ANN ARBOR, Mich., Oct. 25 — Three years after the Supreme Court heard Jennifer Gratz’s challenge to the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policy, she is still fighting racial preferences, this time in a Michigan ballot initiative.
“We have a horrible history when it comes to race in this country,” said Ms. Gratz, 29, a white applicant who was wait-listed 11 years ago at the state’s flagship campus here. “But that doesn’t make it right to give preference to the son of a black doctor at the expense of a poor student whose parents didn’t go to college.”
The ballot initiative, Proposition 2, which would amend Michigan’s Constitution to bar public institutions from considering race or sex in public education, employment or contracting, has drawn wide opposition from the state’s civic establishment, including business and labor, the Democratic governor and her Republican challenger. But polls show voters are split, with significant numbers undecided or refusing to say where they stand.
Passage would probably reinvigorate challenges to a variety of affirmative action programs in other states. In California, where a similar proposition passed in 1996, the number of black students at the elite public universities has dropped. This fall, 96 of 4,800 freshmen at the University of California, Los Angeles — 2 percent — are black, a 30-year low.
For the University of Michigan, the proposition would require broader changes than the Supreme Court did; it ruled in Ms. Gratz’s case and a companion case that while the consideration of race as part of the law school’s admissions policy was constitutional, a formula giving extra points to minority undergraduate applicants was not.
The president of the university, Mary Sue Coleman, an opponent of the proposition, said its reach could extend into K to 12 education.
“It would make it illegal to have our program targeting girls in junior high school, and having them come to campus to learn about science and engineering,” Ms. Coleman said. “I’m a woman scientist, and I know how fragile our gains are.”
Such arguments have resonance in Ann Arbor, where the Democratic headquarters is doing a brisk business in “No on 2” yard signs.
“We need to keep affirmative action because it’s still not a level playing field for women or minorities,” said Gena Morris, who is black, an event planner who volunteers at Democratic headquarters.
Susan Greenberg, a widow whose husband was a University of Michigan professor, took home a yard sign recently, saying, “It’s probably the most important thing on the ballot.”
Just 20 miles north of the liberal university enclave, in Brighton, there is less familiarity with the proposition but more opposition to affirmative action.
“I don’t know a lot about Proposition 2, but I do know a neighbor kid, a good kid, a local kid with a 3.7-3.8 average, who didn’t get into the university and he should have,” said Vicki Smith, who is white, shopping one afternoon at Kohls department store. “I do think there’s something wrong with their admissions.”
Pollsters, in fact, say the Nov. 7 results may well turn on whether the measure is seen primarily as a race issue.
“If voters think about it as being about race, black and white, support goes up,” said Ed Sarpolus, vice president of EPIC-MRA, a polling firm in Lansing. “So the opponents are trying to show that it’s not just race, that it would hurt women, hurt Michigan’s economy, and they’re having some success with that.”
Though most of the debate on the proposition has been about race and college admissions — four out of five Michigan residents are white — the ballot initiative is also playing out against the state’s somber economic picture of high unemployment, high migration of young people and a wrenching transition away from manufacturing.
Opposition to Proposition 2 is strongest in majority-black Detroit and a few liberal strongholds like Ann Arbor. Like California’s Proposition 209, which passed in 1996, Proposition 2 has been backed by Ward Connerly, a wealthy black Republican who is a former University of California regent. If Mr. Connerly is successful in Michigan, and maybe even if he is not, he is likely to carry the fight to other states.
“When my toes turn up, that’s when I’ll stop fighting this,” said Mr. Connerly, who has provided nearly $500,000 for the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, the group Ms. Gratz leads. “As John F. Kennedy said,” he continued, “race has no place in public life.”
As of Oct. 20, the group had raised $1.4 million and spent $782,000.
Ms. Gratz, who grew up in a working-class suburb of Detroit, graduated among the top 15 in a high school class of about 300. But she only made the wait list for the Ann Arbor campus of the University of Michigan and never returned the postcard that would have kept her on the list for available spaces.
She graduated from the University of Michigan-Dearborn with a math degree and became a product manager at a technology company. She also pursued the suit against the university. She called Mr. Connerly soon after the Supreme Court ruled on her case, and they began working on the Michigan proposition. It has been her full-time job for three years.
Opposition to the measure is led by One United Michigan, an unusually broad coalition that includes Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm, a Democrat, and her Republican challenger, Dick DeVos, as well as unions, churches, businesses and higher education and civil rights groups. It has raised and spent $3.3 million.
“We have the A.C.L.U. sitting with the Michigan Catholic Conference on the steering committee, which is something you don’t see very often, “ said David Waymire, a coalition spokesman. “There isn’t a big Michigan voice on the other side. But it’s tough. Two years ago, the initial polling found more than two-thirds supported the proposition. The miracle is that we’ve gotten it into a winnable range.”
Coalition members said Proposition 2 would hamper employers’ efforts to diversify their work forces. They said it would also force some local governments to eliminate outreach and set-aside programs for minority contractors and would diminish the already-meager representation of black and Hispanic students at the flagship university here.
“It would be like slamming a door on progress,” Ms. Coleman said. “I will do everything that’s legal to help us attract minority students. But it’s already having a chilling effect.”
This year, the freshman class at the Ann Arbor campus has 330 blacks, or 6.4 percent, down from the high of 499 in 2001, and from 350 in the year after the Supreme Court case, when a new admissions process was adopted. Over all, blacks make up 7.2 percent of the undergraduates. But there are other ways to look at the numbers.
The Center for Equal Opportunity in Virginia, which supports the proposition, released an analysis of University of Michigan data finding that black applicants who were accepted by the university had lower grades and SAT scores than white applicants who were admitted. The median SAT for black students who were admitted was 1160 in 2005, it said, compared with 1350 for whites.
The center said the university now weighed race and ethnicity even more heavily than before the Supreme Court ruling.
The university disagrees. “Their analysis is flat-out wrong and carefully calculated to achieve a political outcome,” said Julie Peterson, a university spokeswoman.
She said that the center overlooked factors added to the admissions process after the ruling, like recommendations, essays and extracurricular activities, and that the data on which the center based its conclusions did not include all applicants.
Ms. Peterson and others at the university emphasized that because there were so many white applicants and so few blacks, an end to affirmative action would not substantially increase white students’ odds of admission. In their book, “The Shape of the River,” Derek C. Bok and William G. Bowen estimated that if selective universities had race-blind admissions, the probability of white students’ admission would rise only slightly — to 26.5 percent from 25 percent — while black students’ admissions would decline by half.
Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights said the proposition would help determine the future of affirmative action.
“Michigan is ground zero in the national debate on the meaning of equal opportunity,” Mr. Henderson said. “It’s really important that we stop this, before Ward Connerly takes the battle to other states.”
But in many quarters here, public support remained strong, which Ms. Gratz said indicated just how much Michigan’s power brokers were out of touch with voters.
“The entire elite establishment is all lined up on the other side of this issue,” Ms. Gratz said, “but the mainstream, normal, everyday people who go to work every day think their husbands, their wives, their kids, should be treated equally by our government, and should not be judged on race or sex.”