Opponents have raised upward of $340m, out-fundraising the measure’s supporters nearly 10-1
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has led his party’s most powerful figures against Proposition 40, a one-time 5% tax on billionaire wealth that reaches the state’s voters on 3 November, even as a high-quality midsummer poll found rank-and-file California Democrats favor the measure by more than 4 to 1, according to a Guardian opinion column by Norman Solomon published 31 October. Silicon Valley billionaires have raised upward of $340 million to defeat the initiative, out-fundraising its supporters by nearly 10 to 1.
Nine-tenths of the revenue from Proposition 40 would go to health care for Californians in need. As the New York Times reported this month, “California stands to lose around $100 billion in federal Medicaid funding over the next five years, threatening healthcare coverage for millions of low-income residents, as well as the potential closure of hospitals and other facilities.” With so much at stake in human terms, Solomon wrote, refusal to back the measure runs counter to standard Democratic rhetoric about standing up to the ultra-wealthy on behalf of the disadvantaged.
Newsom’s near-certain successor as governor, Xavier Becerra, and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass have also lined up against the measure, Solomon wrote. Most other leading California Democrats have stayed out of the fight: Sens. Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff have taken no public position on Proposition 40, and neither have former Vice President Kamala Harris and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “Neither wants to alienate wealthy donors or their allies in labor by publicly opposing it,” the San Francisco Chronicle noted in mid-October. “But their silence on such a high-profile measure is giving cover to the billionaires” fighting the measure, the paper added.
The split runs through the party’s own organization. In early August, the California Democratic Party’s executive board — a body Solomon described as “hardly a bastion of class struggle” — voted to endorse Proposition 40. Newsom, undeterred, has gone all-out against the measure while also promoting a separate ballot initiative that would nullify any such tax in the state, Solomon wrote.
Opposition fundraising is dominated by Silicon Valley wealth. Nearly half of the money raised against Proposition 40 has come from Google co-founder Sergey Brin, according to the column, which reported that the measure’s foes have out-fundraised its supporters by nearly 10 to 1. With the initiative now facing what Solomon called an onslaught of attack ads, he warned it “might get buried under the avalanche of billionaire cash.” Regardless of the 3 November outcome, he argued, campaigning to tax the wealth of the country’s nearly 1,000 billionaires holds enormous potential nationwide.
Newsom has said he would support a federal tax on billionaires, though Solomon described the governor’s proposal as short on detail. Newsom has claimed that approval of Proposition 40 would drive many of California’s more than 200 billionaires out of the state, with disastrous results.
The journalist Harold Meyerson, cited by Solomon, disputed that account. “Proposed tax hikes on the rich invariably produce grim warnings of millionaire flight which then don’t eventuate,” Meyerson said. Citing a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, he said that even if the billionaires did leave, the revenue gain of roughly $100 billion from the wealth tax would not be offset by the lost income tax revenue from the departure of every one of those 200 billionaires “until 25 years had passed.” He added: “If just 50 of those 200 billionaires fled, it would take a full century.”
The fight also reaches into the party’s past. Newsom became governor in 2019, succeeding Jerry Brown at the end of Brown’s second eight-year stretch in the job. Solomon wrote that Brown, his unique style aside, has long been a kind of prototype for the state’s Democratic leadership now typified by Newsom. “The way you have to approach the political process is something like piloting a canoe,” Brown said in 1979, during his first stint as governor. “If you paddle a little bit on the left side, then you paddle a little bit on the right side, you keep going right down the middle,” he explained.
Brown has stayed out of the Proposition 40 battle. Asked by Solomon in late October whether he supports the measure, Brown replied by email: “I have not discussed the proposition. There is already a plethora of opinions on the measure.” Weeks earlier, in a BBC interview, Brown lamented: “The gains for those who succeed at the top are getting bigger and richer, and the sustenance at the bottom and the middle is getting less and less.” He called for a wealth tax, saying: “We obviously need a wealth tax. If Tesla wants to give Elon Musk a trillion dollars over 10 years, then the people have to take back 99% of it.” But he argued it could not be won at this point: it would not work in one state and, he said, probably not in one country. “So it would take an international agreement to tax the very wealthy, so that you can’t accumulate at the level that they are today,” he said.
In Solomon’s assessment, Brown and Newsom share a fondness for voicing lofty principles while kicking them far down the road, tacitly equating deference to corporate power with realism.
Amar Shergill, a Sacramento-based attorney and former chair of the state party’s Progressive Caucus, was matter-of-fact, Solomon wrote, about the alliance of big tech moguls with the state’s current and next governor. “When it comes to Newsom and Becerra opposing the billionaire tax,” Shergill said, “you need know only two things. First, Newsom needs billionaire money for his presidential campaign. Second, Becerra needs to pay back the billionaires that made him governor. The rest of the corporate Democrats in office are some version of these stories.”
Public support within California’s congressional delegation is scarce. Solomon wrote that a large majority of the delegation’s 45 Democrats richly deserve the corporate label, and the Proposition 40 campaign’s official website lists only two congressional endorsers in the state. One of them, Rep. Ro Khanna, has emerged as California’s most visible and vocal politician advocating for the measure. “It’s the most important ballot initiative in America and in the world,” Khanna said in a recent interview on MS Now. Looking ahead, he asked: “Are we going to continue to cater to a donor class that has hollowed out jobs, hollowed out the working class, and lost us two elections to Donald Trump?”
“This is a fight for the soul of the Democratic party,” Khanna told Solomon last weekend. “Will we be beholden to billionaire donors and offer platitudes without policy like Gavin Newsom, or will we reclaim our FDR courage and offer a bold vision for our nation’s future?” Solomon suggested that kind of rhetorical question could progressively reframe the race for the party’s 2028 presidential nomination.
Solomon, the director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy, argued that the stance of Newsom and other Democratic heavyweights places the party on the side of billionaires in what he called an ongoing class war, offering “a kinder, gentler oligarchy” as an alternative to what he called the far more corrupt Trumpist version. He called the billionaire tax proposal unprecedented but said the response from Democratic party elites is part of a pattern that has undermined capacities to build populist momentum against Republicans, let alone advance progressive agendas favored by voters. He wrote that the disconnect between party elites and their base discourages the turnout those leaders call for at every election, and said the clash between the state’s most prominent Democrats and the party’s grassroots on Proposition 40 is a bad sign but hardly an anomaly. Solomon observed that a semblance of party unity has taken hold with the midterm elections looming, even as he predicted clashes between corporate Democrats and progressives will soon begin to escalate. His latest book is The Blue Road to Trump Hell: How Corporate Democrats Paved the Way for Autocracy.
Solomon closed by recalling a speech President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave at Madison Square Garden 90 years ago — on the last day of October 1936 — in which, by his account, Roosevelt scorned the rightwing plutocrats of his era: “They are unanimous in their hate for me – and I welcome their hatred.” Leaders of today’s Democratic Party, Solomon wrote, have failed to earn such hatred.