The effort to legalize sports betting in California ran headlong into a typical challenge for competing ballot measures as each was battered in a torrent of negative advertising that doomed both to spectacular failure in the most expensive ballot race in U.S. history.
Anytime voters face two measures at odds with each other, they tend to reject both, said professor David McCuan, chairman of the political science department at Sonoma State University.
“Whenever we have dueling ballot measures, and the competitors have an arsenal of dollars … the competitors will go nuclear. And in a nuclear war everybody loses,” McCuan said. “The most powerful money in California politics is on the ‘No’ side of ballot measures.”
The result was a pasting at the polls for both.
