Not just candidates but issues are on many state ballots today. Efforts to ban same-sex marriage in California and abortion in South Dakota have gotten most of the attention. But in several states the issue will be one or another form of gambling.
Fifty years ago, not a single state owned and operated a lottery. Today 42 do, along with the District of Columbia, and Arkansas is deciding whether to become the 43rd. As has become the fashion when southern states create lotteries, the proposed Arkansas lottery would fund a new college scholarship program. Based on the experience of these other states, poor and working-class Arkansans will buy the lottery tickets that pay for the children of the middle- and upper-middle class to go to college.
As recently as the late 1970s, only one state authorized commercial casino gambling: Nevada. Today 13 do. Tomorrow that number may rise to 14, depending on how Ohioans vote on a proposal that would allow a casino to open between Columbus and Cincinnati. Unlike lotteries, when casinos get on the ballot, they usually lose.
Racetracks, which thrived in many states before lotteries and casinos came along, have been in steep decline ever since. Their preferred solution: Become racinos — that is, racetrack casinos — with a few races bearding thousands of slot machines. Today Maryland voters will decide whether to allow 15,000 slots to operate at the state’s five tracks. Massachusetts, on the other hand, is voting on a measure to ban greyhound racing, not so much on anti-gambling as on animal-rights grounds. Both measures seem likely to pass.
One of the most dramatic and sweeping changes in American life since the 1950s is that we have become, in law and in fact, a gambling nation, with governments reaping much of the profit from this transformation. You probably don’t remember this change being debated or discussed very much. That’s because, as today’s little-reported ballot measures indicate, the change took place state by state, below the national media’s radar.
