Yes. Michigan's Proposal 2, the "Money Out of Politics" initiative, passed overwhelmingly in Tuesday's election, with 81.14 percent of the vote. More than 4.3 million Michiganders voted on the measure and about 3.5 million of them voted yes. The Associated Press called it at 9:38 p.m. on election night, with less than 10 percent of the vote counted and "yes" already above 81 percent — one of the most one-sided results anywhere in the country this year.
The plain reality the voters were answering is easy to state. In Michigan, the companies that sell electricity and gas under state regulation — above all DTE Energy and Consumers Energy — could legally give campaign money to the governor, the attorney general, the lawmakers and the utility commissioners who set their rates and oversee them, and companies holding large government contracts could give to the officials who award those contracts. That gap between who decides and who pays is why people kept searching for the proposal results at all: the state's representatives had not closed it, so the question went around them, to the voters directly.
What the measure does is now written into the Michigan Campaign Finance Act. It bans campaign contributions from regulated electric and gas utilities, from companies holding more than $250,000 a year in state or local government contracts, and from people and organizations with substantial connections to them, to the state and local officials within whose jurisdiction they operate — and it widens the disclosure rules for political advertising. It does not touch federal elections: the same companies can still give in presidential and congressional races. The supporters who gathered the signatures to put it on the ballot, Michiganders for Money Out of Politics, claim the result proves there are limits to corporate power.
"We're the ones that make change. Our representatives failed to deliver on holding corrupt pay to play politics accountable, so we said enough. And tonight Michiganders delivered." — Christy McGillivray, executive director of Voters Not Politicians and co-chair of the Proposal 2 campaign, on election night
The common-sense principle the voters applied is just as plain: money given to the very official who sets your prices or signs your contract is not ordinary political speech — it looks like paying the referee, and 81 percent of Michigan decided it should stop. The same electorate made the opposite call on the night's other question, which puts the principle in sharper relief: Proposal 1, the once-every-16-years question asking whether to call a convention to rewrite Michigan's constitution, failed with 75.5 percent voting no. Michigan voters were not in a mood to change everything; they picked this one change, deliberately. It was also a change their legislature tried to pre-empt — House Republican leaders moved to pass a version of it as an ordinary statute, which would have been easier to amend or undo later, and Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks declined to take it up, leaving the decision where it landed, with the voters.
The consequence is that the fight has already moved from the ballot box to the courtroom, and this is the detail that decides whether the voters' verdict stands. Two federal lawsuits were filed within days. The Mackinac Center for Public Policy sued on election night in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan, arguing that Proposal 2's reporting and donor-disclosure rules violate the First Amendment. Then, on Thursday, DTE Energy and Consumers Energy sued to block the utility provisions from taking effect, arguing the ban singles them out while leaving unions and other industries free to contribute; their suit does not challenge the contractor provisions. The Citizens Research Council of Michigan had already warned that the contribution restrictions may be hard to sustain, because U.S. Supreme Court decisions treat political spending as protected speech — though the measure carries a severability clause, so if a court strikes one part, the rest remains in force. So the question that follows the landslide is a harder one: can an 81 percent verdict survive judges applying a very different test than the voters did?
For the volunteers who carried the petitions, election night was not close enough to need any of that analysis. Ken Whittaker of Michigan United, celebrating as the result came in, put it in five words: "Tonight, David beat Goliath."