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This campaign manager says it's now much harder to get a citizen initiative on Arizona ballots

A vote center in north Phoenix
Sky Schaudt/KJZZ
A vote center in north Phoenix on Nov. 8, 2022.

There will be a whole lot of propositions on your ballot this November. From referrals from Republican state legislators looking to get around Governor Katie Hobbs’ veto stamp, to a collection of citizen-led initiatives run by, well, citizens. Or, local and outside interests who are trying to go around the state legislature to get issues on the ballot.

On the referral side, for example, is a measure state lawmakers want voters to decide to give local law enforcement immigration authorities. On the initiative side, there are measures that will do everything from strengthening abortion rights in our state, to creating open primaries here. Lawmakers also sent a measure to the ballot that opponents say would make it harder to get those citizen-led initiatives on it.

So, how do these citizen-led interests get those measures on the ballot? How do you campaign for a cause, as opposed to a candidate?

Stacy Pearson, Democratic consultant, has been behind the scenes in some of the highest profile elections of recent times in our state. She’s worked for plenty of candidates — most notably, running the campaign for Paul Penzone, the man who finally ousted longtime Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio in 2016. But, Pearson has been just as influential in another kind of race, one without a face. She runs initiative campaigns, most notably getting marijuana legalized in Arizona in 2020.

Pearson joined The Show to give a behind-the-scenes look at these campaigns, where Pearson said, you’re dealing with a lot of ego.

Stacy Pearson
Stacy Pearson
Stacy Pearson

Full conversation

STACY PEARSON: So much ego and there's so much you can't control on a candidate's campaign. You can't control if someone likes this guy's face or not, you can't control someone's face.

LAUREN GILGER: And that happens, right? Like you're in a lot of focus groups, you hear a lot of negative feedback to just people and things they can't change about themselves.

PEARSON: Yes.It's so much negative feedback that we stopped letting candidates watch the focus groups on themselves because it's, it is terrible. It's, imagine, you know, walking into a room where everyone's talking about you and not being able to walk away, they don't stop talking.

GILGER: That makes a lot of sense. OK. So is this part of why you say you prefer running campaigns for initiatives? And there are a whole lot of initiatives on the ballot this year, which is why we wanted to talk about this. What's the benefit there? What's the difference?

PEARSON: So initiative campaigns are always issue based and so you wind up with these really diverse coalitions that support an issue. Legalization, for example, the Prop. 207 in 2020 that legalized recreational marijuana, that campaign, we had law enforcement support, we had corrections officers support and we had the ACLU’s support.

So you wind up being able to find these common threads that people just agree that incarceration is not working for minor drug offenses like marijuana. And then putting together a policy that meets their needs is really fun and really rewarding.

GILGER: So there's a level it sounds like of coalition making.

PEARSON: Exactly.

GILGER: Bridging the divide. Does that get challenging as well at times?

PEARSON: Oh, of course. Certainly. There are folks who did it well, somewhere else who really love to share their knowledge and it's probably the most frustrating thing about my job is when folks tell me well in Nebraska in 2016, this worked well.

That's cool. That's great. We're not in Nebraska and an Arizona Republican is very different than a Nebraska Republican or an Ohio Republican. We've, we, Arizona in particular is Libertarian. It's strange, we're a border state. So sometimes those helpful anecdotes are exactly the opposite.

GILGER: Yeah. So that sounds like it comes in real handy when you're running campaigns, particularly for issues, like knowing the voter here very well and who you're after.

PEARSON: Exactly. And we talk a lot about Arizona's LDS population, members of the Mormon Church, Latter-day Saints. And to explain that that population in Arizona, the voting population is larger than the African American voting population is something that folks in D.C. or Chicago or Florida can't even fathom, they just can't wrap their brains around it.

GILGER: So it's a specific-place based thing in a way. Talk about how you approach that. Like how do you campaign on signs and make the, you know, “prop number whatever” mean something to people? How do you message it in advertising, things like that?

PEARSON: So there are some really easy examples like legalizing marijuana or passing Prop. 139, the abortion initiative. Those require very little explanation. People know what it is. The harder ones are a Flagstaff transportation initiative, for example, I'm trying to get folks really excited about having more frequent bus service is where we really start to use all the tools in the toolbox.

GILGER: You have to get creative sometimes.

PEARSON: Exactly.

GILGER: Is that a big challenge? Like just making sure voters understand what the heck something does.

PEARSON: I mean, it's not that simple and these are not policy experts we're talking about. That is the most difficult component of the referrals and the initiatives and the props that are at the bottom of the ballot.

In Tucson, for example, we were running an initiative to fund the zoo, the Reid Park Zoo. And it was a two-question question. And the first question was on the bottom of the front side of the ballot. And the second question was on the top of the second side of the ballot. Just telling voters to turn over their ballot was so hard, getting folks, you're not done yet. You're gonna see the, but you gotta flip it over. Please flip it over. It was, and, and the front side won by a large margin. The backside barely squeaked out and it was just folks that filled their ballot out, put it in the envelope and set it off without finishing the back.

GILGER: So talk a little bit about the funding of these, right? Like what's the difference between having a campaign that is locally kind of grassroots-based and then locally funded versus a lot of initiatives are, initiatives that have been run in other places and then are brought here with outside funding. Is that harder?

PEARSON: Both have their advantages and disadvantages. So when you have someone sending $5 a month, because they believe that Sheriff Joe needs to go. That retiree is telling her friends, you know, at the senior center that she's voting for Sheriff Penzone at that time.

GILGER: A campaign you ran, we should say.

PEARSON: A campaign I ran. And, and those were my favorite. The folks that would send their checks in the envelopes with little notes, like, keep working hard. I mean that, that keeps the day going for lots of folks.

On the flip side, the national money understands that Arizona is ground zero for competitive states. Our swing state status means that we have to win some of these big initiatives, be abortion, restoring Roe versus Wade in Arizona. If it was Proposition 207, marijuana legalization again, we really need our top of the ticket candidates to align with progressive values at the bottom two. And so those, those national funders really help steer that tail that wags the dog. So the initiatives that then help float the top of the ticket.

GILGER: Are there times in which you know that you're going to run something, it's going to fail. But then the next time you run it, it might win.

PEARSON: Sometimes. I think in the referrals, we see that occasionally. In Arizona, it has gotten so expensive to collect signatures that no one's flying a test balloon anymore. And so even to get prepared to qualify and to hire a signature gathering firm, you're talking tens of millions of dollars both in legal and the physical collection of signatures.

GILGER: Is that just because, Stacy, like you're, you're collecting signatures, right? But, but we've seen so many challenges on everything an initiative does, from the wording of the initiative to the description of the initiative. It's challenged almost at every, every turn, it seems like.

PEARSON: It is. And that that was a result of very intentional policy that dislikes direct democracy tremendously. So I'll say that again, like we, we have passed laws in this state either direct or through referrals that make it so much more difficult.

So for example, we called it the coffee stain standard, but we went from substantial compliance to strict compliance on a signature sheet. So if I, Stacy Pearson, signed my name and then start filling out my address and I transpose the state and the ZIP code box. When we had substantial compliance, it was very clear that I know what a ZIP code is and I know what a state is and I just got it in the wrong holes, right? Strict compliance, you can challenge that line.

And so that intentional level of difficulty, increased level of difficulty is now makes everything so much more expensive. You have to gather so many more signatures, knowing that some like that are going to be kicked off.

GILGER: I mean, so and part of this will play into the next answer here, which is that citizen initiatives, if they pass, are very hard to undo, right,. If some of these initiatives pass that are on the ballot this time around, that will make it even more difficult for a citizen initiative to get on the ballot in the end. You're coming at this from, from the Democratic side of the aisle, obviously. Like, is there a risk that one day the Democrats will be in charge and you're going to see a lot of citizen initiatives from the right that may very well pass?

PEARSON: Of course, the point of direct democracy is to go around your Legislature, particularly a Legislature you disagree with. And the fact that it's become so difficult and so expensive undermines democracy at its most foundational level.

I'm perfectly fine with the Republicans using these tools. The difference is because of the Republican majority in the Legislature. They've used the referral, not the initiative. And so you don't have to get their signatures. You get to skip the expensive part, you get to skip the part that you're challenged. And you get right to the end result, which is putting something in front of voters that they may or may not be aware of what it does.

KJZZ's The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ's programming is the audio record.

Lauren Gilger, host of KJZZ's The Show, is an award-winning journalist whose work has impacted communities large and small, exposing injustices and giving a voice to the voiceless and marginalized.
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