When Affirmative Action is Attacked in Your Backyard: Lessons from the Michigan Struggle
By Trisha Stein, Executive Director, One United Michigan
We allow our ignorance to prevail upon us and make us think we can survive alone, alone in patches, alone in groups, alone in races, even alone in genders.
—Maya Angelou
With passage of Proposal 2 in Michigan on November 7, 2006, 58 percent of voters decided to eliminate local and state government affirmative action programs that help women and people of color attain equal opportunity in education, employment, and contracting.
The Michigan Civil Rights Initiative (MCRI), sponsored by Ward Connerly and the American Civil Rights Institute, was adopted as an amendment to the state constitution, making Michigan the third state to eliminate affirmative action by statewide vote.
Ward Connerly’s campaign against affirmative action was successful in California and Washington before coming to Michigan. Many of us in Michigan have now been asked, “What happened?” and “What does this vote in Michigan imply for the rest of the country?”
The quick answer to the first question is: You can’t change a culture that remains willfully ignorant of discrimination and the policies that seek to redress it with a brief election campaign. In response to the second question: Clearly galvanized by his victory in Michigan, Connerly is now on record stating his intent to pursue similar campaigns in 7–9 states in 2008. By further examining what happened here in Michigan, lessons were learned that could be shared with other states that will face an anti-affirmative action challenge by Ward Connerly.
What happened?
In Michigan, we created an incredible and diverse coalition, building relationships many thought could never happen. Republicans, Democrats, business leaders, organized labor, religious, and community groups that represent a multitude of diverse populations, and social, youth, and women’s organizations were among those who came together as a coalition of more than 200 groups called One United Michigan. We raised and spent $5 million over the course of a two-year campaign, most of which came in very late in the campaign. We built local coalitions in 15 geographic areas around the state responsible for grassroots organizing, and earned the endorsement of every major newspaper in the state.
However, these efforts were unfortunately not enough. Issues well beyond our control influenced the outcome of this referendum. The combination of our opponents' fraud and deception, our racially segregated state, and present economic and social fears in a changing world truly made this an uphill fight. In short, we discovered you can't change a racially divided culture with a political campaign, no matter how well organized or financed.
Ward Connerly, the main sponsor of Proposal 2 in Michigan and chairman of the American Civil Rights Coalition and the American Civil Rights Institute, is paid more than $1 million a year to run political campaigns to end affirmative action. That makes him one of the highest paid, single-issue political consultants in the nation and gives him an incentive to protect his interests.
To reach the ballot here in Michigan, Connerly hired a professional petition-gathering firm, which used a variety of questionable tactics to obtain the required number of signatures to place a constitutional amendment on the general election ballot. After reviewing the petition collection process, U.S. District Judge Arthur J. Tarnow in August 2006 found that, “the MCRI engaged in systematic voter fraud by telling voters that they were signing a petition supporting affirmative action.” In his opinion, Judge Tarnow went on to rule, “All Michigan voters, whether supporters or opponents of affirmative action, should be concerned by the actions taken by MCRI in its attempt to place the proposed amendment on the November 2006 ballot. In particular, opponents of affirmative action should be concerned by what the MCRI has done while purporting to act in their name. If the proposal eventually passes, it will be stained by well-documented acts of fraud and deception that the defendants, as a matter of fact, have not credibly denied.” Unfortunately, under current state law, it is not illegal to misrepresent the purpose of an initiative petition for statewide ballot in Michigan, so the measure was cleared for placement on the November ballot.
Once the measure was on the ballot, MCRI continued their campaign of deceit by leaving voters with the impression that the proposal would eliminate discrimination. It proved difficult to counter this message and convince voters that instead the proposal sought to eliminate one of the most effective tools to redress and provide remedies for discrimination—affirmative action. Tragically, MCRI’s campaign fed into the perceptions, fears, and misconceptions many voters had about affirmative action, and about women and people of color in Michigan, one of the most segregated states in the country.
Our campaign conducted a poll of statewide voters in 2004, two years before the election, in which we asked respondents if they believe there continues to be discrimination based on race, ethnicity, or gender in today’s society and if so, how often does it occur. Breaking the results down by race, 74 percent of African Americans said discrimination happens regularly with 46 percent saying all the time and 28 percent saying frequently. Only 36 percent of Whites believed discrimination happens regularly with 14 percent saying it happens all the time and 22 percent frequently, while 19 percent of White voters felt that discrimination is such an insignificant occurrence that it occurs in just a few instances or is a thing of the past altogether. From the beginning, we knew that there was a disconnection between how African-American and White voters view the world around them.
Because White voters are approximately 87 percent of the electorate in Michigan, it was important to find a message that would resonate with them in order for us to be successful. As a result, our paid messaging focused on two themes: the impact of the proposal on women, and the true story behind the sponsors of the proposal, along with their tactics for putting the proposal on the ballot.
One United Michigan’s primary message focused on the negative consequences Proposal 2 would have on women and girls, and their struggle for equal opportunity. This required laying an educational framework to expand the narrow understanding voters had—and continue to have—of affirmative action and who it benefits. The fact that affirmative action has played a critical role in providing qualified women with access to educational and professional opportunities that they would otherwise have been denied despite strong qualifications is not a widely known or believed fact. This point needed to be established well before the final weeks of the campaign, and to effectively do so the funding for paid media needed to be received much earlier in order to change the frame of the debate.
Our research showed that White voters almost universally felt that affirmative action programs work against them and that the system no longer works as it was intended, and now functions as a barrier to opportunity for them. When given additional information later in the poll about affirmative action, voters rejected the elimination of many specific programs that encourage diversity, especially those that seem to not pit people against one another for opportunities. But their initial reaction to the programs is instructive. Our opponents’ message fed into this initial opposition and fear of affirmative action with their message centering solely on race and racial competition.
From polling and focus group research, we also learned that one of the most effective messages was that the MCRI committee was a group that came from, and was funded by, out-of-state interests who operated in secret. Michigan voters were leery of outsiders and hidden money coming into the state to change the constitution. Additionally, voters became even more suspect when they learned that Proposal 2’s proponents were found to have lied to put the proposal on the ballot. Unfortunately this message wasn’t able to penetrate with voters primarily because of the lateness of funding we received to purchase air time in an electorate climate that this state has never seen. In 2006, there was more campaign money spent in Michigan on television advertising than any other year in our state’s history.
Even though we spent $3 million in the last few weeks of the campaign on paid media, including television and radio advertisements, it was not enough to break through the overall election season clutter, the messages of our opponents, and the willful ignorance of some voters and the prejudice of other voters. With this being a highly polarizing issue, we mapped out a strategy that we thought was the most effective given the resources we had. All of the polls indicated it would be a close election leading up to November 7, and even exit polls done after polling sites closed indicated the outcome was too close to call.
But unfortunately we were victimized by what is called the “Bradley Effect,” named after Tom Bradley, an African American who was the mayor of Los Angeles in 1982 and ran for governor in California against then-Attorney General George Deukmejian, who was White. Most pollsters predicted a Bradley win, but in the end he was narrowly defeated. According to veteran Michigan pollster Tim Kiska, "When a question of race is involved, the polling numbers are consistently 6-7 percentage points off. … My own personal belief is that when it comes to race, people give the politically correct answer in polls," said Kiska, "even when they're anonymous." So went Proposal 2 in Michigan, the proposal to ban affirmative action in the end garnered an overwhelming 58 percent of the votes.
Lessons Learned
There were many lessons learned from the Proposal 2 campaign, most importantly that it is difficult to beat race at the ballot box. You can’t convince a majority of voters to defeat efforts to eliminate equal opportunity when they do not feel discrimination is a major problem, and/or when they perceive affirmative action as taking away their own opportunities and giving them to others.
In our experience, all efforts from litigation to legislation should be explored to keep a similar proposal off statewide ballots. Proactive legislation should be explored, as is currently being encouraged by concerned Michigan activists, or existing laws enforced to address and limit petition fraud. The fraudulent messages and practices of paid petition gatherers will likely continue as Connerly moves to other states. Once this frame is established and he is able to control the debate, it is difficult to overcome.
One way to capture and regain the debate is to explore alternative ballot language and/or legislative initiatives. This will give supporters of equal opportunity something to rally around and stand for, as opposed to only being against perceived change.
Public education efforts should be developed and executed to expand voter understanding of affirmative action. As we learned, a well established, sustained messaging effort is needed to break down the misconceptions and fears about affirmative action. Michigan has been a lightning rod for this issue for nearly ten years, with the lawsuits filed against the University of Michigan in 1997, at both the undergraduate and law school levels, claiming that African-American students were admitted over White applicants because of their race. The Supreme Court decisions in these landmark cases led to Connerly’s decision to come to Michigan. Because of this intense debate, it was difficult for us to move the discussion beyond the effects affirmative action has on higher education.
Because of our coalition’s diverse, broad-based composition, we had support from the leadership of just about every major group and organization in Michigan. We, however, needed to do more to ensure the message transferred from the leadership to the membership base of the esteemed organizations that joined us.
In geographic areas and constituency groups where we penetrated down to the grassroots level, the voting results reflect our coalition’s work. There is a marked difference in voting results in urban areas vs. rural and suburban communities. This can be explained by the high concentration of people of color in urban areas and the grassroots education that was done by the coalition in these communities.
A notable example is with the Arab community, an area that we successfully organized and where they rejected the proposal by large margins. In a November 2003 focus group, Arab-American participants were supportive of the initiative and opposed to affirmative action because they saw it as a program that only helps African Americans and not people like them. Three years later, on November 7, election results in East Dearborn, an area with a high concentration of Arab Americans, show Proposal 2 was rejected by 67 percent of the voters. Additional funding would have enabled more organizing and field efforts to be done at the grassroots level in addition to our success with securing the support of the grass tops.
We know from the lessons learned from our work in Michigan that it is difficult to defeat an anti-affirmative action initiative straight up given the current frame of the debate. It is now clearer than ever before that the best way to conquer this challenge is to prevent it from ever appearing on the ballot in the first place. Therefore, all efforts must be exhausted to try to prevent a similar proposal from reaching statewide ballots in other states and/or create an atmosphere long before Connerly comes to a state that has a culture that understands we must all work together to protect equal opportunity and diversity to move forward.
