How California Voters Could Surprise the Machine

With elections across the U.S. set for next week, the focus is on close races that will determine which party controls the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, along with who will become the next governor in 36 states. With so much at stake, it is understandable that election outcomes in California are not getting much spotlight. After all, elections aren’t close anymore in California.

Or are they?

While California’s voters still overwhelmingly support machine politicians who will perpetuate a one-party state, those preferences obscure what could be the beginnings of a realignment. Because while entrenched politicians can hide behind rhetoric that stigmatizes the opposition party, ballot initiatives are harder to sell merely based on partisanship. And right now, in California, the outcomes of several state ballot initiatives carry consequences with national impact.

The obvious example of this is Prop. 40, the wealth tax. On the surface, this tax sets a horrible precedent by imposing a “one-time” tax on the accumulated wealth of any California resident with a net worth of $1 billion or more. But the fine print is even more ominous. The measure grants the state legislature power to make substantial amendments to Prop. 40 via a two-thirds vote if the amendment is “consistent with and furthers the Act’s purposes.”

This fine print means that Prop. 40 empowers the California state legislature to potentially lower the taxable wealth threshold below $1 billion, to impose the wealth tax more than just once, and to extend assessments to real estate.

Notwithstanding the legal battles, in state courts that consistently favor the agenda of the one-party state, a two-thirds vote of the state legislature is a fait accompli. The Party that put Prop. 40 on the ballot currently holds 80 percent of the seats in the state senate and the state assembly.

All of this, the explicit provisions and the built-in avenues for enhancements, has provoked powerful opposition. For decades, California has been a state with world-leading industry and innovation in spite of a state government utterly hostile to private business. And for decades, businesses either put up with the harassment or vacated to more business-friendly states. But this time, they’re putting up a fight.

As noted in Ballotpedia, in California, “Two measures—Proposition 41, the Prohibit Excluding New State Taxes from Spending Limit and Require Special Tax Audits Initiative and Proposition 42, the Prohibit New Taxes on Retirement Holdings, Personal Assets, and Savings Initiative—are also on the November 3 ballot in California and contain competing measure provisions that would nullify Proposition 40 if all the measures are approved, but Propositions 41 and 42 receive more votes than Proposition 40.”

And then there is Prop. 43, a citizen initiative championed by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, the organization that was founded during the state’s 1978 tax revolt. In that year, beleaguered voters approved the legendary Prop. 13. Approved by a 65–35 percent margin, it has given California one of the lowest property tax rates in the U.S., and it remains one of the only reasons many small businesses and retired homeowners still survive.

For nearly 50 years, Prop. 13 has been attacked by the insatiable tax-and-spend progressives running California. Prop. 43, if approved by voters, will restore the original provisions of Prop. 13, including the requirement for a two-thirds vote on local special tax initiatives.

Altogether, these four ballot initiatives are transformative. If the wealth tax is approved by voters and gets more votes than the initiatives that opponents have placed on the ballot to nullify it, and if Prop. 43 cannot gain a majority, California’s spendthrift politicians will not be forced to confront the spiraling deficits they’ve created. But if the opposite occurs, everything is going to change. State and local governments will be forced to live on the tax revenue they currently collect. It ought to be plenty. The state’s general fund has doubled in the past ten years, while the population has stagnated. Meanwhile, despite all this spending, nothing is better. Everything is worse. Yet spending soars. But if California’s voters say “no more,” the consequences will reverberate from coast to coast.

There’s reason for hope. California’s voters may still be conditioned to vote for one-party machine candidates based on Pavlovian triggers such as “Trump” or “climate,” but increasing numbers of them aren’t letting those magic words impair their ability to see how rising taxes are not correlating to an improving quality of life.

In June 2026, there were 92 local ballot propositions presented to primary voters, and only 53 of them passed. This may still seem like a high number, but historically, 70 percent of these perennial asks by local governments for more money have been approved by California voters. This recent decline is more than a rounding error, and a look at what measures failed offers additional evidence that Californians could be on the verge of another taxpayer revolt.

For example, San Francisco Measure D was pushed by labor unions to raise taxes on “overpaid CEOs.” It failed 54–46 percent. Oakland Measure E to raise the parcel tax for “public safety programs and improvements” also failed, 54–46 percent. And while Los Angeles County Measure ER to impose a 0.5 percent sales tax for “local health departments and services” narrowly passed 50.61–49.39 percent, it was a squeaker, and if Prop. 43 passes on November 3, a simple majority will no longer be enough.

“Overpaid CEOs.” “Public safety.” “Health services.” Absent actual results pursuant to the campaigns that relied on them, these buzzwords no longer have the power they once had, even in deep progressive California. The trend appears to be rolling into November 3. A new regional tax proposal, a sales tax increase set to extract nearly a billion dollars a year from San Francisco Bay Area taxpayers to bail out a mass transit system that is grossly mismanaged, is behind in the polls. And the precedent-setting billionaire tax appears short of majority support so far, in a race observers deem a toss-up.

If Californians reject more taxes, their state and local governments will be forced to set priorities that they’ve avoided thus far. They will be forced to govern with a better sense of their own limits and a firmer grip on reality. If, on the other hand, Californians fulfill their stereotype and continue to empower the one-party state and the perpetual tax increases their governing model cannot live without, it will inspire and catalyze the tax-and-spend movement in other states.

Perhaps not in advance, but definitely in the aftermath, the nation will watch and be affected by what happens in California on November 3.

Maybe, just maybe, California’s voters will surprise the skeptics.

This article originally appeared in American Greatness.

Edward Ring is the director of water and energy policy for the California Policy Center, which he co-founded in 2013. Ring is the author of several books, including The Abundance Choice – Our Fight for More Water in California (2022), and The Analyst’s Cookbook: Making the Case for Abundance Using Numbers (2026).