California’s November ballot contains 14 measures, and voters have not faced this many decisions about tax policy at the ballot since 1994. Five of the propositions touch taxation directly — raising it, cutting it, banning whole categories of it or rewriting the rules for approving it — and that does not count the roughly 300 tax and bond measures appearing in local elections around the state, according to CalMatters. It is a lot. The state’s own polling experts think the lot-ness of it is itself one of the biggest forces in play. More on that shortly.
The headline fight is Proposition 40, which would make California the first state in the nation with a wealth tax: a one-time 5% levy on the net worth of every Californian worth at least $1 billion — all approximately 200 of them — excluding real estate and retirement accounts. This is not an income tax; it taxes the assessed, unrealized value of investments.”
Think of it like the property tax homeowners pay on their houses, per CalMatters’ explanation, except applied to stocks, bonds, business shares, Bugattis and the occasional machine gun collection. The Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates it could raise tens of billions of dollars, almost all earmarked for public health insurance programs bracing for dramatic federal cuts — assuming it passes and survives the blizzard of inevitable legal challenges.
The billionaires are not relying solely on the usual channel — literally hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign spending, a cause to which Sergey Brin alone has reportedly committed $102 million. They also put two countermeasures on the ballot. Prop. 41 would ban taxes structured to circumvent a 1970s state spending limit, which Prop. 40 is written to do; Prop. 42 would ban new taxes on financial assets, private businesses and most other forms of wealth outright. Here is the elegant part: if the wealth tax and either countermeasure both pass, whichever gets more votes becomes law. So the wealth tax can lose even if a majority votes for it. “The black hole into which all political energy is going right now,” is how Jon Coupal of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association described the question.
Nor are Props. 41 and 42 mere no votes, notes Kayla Kitson of the California Budget & Policy Center. Prop. 41 would also require the state auditor to run a “pre-election” analysis of any program set to be funded by a future tax measure and recommend 10% cost cuts. Prop. 42 would bar any tax from applying retroactively before its approval — which, Kitson argues, could strip the state of a tool for stopping people and businesses from dodging a tax they know is coming. Opponents separately argue Prop. 40 is a Trojan horse for broader taxes, a claim legal experts have pushed back on.
Two more measures stand apart from the billionaire brawl. Prop. 3 would make permanent the boosted income-tax rate on the state’s top 2% of earners — individually earned income above $360,000 a year — first proposed by Jerry Brown as a temporary fix for education funding, renewed by voters in 2016, and worth between $5 billion and $16 billion annually, most of it for schools. The tax expires in 2030, and the California Teachers Association would rather not wait; if Prop. 3 fails, the union gets two more swings. Prop. 43 would raise the threshold for a very specific kind of tax — special taxes placed on local ballots by citizen signature drives, as opposed to elected officials — from a simple majority to two-thirds. Business and anti-tax groups have wanted some version of it since a 2017 state Supreme Court ruling went the other way; this year’s version passed the Legislature only after Democrats pared it down to apply to future taxes.
Now the polling, which is where confusion earns its_keep — which is where things get ominous for the yes campaigns. Since 2000, 57% of non-tax ballot measures have passed, compared with a mere third of tax propositions. “When voters aren’t sure how to proceed, staying with the status quo and letting someone else decide at a later date is a safe bet,” said Mark Baldassare, survey director at the Public Policy Institute of California. A recent PPIC poll found a narrow 52% majority of likely voters backing the wealth tax and 58% backing Prop. 3 — but support for propositions tends to sag as Election Day nears, five tax measures at once invite “tax fatigue,” and when PPIC asked Californians whether they preferred lower taxes with fewer services or higher taxes with more, 55% took the lower tax bill.
Then there is Proposition 5, which is not about taxes at all but about the machinery of political revenge. California recalls currently ask two questions: should the official go, and who should replace them — with the replacement needing only the most votes, not a majority. That is how, in 2003, a re-elected Gray Davis was ousted and Arnold Schwarzenegger won a 135-candidate free-for-all. Prop. 5, placed on the ballot by Democratic lawmakers in 2024 after the failed 2021 recall of Gavin Newsom, would drop the second question. Recalled legislators would be replaced in a special election the governor calls within about four months; a governor recalled in the first two years of a term would trigger a special election, while in the second two years the lieutenant governor would finish the term; recalled statewide officials would be replaced by gubernatorial appointment. The ousted official could run again in the special election.”
The measure’s author knows the terrain personally. Democrat Josh Newman was recalled in June 2018 — by close to 60% of voters — after casting a vote for a 12-cent gas-tax surcharge, having been singled out by Republican strategist Carl DeMaio as the “weak gazelle”: “We’ve identified that weak gazelle, the slowest gazelle, the one with the limp,” DeMaio said at the time. “And that’s Josh Newman, in Orange County.” Newman had won his seat by fewer than 2,500 votes; the recall, which collected more than 64,000 signatures, ended the Democrats’ Senate supermajority and installed Republican Ling Ling Chang. Newman won his seat back in 2020 and made recall reform a priority. “I didn’t do anything other than cast a tough vote,” he told CalMatters, noting that Hiram Johnson designed the recall in 1911 as “the precautionary measure by which a recalcitrant official can be removed.” DeMaio, for his part, stands by the strategy, argues Prop. 5 would leave communities unrepresented for months, and notes the 2021 Newsom recall cost about $200 million to administer — a cost that would roughly double with two separate elections. Sacramento State professor Kim Nalder suspects the real effect would be fewer recalls: “It’s relatively easy to get the signatures, and it causes a lot of chaos and costs a lot of extra money.”
Prop. 5 has not attracted a single dollar in support or opposition, and an early September PPIC poll had it at 35% yes to 59% no — though Nalder notes voters had not done their homework yet. Which is the theme of the whole ballot, really. Confused voters vote no, and this ballot is engineered to confuse. Billionaires whose combined campaign spend could fund a small city are counting on it; everyone else gets a voter guide the size of a novella and the consolation, as CalMatters’ Jon Coupal might put it, of knowing exactly where all the political energy went.