey Playbook | New York Playbook | Ottawa Playbook | Brussels Playbook | London Playbook View all our political and policy newsletters | | Follow us | | | |
