State politics and ballot measures

A month after Charles Munger Jr. wrote his first $100,000 check to a political campaign, he got a taste of the chronic rejection familiar to California’s big Republican donors: The 2005 ballot measure he backed lost by a landslide.

The statewide initiative on Tuesday’s ballot to reduce penalties for illicit drug use and petty theft is part of a multimillion-dollar campaign to revise sentencing laws in California and across the nation.

Twenty years ago, one of the first callers to Jerry Brown’s radio show, “We the People,” asked whether campaign money had influenced him as governor in the 1970s and ‘80s.

With Democratic Gov.