Gov. Gavin Newsom bubbled with confidence about Proposition 1 in January as he sat in a Costa Mesa Motel 6

hotel

room that was converted into housing for homeless veterans.

“I think it’s going to be an overwhelming victory,” the governor said in an interview with The Times. ‘Period of time. Point.’

Nearly two months later, Newsom’s cockiness seems misplaced.

Despite the millions his campaign has spent, Newsom’s ballot proposal to expand drug addiction care and fund more treatment beds has had only a narrow lead since the March 5 primary.

More than a week after the election, it’s still too close to make an official call, but preliminary numbers from the California Secretary of State show Proposition 1 has a lead of less than a percentage point.

Even with that uncertainty, the heavily funded opposition campaign conceded Tuesday morning that the measure would “almost certainly” pass.

“We almost took the bear down, but it looks like we will fall short,” the Californians Against Prop 1 campaign said in a statement.

Newsom’s campaign said so

it was them

“optimistic” about the outcome, but ballots still need to be counted. More than 1.5 million ballots remain uncounted statewide, with the election expected to total more than 7.5 million votes, which could be one of the lowest turnouts in state history.

The Associated Press, which its affiliated news organizations rely on to read results and call elections, said in a statement that “the race could flip if ‘No’ does just 1.5 percentage points better among outstanding votes.”

“AP has determined that there is too much uncertainty to make a call at this time because results are uneven across the state.”

Pollsters say Proposition 1 and most Democratic candidates underperformed on Election Day due to lower-than-expected turnout, inflating the Republican share of the electorate. Election results showed that inland counties and parts of Southern California opposed the measure, while a majority of voters in Los Angeles and the Bay Area supported the plan.

It was the angry versus the apathetic, said Jim DeBoo, a consultant for Proposition 1. Republicans are angry and showed up.

Although Newsom’s proposal received rare bipartisan support from Central Valley Republicans and San Francisco Democrats in the state Legislature, that political harmony did not extend to voters. The measure was criticized by civil rights groups on the left, who worried about the impact of funding safe mental health services, and by its Republican opponents on the right, who scoffed at its estimated $14 billion price tag amid a massive budget deficit.

Proposal 1

would

approve a new $6.4 billion bond to support 10,000 treatment and housing beds and reconfiguration

D

a two-decade-old mental health tax to also fund drug addiction services. The plan is key to Newsom’s strategy to tackle California’s homelessness crisis, a persistent obstacle for the state and political vulnerability for the Democratic governor.

Under increasing pressure to clean up camps and get people into treatment, the governor has adopted a series of policy positions that move away from the liberal model of voluntary treatment toward a more moderate approach that pushes people with serious mental illness and substance use disorders into care.

Newsom signed a law last year to expand the conservatorship so courts can appoint someone to make decisions for people struggling with serious substance abuse disorders. Counties last year began implementing their CARE Court program, which gives families the opportunity to request that the court order treatment for a loved one.

The lack of treatment beds and places to accommodate the influx of patients has been the main argument against Newsom’s strategy. In her State of the City address days after the election, San Francisco Mayor London Breed touted that passage of Proposition 1 would provide “a real opportunity to add hundreds of additional” treatment beds.

“So when the state opens the pipeline for new beds, San Francisco will be ready and first in line,” Breed said.

Civil rights groups and advocates for the disability community opposed the measure and sounded alarm bells in 2023 about a last-minute change to Proposition 1 that would allow counties to use the bond money for “locked facilities,” where patients cannot voluntarily leave.

American Civil Liberties Unions in California and League of Women Voters of California urged voters to reject the measure, arguing that community mental health care is more effective than institutionalization.

“I think a lot of times the governor and the mayors just want the encampments to go away by any means necessary,” said Katherine Wolf, a doctoral student in society and environment at UC Berkeley who said she voted against Proposition 1.

Wolf said she believes community programs that provide stability to some mentally ill Californians will lose funding

as

money shifts to involuntary treatment. Like the ACLU and the League of Women Voters, she also opposes forcing people into care.

“For them to sneak it in at the last minute, after promising all summer that the deposit would only be used for community-based, voluntary unlocked treatment, I think is really underhanded and I think they did it specifically to avoid objections from the groups and people. who they knew would object,” Wolf said.

Newsom called the measure an opportunity to get more people off the streets and into treatment. The measure, he argued in an interview with The Times, targeted voters’ top crime, homelessness, substance abuse and mental health issues and “90% of the boxes that unite the vast majority of Californians.” “

Early polls seemed to indicate Newsom was right. For example, a survey conducted in November by the Public Policy Institute of California found that two-thirds of likely voters approved of Proposition 1, 30% opposed it, and just 2% remained undecided.

But despite the governor’s publicly optimistic stance, behind the scenes his campaign predicted the final outcome would be tighter than polls showed and tried to lower expectations in the months and weeks before the election.

Support fell to 59% among likely voters in a second PPIC survey conducted in February.

By the end of the month, the measure was teetering with just 50% support in a poll by the UC Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies co-sponsored by the Los Angeles Times. More than a third of voters were against and 16% remained undecided. A large majority of Republican voters who responded to the Berkeley poll opposed the measure, raising concerns about how Proposition 1 would fare in elections with higher Republican Party turnout.

In a memo sent days before the election, David Binder, a pollster hired by Newsom’s campaign, suggested that the PPIC polls were optimistic given low turnout and underperformance among Democrats.

“It’s likely that even if ‘yes’ on Proposition 1 was in the low 60s when it was first introduced in 2023, the ‘yes’ vote could end up in the low 50s, given the history of erosion in support for bond and tax measures and “The specifics regarding the low turnout and disproportionate Republican turnout California is experiencing in the March 5 election,” Binder wrote.

Mark DiCamillo, director of the IGS Poll, said that despite bipartisan support in the Capitol, it should come as no surprise that Republican voters did not back Proposition 1.

Republicans tend to oppose large-scale voting measures. Voters of all political leanings who remain undecided in the final days before an election also often vote against a measure if they have not yet made up their minds, he said. Complicated measures like Proposition 1 can also easily confuse voters.

“Another difference that probably worked against this election was that turnout was so low that you actually have three times as many older voters, who tend to be more conservative than younger voters,” DiCamillo said.

Newsom’s campaign said the governor deliberately chose to place the measure on the March ballot because they believed it “could withstand a more conservative electorate and still pass on Election Day” and because of its urgency of the issue.

Anthony York, a campaign spokesman, said and pollsters agreed the measure would have done that

performed better

if placed on the November ballot, where Democratic turnout is expected to be higher.

But Democrats in Sacramento are also eyeing several other bond measures on housing, schools and climate that will go before voters in November that could total tens of billions of dollars. With the state struggling to make up for a budget deficit of at least $37.9 billion, bonds act as a kind of method for the government to take out loans that will be paid back over time to finance major policy measures .

Voting on Proposition 1 in March instead of November was a strategic decision that allowed Newsom to avoid a crowded vote in the fall, said Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data Inc.

“Voters, when you collect ballot measures that have money being spent on them, they start to collectively say ‘no’ to them,” Mitchell said.

Times staff writer Hannah Wiley contributed to this report.