Since November 2006, when Ward Connerly scored his first state ballot initiative victory against affirmative action in eight years with a lopsided 58-42 percent win in Michigan, speculation has been rife over where he and his wealthy backers would next turn their attention.

In a speech to the Heritage Foundation in March, Connerly declared his intention to expand on the Michigan win by organizing a multi-state “Super Tuesday for Equal Treatment,” calling it “the most high stakes effort that we will ever engage in.”

At the Heritage briefing, Connerly said he would be choosing five states to target from a list of nine, but subsequently cut the number to four. He may have run into difficulty finding the resources and well-connected in-state supporters needed to sustain a coordinated campaign across such a wide field.

In late April, at a high profile event in Denver, Connerly finally declared his intention to target Colorado, Missouri, Oklahoma and Arizona with simultaneous initiatives on November 4, 2008. Campaign announcements in the other three states followed. If passed by the voters, these referenda, using identical ballot language, would outlaw state-level affirmative action policies on race and gender in public education, contracting and employment.

The Supreme Court: A “Speed Bump”

Connerly has sought to present his initiative as a grassroots effort, a mischaracterization repeated by the Christian Science Monitor. But this is no grassroots movement. The main supporters of his “Super Tuesday” campaign come from the same cozy circle of well-funded conservative political operatives who have been backing the national assault on diversity policies since the early 1990s. In his Heritage talk, Connerly referred to them as “our own vast right wing conspiracy.”

Connerly told his audience that he has formed a twelve member “working group” to “fashion a national campaign” to overturn the “diversity rationale” that the Supreme Court applied in upholding affirmative action at the University of Michigan. Chastising his colleagues for taking too timid an approach to overturning Grutter, Connerly has declared that “a negative court decision should be regarded as merely a speed bump.”

The working group for “Super Tuesday,” which is being run under the umbrella of Connerly’s American Civil Rights Coalition, includes, among others, Linda Chavez and Roger Clegg of the Bradley foundation-funded Center for Equal Opportunity. Clegg has been working for several years on a project to uproot state legislation and regulations that attempt to secure diversity in education, contracting and employment. Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and National Labor Relations Board, was also named by Connerly as being part of the group; as was Manuel Klausner, co-author of California’s Prop 209 and immediate past chair of the Federalist Society’s Free Speech and Election Law Practice Group.

Other members include Terry Pell of the Center for Individual Rights, also funded by Bradley, which litigated the University of Michigan cases for lead plaintiff Jennifer Gratz (now director of state and local initiatives for Connerly); and John Carlson, the Seattle talk radio host who spearheaded I-200, the 1998 initiative banning affirmative action in Washington State.

Abigail Thernstrom, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, is also in the working group. Thernstrom has been waging academic warfare against diversity policies and serves on the boards of both the Center for Equal Opportunity and Clint Bolick’s Institute for Justice.

Battleground States

In three of the four states targeted by Connerly, leading members of the anti-civil rights infrastructure established over the past two decades by the Right’s major foundations form the core of his support.

Linda Chavez is the honorary co-chair of the Colorado initiative, along with Valery Pech Orr, a co-plaintiff in the landmark Adarand case, which challenged the constitutionality of affirmative action in government contracting. Both are veteran opponents of government-sanctioned diversity programs. Connerly’s effort in Colorado has also been backed by Jessica Peck Corry of the Koch-funded Independence Institute in Golden, Colorado.

The Independence Institute prepared the ground for Connerly’s assault on affirmative action policies in Colorado by publishing an attack on the University of Colorado’s diversity administration in January 2007, of which Peck Corry was the lead author. Anti-immigration presidential candidate Tom Tancredo served as the institute’s president for five years, and Jeffrey Coors of the Castle Rock Foundation, which supports the Independence Institute, serves on its board.

Legislative initiatives to ban affirmative action have been repeatedly turned back in Colorado for a decade. It remains to be seen whether the shift to a ballot initiative strategy will succeed.

In Arizona, the picture is similar. Anti-affirmative action legislation was turned back in the late 1990s, and a state referendum failed in 1998. Clint Bolick, who played a key role in building the assault on affirmative action in the 1990s from his perch at the Institute for Justice, which he co-founded, is legal advisor to the new Arizona Civil Rights Initiative. Connerly (2005), Bolick (2006) and Thernstrom (2007) have each received $250,000 in Bradley Foundation prizes for service to the right wing infrastructure.

Bolick recently departed as president of the Alliance for School Choice, a school privatization think tank, to start the Goldwater Center for Constitutional Litigation at the Koch-funded Goldwater Institute in Phoenix.

Revising generations of conservative legal theory, Bolick has just published a book advocating judicial activism. To say the least, his flip-flop raises the question of whether the Right’s boisterous advocacy of judicial restraint and states’ rights over the past generation owed more to the fact that they didn’t control the courts and couldn’t get the outcomes they liked than to any principled adherence to the concept of strict constructionism.

The outcome of the Seattle and Louisville school integration cases, which will be decided shortly, may indicate how far the present Supreme Court intends to go down this activist path.

In Arizona, Connerly and Bolick have teamed up with Andrew P. Thomas, the extreme right wing Maricopa County Attorney, to fight for a ballot initiative ending affirmative action. Since taking office in 2005, Thomas has attracted criticism not only from the progressive and mainline legal establishments, but even from Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has gained a reputation as one of the most right wing figures in law enforcement in the U.S.

Arpaio, among many others, has criticized Thomas for refusing to prosecute a vigilante who allegedly pulled a gun on a group of what he believed to be undocumented immigrants. Thomas has made national headlines for making Maricopa the leading county government for seeking the death penalty.

One of the complications Connerly faces in Arizona is that Thomas seems to want to devise ballot initiative language that would terminate a system of separate courts and programs for criminal defendants from different cultural backgrounds. Whether this mixing of anti-immigrant and anti-affirmative action politics will prove too tricky for Connerly to manage remains to be seen.

Nevertheless, Connerly has moved aggressively to bring together the two issues. On June 8, coinciding with a critical vote on comprehensive immigration reform legislation in the U.S. Senate, Connerly published a full page open letter in the Washington Times demanding that immigrants to the U.S. be denied access to affirmative action and diversity policies. The advertisement was signed by twenty-six opponents of affirmative action and racial justice policies, including right wing strategist Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform. Norquist, Bolick and Thomas Rhodes, co-chair of Connerly’s American Civil Rights Institute and president of National Review, were among the key founders and advisers of ACRI when it was created in 1997.

Andrew Thomas also signed the ad, along with the executive director of the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative, Max McPhail, who is the former communications director of Connerly’s Michigan effort and former state chair of Michigan Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). The Michigan State University chapter of Young Americans for Freedom was listed as a hate group in 2006 by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In Missouri, Connerly is working with John Uhlmann, the wealthy St. Louis businessman who has contributed substantial funding to his other ballot initiatives. Uhlmann is the honorary chair of the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative. Its executive director is Tim Asher, a former director of admissions at North Central Missouri College who opposed the community college’s diversity scholarship program. Both Asher and Uhlmann signed the open letter on immigration and affirmative action, with Uhlmann identified as being with the American Civil Rights Foundation, Connerly’s California-based legal advocacy arm.

Legislation banning affirmative action for firefighters and law enforcement personnel was enacted in 1999, so Connerly and Uhlmann seem to think Missouri is fertile ground for a referendum. Connerly told the media that the petition drive to get the initiative on the Oklahoma ballot would begin in July or August. He also seems to be still holding out hope for initiatives in South Dakota and in Nebraska.

The coordinator of Connerly’s initiative in Oklahoma, which seems to be the weakest operation of the four, is Ryan Steusloff, political director of Wilson Research Strategies, a conservative consulting firm based in Oklahoma and DC. Steusloff is a former Michigan state legislative staffer and University of Michigan graduate. Doug Tietz, the campaign manager for Connerly’s Michigan ballot initiative, signed the open letter on behalf of the Nebraska and Oklahoma Civil Rights Initiatives. Tietz, a graduate of Morton Blackwell’s Youth Leadership School and former chairman of the Michigan chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, is now secretary of the national board of YAF.

A Strategic Response?

Thus far, the response to the challenge posed by Connerly’s “Super Tuesday” initiative has been somewhat tentative. He certainly has his work cut out for him coordinating efforts to adopt the same proposal language in four very different swing states, meet the inevitable legal challenges to whatever language is proposed, and secure financing for the extensive signature-getting efforts necessary to place these initiatives on the ballot. Connerly’s record in Michigan on all of these counts was weak.

That said, in light of the “thumping” that supporters of affirmative action took in Michigan, some careful thinking is in order about what an effective strategy to interdict Connerly’s efforts might look like.

This is not the place to engage in a detailed analysis of what happened in Michigan (though the right wing is looking at the results precinct by precinct for patterns), but it’s clear that some of the more optimistic predictions of success were misplaced or based on inadequate polling. It’s widely recognized that many white poll respondents are reluctant to tell the truth about how they will behave in the voting booth on issues involving race.

To avoid such surprises in the “Super Tuesday” states, well organized and streamlined efforts to develop effective polling, issue-linkage, media and electoral strategies should begin as early as possible, and be rooted as closely as possible in community-based multi-issue progressive organizations and movements.

One thing that the Prop 54 battle in California showed was that if all of the stakeholders are involved, Connerly and his wealthy backers can be defeated. These efforts should be undertaken at the ballot language-challenging stage, not just in the run-up to the elections themselves. Finding the necessary funding early enough is never easy, of course, especially in a presidential year.

Messaging will also be important. To the extent that strategic planning has been done to defend diversity programs, policies, and regulations, it has tended to focus on institutional responses to the challenges of the Right or the limits set by the courts. One of the best examples of this type of careful thinking is the College Board’s strategy paper, From Federal Law to State Voter Initiatives, prepared with the assistance of Holland and Knight, on shaping a response to the post-Michigan Proposal 2 environment.

But these approaches to messaging, which tend to focus on developing a sound policy and jurisprudential case for affirmative action or diversity polices, may be more suited to defensive strategies in the courts and legal system than in highly charged referendum battles over banning remedies for race and gender discrimination.

This is particularly true in tough, rust belt states like Michigan or swing states like Colorado, Missouri or Arizona. Having found an effective way to polarize the debate along racial lines, Connerly will be surely playing it for all it’s worth over the next seventeen months. Hopefully, he will meet a focused strategic response.

Lee Cokorinos conducts political research on right-wing movements and organizations. He is the author of The Assault on Diversity: An Organized Challenge to Racial and Gender Justice (Rowman & Littlefield), and Target San Diego: The Right Wing Assault on Urban Democracy and Smart Government, and can be reached at rightnotes@earthlink.net.