Between May 2018, when the Supreme Court overturned the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, and November 2020, voters in six states legalized sports betting. Against that backdrop, commercial operators announced in 2021 that they would run initiative campaigns to legalize sports wagering in Florida and California.
The Florida attempt didn’t even get on the ballot. And if current polling is on point, it appears that the California effort, backed by Bally’s, BetMGM, DraftKings, FanDuel, Fanatics, PENN Entertainment, and WynnBet, won’t come near the simple majority needed to pass.
Prior to 2021, four out of six proposals that voters weighed in on were put on the ballot by lawmakers. In most states, constitutional amendments can be offered either by the state legislature or by citizens backing an idea. In Colorado, Louisiana, Maryland, and South Dakota, state legislators sent the question of legal wagering to the ballot. And in all but one case, a simply worded question passed easily. Only in Colorado, where anything involving a tax has to go to voters, did stakeholders sweat on election day.
“Voters can be finicky animals,” Brendan Bussmann of gaming consultancy B Global said. “Regardless of the pathway to the ballot, you better be up in the lower 60s to survive the potential death of a thousand cuts that these issue-based campaigns tend to endure. See Colorado as an example where individuals took that race for granted and squeaked it out by 12,000 votes.”