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Home > What's New > Smoke-Filled and Anxious in California
Smoke-Filled and Anxious in California
Posted: Wednesday, November 08, 2006
By Alejandro Benes
In a smoke-filled room, two men studied a computer screen showing the early returns on California's Proposition 86, the proposal to increase tobacco taxes by 135 percent. With 7 percent of the statewide vote reported, 53 percent of the voters were saying "no." If only temporarily, that pleased Eric Guidice, the owner of The Big Easy, a cigar shop on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, part of Los Angeles County.
"Dude, I thought for sure it was gonna pass," Guidice shared, then set fire to a Padrón.
Guidice's friend, Dodd Harris, was reassuring the tobacco store owner.
"You know what?" Harris said optimistically. "You can go to bed."
Not so fast. Guidice clicked on the prompt for San Francisco on the online tally. There, the state's most liberal voting bloc was supporting the tax measure by 65 percent to 35 percent.
"There's your problem," offered Harris, suddenly less optimistic.
San Francisco, though, has a relatively small number of voters compared with Los Angeles and Southern California. By midnight Pacific time, with 61.5 percent of the statewide vote in, Prop. 86 was losing, 53 percent to 47 percent, but in L.A. County, the "yes" vote was 50.2 percent, with nearly 50 percent of the precincts reporting. L.A. County was the state's biggest and potentially most troublesome battleground for the anti-86 side. The remaining half of the vote could easily split in a way to pass the proposition statewide.
I stocked up on cigarettes," explained Ted Faroully, owner of the Cigar Zone in Ventura County, earlier in the evening. He was hedging his bets. A lot of the discussion Tuesday night focused on what could happen with cigarette prices irrespective of the fate of the proposition.
"Philip Morris will raise prices a buck a pack [of cigarettes]," offered one observer. "They have to make back the money they spent to defeat 86."
By most accounts, the big cigarette companies, mainly RJ Reynolds and Philip Morris, spent around $65 million to defeat the tax. California is the biggest cigarette market in the country. The cigar industry, whose products would suffer the tax increase aimed principally at cigarettes, had little choice but to throw in with what proponents of the measure called "Big Tobacco."
With 100 percent of the vote in on Wednesday morning, Proposition 86 had lost. The final tally was 52.1 percent against to 47.9 percent in favor. The difference is slightly more than 280,000 votes out of more than 6.5 million.
At least part of the credit for the defeat goes to an effective campaign waged by the anti-86 coalition. TV commercials, shrill and fear-mongering in the early days, shifted to featuring police, fire and medical spokespersons decrying the measure. That, to a degree, put the pro-86 side on the defensive and had the effect of making its commercials seem as if they were trying too hard to explain that all the revenue raised by the tax increase would indeed go to supporting health programs and antismoking efforts. To put it another way, the anti-86 ads raised what passed for reasonable doubt in the proposition process.
Not good enough for Guidice, who was already looking past a possible victory this night.
"I can't do this every two years," he said.
Click here to read more from Alejandro Benes on Prop. 86.
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