Majority Rules

Ballot initiatives go by different names — ballot measures, propositions, issues, questions, referendums, and so on. Basically, they all mean a vote on a policy instead of a politician or party. The United States doesn’t have them at the national level, while state legislators can choose to put initiatives before voters. However, in about half the states and most municipalities, voters can gather signatures to put initiatives on the ballot themselves. These “citizen initiatives” enable ordinary people to propose and directly pass legislation, making them a viable alternative to beating our heads against the brick wall of the two-party system.

Like all genuinely democratic mechanisms in this country, the option exists because previous generations of exploited and oppressed people fought for it. Ballot initiatives originated from the late nineteenth-century People’s Party. The original Populists were a multiracial coalition of farmers and workers in the Midwest, Appalachia, and South who came together in a powerful but short-lived bid to create a more egalitarian and democratic society. They faced much the same problem we do: a two-party system where both parties were run by and for the rich.

After a contentious attempt to join with the Democratic Party in 1896, the Populists were crushed by a combination of Republican money and Democratic white supremacy — but not before they planted direct democracy in the American political machine. Today, at a time when class has become dislocated from partisan politics, citizen initiatives have the potential to reconnect working and marginalized people around policymaking for the common good.

In what became known as the “tax revolt” in the 1970s and ’80s, conservatives realized they could use ballot initiatives to pass pro-rich policies if they framed the votes as lowering taxes. In the decades that followed, tough-on-crime initiatives, votes against same-sex marriage, and other measures based on ginned-up moral panics seemed to confirm the idea that ballot initiatives were a right-wing tool. The bulk of the literature on direct democracy during this period focused on its vulnerability to exploitation by the rich and powerful.

Recent research has been more ambivalent about the direct vote, often pointing to data showing that initiatives have little impact in the aggregate. Other scholars maintain that initiatives can increase voter turnout or argue, ironically, that ballot initiatives can help defeat “populism.” From an organizer’s standpoint, the problem with these studies is that they tend to approach the ballot initiative mechanism as a whole, casting judgments on their overall effects rather than their potential.

Ballot initiatives are not inherently progressive, nor does the Left have exclusive access to them. The point is that the Left has access to them. While the Left is iced out of partisan politics, citizen initiatives present an avenue to policymaking that can still be used. The dynamics of direct democracy favor redistributive policies, which pass at far higher rates than the average initiative. If applied strategically, ballot initiatives could play a crucial role in reorienting politics along class-struggle lines and hindering the advance of the Right. Below, I make three arguments for such a strategy.

1. Ballot Initiatives Can Win Policies We Need

Most of society works for a living, so it should be unsurprising that policies benefiting working people tend to win majority votes. Of the many examples, raising the minimum wage stands out. Since 1996, minimum wage hikes went on an unbeaten streak of twenty-seven for twenty-seven at the state ballot, many of these wins coming in states controlled by Republicans. That is billions of dollars in working people’s pockets, passed by democratic vote.

The last federal minimum wage increase was signed by George W. Bush in 2007 — after he added a clause cutting taxes for businesses — raising the hourly minimum from $5.15 to $7.25 over two years. Since then, it hasn’t budged, but costs have. Since 2009, the cost of medical care has shot up 49 percent, food is up 51 percent, and average rent in cities is up 67 percent. In terms of how much a dollar can buy, the federal minimum wage is currently at a sixty-seven-year low. In this context, it stands to reason that raising the minimum wage would be widely popular.

Most state minimum wages are higher than the federal rate, many of them thanks to those twenty-seven initiative victories. California just broke the winning streak this year, with voters narrowly rejecting a $2 bump to their current $16 minimum wage. But two others in 2024 passed: Alaska and Missouri, both solidly red states, approved $15 minimum wages with annual increases for inflation along with paid sick leave.

Abortion is another prime example of the power of ballot initiatives to enact popular will in hostile political climates. Since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision overruling federal abortion protections, there have been seventeen state votes on abortion rights, and fourteen of them have supported reproductive freedom. Most importantly, many of these victories have been won in Republican-controlled states. The Republican Party makes no secret of its antiabortion position, but that does not mean majorities of voters in red states share that view, just as having pro-abortion views doesn’t mean a person also votes Democrat. Ballot initiatives enable us to route partisan politics and get policies that majorities want on the books.

In recent years, ballot initiatives have expanded access to health care, passed protections from predatory debt collection (nothing unites working people quite like hatred of debt collectors), mandated paid family and sick leave, increased funding for public education and transportation, and more. No other existing governmental mechanism can as readily win progressive policy at scale.

Both parties are antagonistic to the direct vote when it threatens elite interests. After all, the entire point of initiatives is passing policies that are popular but which neither party will deliver. For example, the Atlanta city government is using the same antidemocratic tactics to stop a popular referendum on Cop City that Republicans wield against abortion initiatives elsewhere. And when residents of Washington, DC, recently put a popular initiative on the ballot to increase the minimum wage for tipped workers, the mayor and City Council (all Democrats) fought against it just like Republican legislators do when minimum wage votes are proposed in their states.

With both parties chipping away at direct democracy and an antidemocratic Republican Party in power, it is unclear how long the window will remain open for citizen initiatives to be able to pass meaningful policy. But importantly, the direct vote has other potential benefits.

2. Initiative Campaigns Can Rebuild Working-Class Politics

Despite rising frustrations with the two-party system, and growing mistrust of institutions in general, elections remain the primary lens through which ordinary people understand politics. For many, voting is synonymous with political participation. Even the plurality of eligible voters who choose not to vote — a massive group that is disproportionately poor and working-class — aren’t abstaining because they don’t think voting is political; they aren’t voting in large part because they don’t believe politics will change their lives in any meaningful way.

Organizing requires meeting people where they’re at. That means engaging with electoral politics at some level. But the two-party system has trapped us in a bind: take ourselves out of the game or become junior partners in a failing party run by the 1 percent. Ballot initiatives can bypass this dilemma and turn popular opinion into policy, but just as importantly, they enable organizers to connect people on that basis. Initiative campaigns can facilitate productive conversations across party affiliation, using policy agreement to open lines of solidarity.

Despite the parties’ polarizing rhetoric, on the ground there is overwhelming bipartisan support for a host of progressive policies. Measures for economic redistribution not only pass at high rates, but they are also especially suitable for connecting working-class people based on shared interests. Many progressive canvassers will tell you versions of the same story: they never thought it was possible to knock on Republican doors and have positive conversations until they worked on a ballot initiative for something like raising the minimum wage or protecting abortion rights.

In 2024, Arizonans chose Donald Trump by almost two hundred thousand votes. They also voted to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution by four times that number. We saw similar results in Missouri, Montana, and Nevada. In Florida, their abortion amendment received a higher percentage of the vote than Trump; the ballot initiative only lost because of the state’s 60 percent rule for such measures, installed as part of a wave of antidemocratic legislation across the country designed to undercut citizen initiatives.

Health care is another example. Since Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Republicans made opposition to Medicaid expansion a pillar of their platform. But polls have consistently shown its popularity across party lines. When voters in Republican states petitioned to put Medicaid expansion on the ballot, often fought tooth and nail by their own elected representatives, it passed seven out of eight times.

The combination of Democratic dealignment with the number of Republican voters willing to support progressive policies reveals an American working class begging to be organized. Ballot initiative campaigns — even ones that end up getting overruled or struck down from above — can enable the first step by mobilizing working-class voters while detaching the idea of political participation from fealty to one of the major parties, beginning to reorient popular consciousness away from reliance on leader-politicians and toward class power.

3. The Direct Vote Prepares the Left to Govern Democratically

If the Left is serious about winning, we need to start thinking about what might happen if we actually take power. To govern democratically, and to achieve the opportunity in the first place, we need credible, positive, diffuse experience with local governance — more than we can get through a handful of allied politicians.

Ballot initiatives are complicated processes, and increasingly so. The more progressive policies pass by ballot initiative, the harder local legislators turn the screw against the direct vote. The result is a deeply convoluted and disjointed system for direct democracy: each state or municipality has its own rules and regulations and many of them are opaque, their secrets often gatekept by a network of lawyers, bureaucrats, and consultants. Learning the contours of ballot initiative code and precedent wherever you live is a serious pain. But it’s one that leftists should lean into.

Running initiative campaigns not only forces us to learn the system’s nuts and bolts; it also demands a reckoning with our political geography. With politician personalities out of the way, majority votes for a policy demand uncomfortable honesty: Are our policy goals popular? Are they addressing the actual needs and aspirations of our communities? Conversations need to be had, connections made, coalitions built and managed, and communities canvassed.

With ever-mutating versions of the Right in power for so long, the Left has been stuck on defense. Thinking about which policies can be advanced via popular vote can help consolidate a scaffolded plan out of the two-party trap. Our opponents can challenge, roll back, or strike down citizen initiatives from above, but if we’re prepared for them, these attacks on the popular vote can be used to sharpen political consciousness — reorienting a Democrat vs. GOP logic to one of organized class struggle.

Votes Aren’t Everything, But They Can Give Us a Running Start

Ballot initiatives give organizers the strategic opportunity to pass meaningful policy, build a base, and set the stage for independent working-class struggle. I’m using the word “strategy” to suggest that this is more than a tactic, more than a simple means of achieving this or that reform. Even so, the ballot initiative strategy cannot stand alone. We need a dynamic, diverse, working-class movement with primary sources of leverage: militant labor unions and co-ops, tenant unions and solidarity-based neighborhood associations, and activists willing to take direct action, all generally rowing in the same direction.

The ability to put people-first policies to a direct vote is a vital tool in building the broader movement. That is partly why forward-thinking unions have been at the forefront of sponsoring ballot initiative campaigns to raise wages, improve health care coverage, protect abortion, and more — to pass policies that will improve workers’ lives and put them in a better position to organize.

Ballot initiatives are no silver bullet. They are embedded in an otherwise elite-controlled electoral system, subject to all kinds of limitation, oversight, manipulation, and rollback, and ultimately reliant on implementation in a hostile system. Waves of antidemocratic legislation are proliferating in state houses nationwide, attempting to limit the scope and authority of ballot initiatives or sink them altogether.

At the end of the day, the Left’s power comes from the masses of people. To organize the majority who create society’s wealth across demographic and geographic lines necessarily means establishing connections over current party divides and proving that there are viable alternatives to the status quo. Direct votes on people-first policies are one avenue to precisely such a project, and one that has been vastly underutilized.