History
Hawaii’s territorial Democratic Party convention of 1907 passed a
resolution in favor of I&R, but until the 1950s the territorial government was
dominated by Republicans who opposed the initiative process. After the
Democrats gained power, however, most of them turned against I&R, and
it was not included in the state constitution when Hawaii became a state
in 1959. In the state’s 1978 constitutional convention, initiative advocates
attempted to pass an amendment enacting I&R, but they were narrowly
defeated.