The campaign to pass a tough-on-crime ballot initiative in California heads into its final stretch in an enviable position. Proposition 36 is polling above 70 percent , boasts an impressive bipartisan list of prominent endorsers and maintains a major financial advantage over its opponents.
Only one thing is missing: the once-formidable alliance that helped launch Prop 36 and push its law-and-order concerns to the top of California’s political agenda.
The initiative, which would undo a decade-old criminal-justice reform measure by strengthening drug and theft penalties, was developed by a coalition that brought county district attorneys together with big-box chains like Target, Home Depot and Walmart. It seemed like a perfect partnership in a sphere where it typically takes tens of millions of dollars to reach voters: the stores would provide the money and the prosecutors the policy heft and political pitch.
But intense negotiations earlier this summer about whether to accept a legislative compromise have left some of the business interests that paid to put Prop 36 on the ballot considering whether to divorce the prosecutors running the campaign to pass it.
The resulting divisions have the potential to detract from the otherwise strong position of one of the country’s most closely watched ballot measures, in an election cycle where crime and public safety have reemerged as a subject of top voter concern nationwide .
While the national chains and other business groups welcomed offers by Gov. Gavin Newsom to address the companies’ theft concerns through compromise legislation, the prosecutors took a hard line against any possible deal. At a crucial moment in the negotiations, private correspondence between the Democratic governor’s chief of staff and the head of the California District Attorneys Association leaked to the media , an apparent attempt to embarrass the governor widely believed to have originated with the prosecutors (a claim they have denied).
Those unresolved divisions — over policy focus, political strategy and clashing personalities — have weakened the alliance. And some groups that were crucial to qualifying Prop 36 for the ballot are now questioning how involved they want to be in the measure’s future, or whether they want to be involved at all.
“Some of the tactics that were used were unfortunate,” said Rachel Michelin, president of the California Retailers Association, which played a crucial role in hatching Prop 36 but is considering whether to yank its support. “I think it was a huge missed opportunity … a lot of egos were involved, and to me, it was sad to see.”
Democrats led by Newsom failed to convince the tough-on-crime coalition to withdraw its initiative, but his recent enactment of bills cracking down on retail theft , which were designed to address many of the same issues as the initiative and marginalize the prosecutors’ proposal, have continued to open up a wedge between the erstwhile allies behind Prop 36.
“I know some probably have characterized us as maybe a little stubborn,” Yes on 36 co-chair Greg Totten, who also heads the California District Attorneys Association, told POLITICO. “But I take pretty strong issue with that. At the end of the day we were prepared to negotiate, but we wanted a package that actually fixed the problem.”
Some members of the coalition that initially helped fund the costly effort to sell the measure, including Target and Home Depot, have not provided any further funding since it qualified for the ballot. Others are being pursued by a new, rival pro-Prop 36 committee aimed at cultivating support from moderate Democrats. Its presence could pose a fundraising and messaging challenge for the main Yes on 36 committee.
The initiative’s detractors see opportunity in dividing some of the country’s most visible and beloved consumer brands from local politicians whose records and motives they find easier to attack.
“Once you strip away the retailers, their money and their messaging, what's left?” said Anthony York, spokesman for the No on 36 campaign. “It’s the same people who pushed three strikes legislation , who opposed Prop 47, it’s the same prison industrial complex that’s been behind this for decades.”
The unlikely alliance
In 2014, Proposition 47 passed by an overwhelming margin, relaxing penalties as part of a broader movement to rethink the state’s approach to criminal justice. District attorneys who saw the new laws as catastrophic for the state’s approach to crime and drug enforcement immediately began angling to unwind them.
Then in 2020, the California District Attorneys Association — which links elected prosecutors across the state’s 58 countries — presented voters with an opportunity to address those concerns through Proposition 20. The initiative would have strengthened penalties for certain theft and fraud crimes from misdemeanors to felonies, required DNA collection for some misdemeanor crimes and tightened rules for inmates to request early parole.
The measure was largely bankrolled by law-enforcement groups, who found themselves outspent by the opposition amid a national reckoning around criminal justice policy and its racial impact. That November, voters rejected Prop 20 by a margin of more than twenty points.
In the wake of that defeat, the district attorneys association changed leadership. Its new president, Greg Totten, was a square-jawed former Ventura County DA who had used his post to campaign against Prop 47, saying it would “dramatically weaken criminal laws and significantly undermine public safety.” In the middle of his fifth term, Totten quit his office to helm the district attorneys association, where he had served a stint in the mid-1990s as executive director just as the group’s members found themselves in the midst of the debate over three-strikes-and-you’re-out Proposition 184.
Totten returned to Sacramento just as the political environment was swinging back toward a harder line on sentencing and incarceration. Crime rates jumped during the pandemic as incarceration rates plunged. Law enforcement caught and prosecuted fewer suspects in property-crime cases. Stores began locking up basic household goods, feeding a public perception that shoplifting was out of control in California.
With Totten at the helm, the prosecutors decided to hit again at Prop 47, this time aiming to build a broader coalition. For years, interest groups representing the state’s retail sector had been lobbying the Legislature to take meaningful action against theft and had come away disappointed by what they saw as unwillingness to pass serious legislation on the issue.
Totten told POLITICO the prosecutors came to see a “constellation of issues” — homelessness, drug addiction, retail theft and fentanyl — as inextricably connected and wanted to craft a measure that addressed all four. The measure’s focus on retail theft came in part due to conversations he and a group of other prosecutors, including Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig, had with small and large businesses during the drafting process in 2023.
“We were all hearing from the business community about their frustration with theft and the lack of consequences,” Totten said. “Many businesses were privately telling us, ‘We don’t even call the police anymore, because nothing happens.’”
The prosecutors concluded they could court big-box retailers and other business interests who were grappling with the pandemic-era rise in theft by refocusing the initiative push around property crimes. The new partners would come with deeper pockets than the California Grocers Association, which had supplied about one-tenth of the Prop 20 campaign’s $6 million budget.
The prosecutors approached chains from 7-Eleven to Ulta Beauty, largely through contacts from the California Retailers Association, which represents a range of both national chains and individual stores. They also spoke with the California Grocers Association, which counts thousands of supermarkets and other food sellers across the state as members.
Retail and business groups were less interested in the portions of the measure tightening penalties for repeat drug offenders, but saw the ballot initiative as the best way to push for tougher policy on theft.
“When the opportunity once again presented itself to make changes to Prop 47, it was a conversation we wanted to be a part of,” said Daniel Conway, executive director of the Grocers Association. “CGA has basically been looking to reform Prop 47 since its passage.”
The newly formed Californians for Safer Communities coalition headed by Totten and former Sacramento County DA Anne Marie Schubert successfully convinced individual companies to follow their trade associations by pouring money into qualifying the initiative. Walmart gave $2.5 million, and both Target and Home Depot gave $1 million each toward the effort, which turned in 900,000 signatures in April and formally won a spot on the ballot two months later. A handful of others, including Macy’s and regional supermarket chain Stater Bros., chipped in six-figure sums along the way.
But an alliance that agreed on one shared goal — to tighten penalties for retail theft — fractured when Sacramento’s top Democrats showed interest in a deal that would placate the initiative’s backers in exchange for their killing the initiative.
Late last year, Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas created a select committee on retail theft, to be chaired by Assemblymember Rick Chavez Zbur, a Los Angeles Democrat eager to dive into crime and public safety policy. While amending Prop 47 itself would require voter sign-off, Zbur set out to find ways lawmakers could address the matter without it.
The Retailers Association welcomed Zbur’s interest. After meeting with him, the group’s lead lobbyist came away convinced the new organ presented a real chance to attain the group’s objectives without the cost and uncertainty of a ballot initiative.
“I went back to my members and said look, I think we have an opportunity here to work with the Legislature, with the speaker, to see if we can get something done through the legislative process,” said Michelin, whose group removed its name from the official ballot-measure committee at the end of 2023.
Democratic lawmakers spent the spring working on a package of retail theft bills which, among their provisions, created a new felony category for organized retail theft. While many of the retail and business interests were receptive to the possibility of a legislative compromise, the prosecutors insisted there was no option but a return to the ballot.
“While some legislative changes could be made, they could not be made to the core intent of Prop 47,” San Diego County DA Summer Stephan said this spring, as she worried that any approach that did not include a ballot initiative might struggle to “pass constitutional muster.”
After the Legislature released its package of bills in April, Michelin testified in support and began to pull the retailers farther away from the prosecutors.
Other business-side groups remained at the negotiating table, fuming privately about the lack of concrete progress toward a deal. Many of the business lobbyists suspected that Totten was just looking to run out the clock before the late June deadline to pull measures from the ballot.
“Part of our rationale for supporting the proponents during the early phases was based on assurances that we were given that, should the opportunity come to work with the governor and the Legislature on a compromise, the proponents told us they were prepared to do that,” Conway told POLITICO.
Ten days before the deadline, participants were jolted by a news story that included a complete chain of email messages exchanged by Totten and Dana Williamson, who as Newsom’s chief of staff played a key role in negotiations with ballot-measure proponents. The message revealed that Democrats were willing to consider a 2026 ballot measure on retail theft, but that Totten had rejected that possibility.
The leaked emails, viewed by many involved in the negotiations as a gambit to sabotage the talks for good, antagonized the governor’s team and effectively killed any remaining hope for a deal. The sticking point remained: Totten and the law enforcement backers of the initiative wanted the issue to go before voters this fall, and weren’t interested in a compromise that didn’t involve a 2024 ballot initiative.
Pushing back by two years “was a nonstarter for us,” Totten told POLITICO. “When you’ve got a crisis — and I don’t think any reasonable person that looks at the issue of retail theft, homelessness, addiction and fentanyl, would not conclude that we have a serious crisis — to say that we’re going to delay it for two years is not, in the opinion of the coalition, a responsible response.”
After officially securing its place on the ballot, Yes on 36 has dramatically expanded its reach. The committee secured endorsements from the League of California Cities and the California Contract Cities Association, then a group of legislative Democrats joined some of the state’s leading mayors in support , and most recently, the California Chamber of Commerce formally backed the measure.
But among some of those who first launched Prop 36, the sense of distrust and frustration toward Totten would never fully go away.
“It’s not uncommon during the debate to see people join the coalition and other people maybe walk away from it,” Totten said in a separate interview after a late June press conference celebrating the initiative’s confirmed place on the November ballot. “We think this is so broad-based, that’s not going to happen very much — but I wouldn’t be surprised if we don’t see a few people do that. That’s just the nature of these kinds of issues.”
Yes versus Yes
On a hot afternoon in mid-August, Newsom traveled to a Home Depot in East San Jose and took his position before cameras in front of dauntingly tall shelves stacked full of palleted construction materials. In front of him sat a stack of bills that would create a new category for offenses by organized-crime rings and allow law enforcement to add up the value of goods stolen in different locations to more easily meet the threshold for felony grand theft. With a ballpoint pen, Newsom signed each into law.
“The issue of organized retail theft, the issue of serial theft — [that is] the issue that is front and center in the consciousness of so many Californians,” Newsom said. “This goes to the heart of the issue, and it does it in a thoughtful and judicious way.”
That moment marked the culmination of Assembly Speaker Rivas’s nearly year-long quest to drive a wedge between the initiative’s business backers and the prosecutors. As a matter of policy, what Democrats had come to describe as their “retail-theft package” delivered much of what they could without returning to the ballot — and in some respects went farther than Prop 36 would.
Democrats were not subtle about their political objective in doing so. It may have been too late to get the initiative yanked from the ballot, but they believed they could still convince the groups expected to fund the campaign that the need for such an initiative had passed.
That, too, was the message Newsom worked to send with the meticulous staging in East San Jose, where he signed the bills into law from a table assembled from orange buckets plastered with Home Depot’s logo. Behind him was Michelin, who, in addition to Democratic legislative leaders, stood alongside both a representative from Target and the Grocers’ Association lobbyist Conway and its president Ronald Fong.
Earlier this month, under more prosaic conditions, Newsom — who has emerged as the most vocal critic of Prop 36 — signed the last item in Democrats’ anti-theft package. The Rivas-sponsored bill that would strengthen penalties for people who damage costly property while committing a felony is the final piece of legislation that retail lobbyists have hoped to see this year.
As the Prop 36 campaign enters its most active phase, many of the retail groups that were involved in its early stages and at the negotiating table in June have assumed diminished roles in the Californians for Safer Communities committee or disappeared from it entirely.
The only big donation to come from a major retail or food organization was a $500,000 contribution from In-N-Out this summer. Last week, Walmart donated an additional $1 million to the Yes on 36 campaign; it was the first time one of the big-box retailers who helped set in motion the initiative have provided financial backing for it since the signature-collection phase concluded in April.
Instead, the measure has largely relied on donations from several of California’s native tribes, the conservative California Business Roundtable, and smaller donations from individuals.
Totten said he is still in regular touch with Target and Home Depot and that both companies remain “active members of our coalition.” (Lobbyists registered for both corporations in California did not respond to requests for comment.)
Some corporate interests are waiting to weigh in on the initiative further until the end of September, after the window in which Newsom can sign or veto bills from the August legislative session. They hope to avoid angering the governor before he has signed other pieces of legislation important to them.
Many of those businesses are being courted by a new pro-Prop 36 committee, Common Sense for Safety, launched by San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho and Elk Grove Mayor Bobbie Singh-Allen. The new committee aims to bring moderate Democrats on board with its focus on Prop 36 as a compassionate way to tackle California’s homelessness and drug issues.
It may also provide an outlet for those who do not want to choose between aligning with Newsom and standing with the prosecutors whose leadership they distrust, or going silent altogether on the question dominating California’s political debate.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this report misidentified the organization whose emails with Gov. Gavin Newsom's office were leaked to the media. The organization is the California District Attorneys Association.
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