Several campaigns opposing a November ballot measure that would place an additional tax on billionaire wealth have raised more than three-and-a-half times as much as the healthcare union backing it, setting up an expensive fight this fall over the initiative and the two countermeasures aimed at invalidating the tax.
It is expected to be the marquee contest among the 14 measures on California’s November ballot. But money has poured into others as well, including measures to shorten California Environmental Quality Act review, raise the approval threshold for some special taxes and require identification to vote.
While the advertising blitz in the lead-up to the November election has yet to begin, campaigns supporting and opposing the 14 measures on the ballot are gearing up, having raised roughly $265 million and spent $213 million as they prepare to sway voters in the coming months.
The latest totals, which were reported to the California Secretary of State’s Office last week, account for fundraising and spending Jan. 1 through June 30 — just five days after the deadline to qualify an initiative.
“These 14 measures, and really just a few measures driving that, this has the potential to set records for ballot measure campaign spending in U.S. history,” Sonoma State political science professor David McCuan said of the coming ballot fight.
It’s not unusual for the attention to be concentrated on a select few measures. In 2022, two separate initiatives dealing with sports betting drew $556 million in contributions, making it the most expensive ballot measure campaign in California history.
This year’s big-ticket item appears to be Proposition 40 — a one-time 5% levy on the state’s billionaires that was proposed by Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West — and the two countermeasures that seek to nullify the tax. Proposition 41 would require audits on ballot measures proposing special taxes and invalidate any taxes that don’t comply with state spending limits, while Proposition 42 would ban new taxes on personal property, including on retirements assets. The three initiatives account for more than half of the $213 million spent thus far.
McCuan said that the “most powerful money” tends to be what’s spent on the no side and that countermeasures like Props. 41 and 42 often are “designed to sink everything.”
In 2022, Propositions 26 and 27 both aimed to legalize sports-betting in the state but disagreed on how to implement it and how the revenue stemming from the new industry would be used. Attack ads flooded the race with both sides claiming that they were the initiative supported by California’s tribes. Both measures ultimately failed.
“When voters get confused, when they’re uncertain, when ads are run that talk about the unintended consequences of what was written in a ballot measure, then voters tend to just issue a blanket no,” he said.
Driving much of the spending against Proposition 40 is a group of Bay Area billionaires and tech executives who have poured $118 million into a newly formed organization called Building a Better California. Google co-founder Sergey Brin is its biggest donor, having contributed $82 million to the campaign war chest. The group has quickly spread its money around the first half of the year, giving $97.5 million to the yes campaigns of the countermeasures.
A spokesperson for Building a Better California said of its spending that “California is a big state, and we’re making sure we can reach voters about policies that will have a pivotal impact on the state’s future, including making the government more accountable, housing affordability and protecting California families from new taxes on their retirement savings.”
A spokesperson for the Yes on Prop. 40 campaign could not immediately be reached for comment. The campaign has raised $30 million.
Shaun Bowler, a professor of Political Science at University of California, Riverside, who studies ballot measures, said he expects to see “wall-to-wall ads even more than usual” this election cycle.
“I suspect, partly because of their links to the tech industry, we will see (ads) even more than usual on social media,” he said. “The algorithms will be working overtime this fall.”
After the billionaire tax and its two countermeasures, which have raised $139 million collectively, Proposition 37 attracted the next-highest total at $34 million. The measure would approve the sale of $25 billion in state bonds, giving residents a fixed-rate mortgage for up to 17% of the price to buy a newly built home, condo or townhome. More than half of the funding behind the measure comes through a loan from the California Association of Realtors. No committees have been formed to oppose the measure thus far.
Proposition 39, a measure that would require voter ID in California, saw the yes campaign, which placed the measure on the ballot via the signature-gathering process, raise $3.4 million, nearly 12 times more than the no side through June 30. The measure’s backers got additional help this week from Republican megadonor Richard Uihlein, who gave $6.5 million to the campaign.
The opposition to the measure has been slower to organize, but one new campaign against it that launched last month, with former Health Secretary Xavier Becerra, a Democrat now running for governor, and Democratic California state Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas serving as honorary co-chairs, announced it was starting with $2 million raised.
The billionaire group, Building a Better California, has also given $10 million to the campaign supporting Prop. 45, which seeks to amend the California Environmental Quality Act by setting a 365-day limit on environmental reviews for certain projects. The yes campaign has raised $18.5 million thus far, while the opposition has raised just north of $4 million.
While the early costs of the campaigns might give some voters “sticker shock,” Bowler said hundreds of millions of dollars “buys less than you think.”
“Communicating to each of the 20-odd million voters is an inherently expensive thing,” he said.
