OLYMPIA — Back in 1997, those pushing a ballot measure that would have required handgun trigger locks got help from Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and one of the company’s rising execs, Steve Ballmer.
They gave a little, not a lot. Gates contributed $35,000 and Ballmer $1,000 to an effort that wound up losing by a margin of almost 3 to 1.
This year, it’s quite a different story.
Ballmer and Gates have each given a $1 million to the Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility in support of Initiative 594 on Tuesday’s ballot. The measure would require background checks on private sales and transfers of firearms.
The two men, and their wives, along with venture capitalist Nick Hanauer ($1.4 million), Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen ($500,000), former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ($285,000) and the group he established, Everytown for Gun Safety ($2.3 million), account for $6.6 million of the $10.3 million raised by the campaign thus far.
There have been 9,133 contributions to the campaign, some as small as $2.50, but it is the handful of checks from billionaires that has been a rallying cry for opponents behind competing Initiative 591.
“It’s looking more like ‘Every Billionaire for Gun Control’ wants to buy this election,” Alan Gottlieb, point man for the Yes on 591 campaign and chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, said in an Aug. 29 news release.
Christian Sinderman, a consultant for the Yes on 594 campaign, rejected the assertion.
“Regardless of your net worth, you live in the state of Washington, you care about the quality of life here and you care about your community,” he said.
Actually, Gottlieb might not be far off.
Thumb through the records of the state Public Disclosure Commission and nearly every year you’ll find the names of millionaires and billionaires contributing generously to support or oppose measures dealing with transportation, schools, taxes and more. And the size of their checks is increasing.
In 2012, their money helped legalize marijuana and charter schools and repel an attempt to repeal the state’s gay marriage law.
Bill and Melinda Gates gave $3.1 million for the charter school campaign, with Allen putting in $1.6 million, Hanauer $1 million and Connie Ballmer $500,000.
Meanwhile, Amazon founder and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and his wife, Mackenzie, contributed $2.5 million to the effort to preserve gay marriage. Gates, Ballmer and Bloomberg all wrote six-figure checks, as well.
And on the marijuana initiative, Peter Lewis, the billionaire executive of Progressive Insurance until his death last year, provided $2 million. That accounted for one-third of all the money raised.
In 2011, Costco, whose founders James Sinegal and Jeffrey Brotman are Washington residents, shelled out almost $20 million to put sales of liquor in the hands of the private sector rather than the state.
The wealthy are not always on the same side.
In 2010, Gates and Hanauer donated a combined $850,000 to support Initiative 1098 to create an income tax; Ballmer, Allen and Bezos provided a total of $625,000 to the opposition. The measure failed.
And they don’t always win.
In 2004, Hanauer gave $830,000 to the campaign to raise the state sales tax to provide additional money for public schools and colleges. That same year, Bill Gates gave $1 million to the group trying to prevent the repeal of a law creating charter school schools. Both men wound up on the losing side.
Such ballot box activism might be a response to stalemated lawmaking in Congress and the Legislature.
“Given the current political climate and the dissatisfaction with elected officials, more people are trying to use direct democracy as a way to circumvent lawmakers, including wealthy people and those with an agenda,” said Brittany Clingen of Ballotpedia, an online encyclopedia of elections. She is director of its Ballots Project.
“I don’t think we can definitively say that wealthy individuals are usurping the initiative process, primarily because there are so many unknowns,” she wrote in an email.
They could wind up on the losing end of a campaign, or the measure they support could be derailed by a lawsuit, she said.
And it shouldn’t be a surprise to see billionaires and businesses carrying the financial freight of initiatives, said Leslie Graves, president of the Lucy Burns Institute and publisher of Ballotpedia.
It can take a couple of million dollars to gather the signatures to qualify a measure for the ballot, then a few million dollars more to run a campaign.
“It’s nearly impossible to raise the millions of dollars you need from a pool of small donors because the costs of that kind of fundraising are so high, and it takes forever,” she wrote in an email.
That makes it critical to line up support from wealthy individuals and corporations, she said.
Sinderman, who has managed several statewide initiative campaigns in Washington, acknowledged it is a “new era of initiative politics.”
“You couldn’t have predicted it,” he said. “It’s a big evolution. But it’s not dissimilar to how the process works in other states.”
Jerry Cornfield: 360-352-8623; jcornfield@heraldnet.com.
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