The PUBLIC COMMENT 2026 California Voter Guide — Part 2

As a reminder, the first official event for my Build or Die book tour is scheduled for December 9, 7 p.m., at Clio’s Books in Oakland, California. I’ll be discussing the book with Natalie Foster, co-founder of the Economic Security Project and author of The Guarantee: Inside the Fight for America’s Next Economy. We’ll also be joined by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, one of California’s foremost housing champions.

If you’re based in the Bay Area, come by! Tickets are $10, but for $33.80 you get both a ticket and a copy of Build or Die. Book your seat here. And if you can’t make it, remember that the book is now available for preorder from Bookshop.org.

And now on to today’s subject.

In Part 1, I covered this year’s races for statewide office, all of which are fairly straightforward and offer a clear contrast between their respective candidates. Now, things are going to get more complicated; it’s time for us to wade through the thicket of propositions whose fates the voters are being asked to decide.

There are 14 measures to get through, covering everything from fixed-rate mortgages to immunotherapy research to voter ID. But there are a couple of themes here worth calling out. First, three of the ballot measures are what I call “neo-Jarvisian,” in reference to Howard Jarvis, the avatar of California’s late 1970s tax revolt. Propositions 41, 42, and 43 all seek to limit the government’s revenue-raising ability in one way or another.

Second, with one exception—Prop 43—I’m voting “yes” on all the measures that originated with the legislature. And with one other exception—Prop 3—I’m going to be voting against all of the ones that made it onto the ballot due to a signature-collection campaign. I didn’t plan it that way, but it makes a certain degree of sense; California’s state legislators, for all of their manifold flaws, are generally trying to make policy on behalf of their constituents. The ballot measures that bypass the legislative process, on the other hand, are more likely to be the product of well-funded campaigns by powerful interests who are trying to line their own pockets.

We start with a relatively easy one. Proposition 1 would authorize the state to issue a little over $11 billion in bonds for various housing-related activities, mainly the development, acquisition, and preservation of affordable housing. The analysis from the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO)—where I worked for about two years following grad school—finds that these bonds would subsidize up to 43,700 homes (and provide homebuying assistance to another 40,000 households). Not enough to dig the state out of its housing deficit by any means, but nonetheless a move in the right direction.

Mandatory disclosure: one of the legislative champions for this bond is Asm. Buffy Wicks, who, as I mentioned above, will be a guest at my book launch event.

How I’m voting: Yes

One of the things I learned while working at LAO is that budgeting for the state of California is an absolute mess. And one of the key reasons why it’s a mess has to do with revenue volatility: the state’s general fund is heavily reliant on progressive income taxes, which means that its fiscal health is, to a remarkable extent, downstream from the yearly earnings of its wealthiest residents. In a year when a few large tech companies IPO, the state gets a tax windfall; on the other hand, this system turns a bad or even middling year for Silicon Valley and Hollywood into everyone’s problem.

Under Gov. Jerry Brown, the state strengthened its rainy day fund to help smooth out some of the jaggedness and unpredictability that its tax regime introduces into the annual budget cycle. Proposition 2 would allocate more cash to the rainy day fund until it reaches 20 percent of total general fund taxes. (It would also tweak how the rainy day fund interacts with the state appropriations limit, but that’s probably too technical for this post.)

Ultimately, California needs to do a comprehensive overhaul of how it does budgeting, involving a series of amendments to the state constitution (including, ideally, scrapping the aforementioned state appropriations limit entirely). But until then, putting some more money aside for the lean years is a sensible idea.

How I’m voting: Yes

As much as I complain about California’s overreliance on progressive income taxes, I do think progressive income taxes are a good idea. The current tax rates for affluent Californians (for example, single filers making upwards of $371,000 per year) are set to expire in 2031; this proposition would make them permanent. LAO estimates that this would mean somewhere between $5 billion and $15 billion in annual tax revenue.

How I’m voting: Yes

Under current law, the state, counties and most cities (with the exception of those with a city charter) are barred from allocating public funds to political campaigns. Prop 4 would lift that prohibition, allowing the state, all counties, and the 74 percent of cities that don’t have a city charter to institute public campaign finance programs if they so choose.

As you might expect, I’m generally supportive of public financing for political campaigns as a way to mitigate the excessive influence that big money holds over our democratic process.

How I’m voting: Yes

California law makes it exceptionally easy—some might say far too easy—to force costly and time-consuming off-cycle recall elections. See for example the bizarre and pointless 2021 matchup between Gavin Newsom and right-wing talk radio personality Larry Elder, or the 2003 recall of Gray Davis that gave us The Governator. This ballot measure wouldn’t raise the bar for triggering a recall race, but it would fix another big problem with the current system: the two-question recall ballot.

Historically, recall elections have been meant to settle two questions simultaneously: First, should the incumbent politician be removed from office? Second, assuming they are removed from office, who should replace them? In other words, voters are being asked whether to fire powerful state officials without any indication of who would then fill in. If I vote to recall Gray Davis, then maybe I’m voting for Schwarzenegger to take his place. But then again, maybe I would vote for Davis to hold onto his seat if I knew Schwarzenegger was definitely the alternative. Either way, a “yes” vote on the first question always ends up being a dice roll.

Prop 5 would clean up some of the messiness inherent to recalls by separating the first and second questions. If the governor gets recalled, then the lieutenant governor takes over until the next statewide election. If any other official gets recalled, their seat remains vacant pending a special election or gubernatorial appointment. It may not be a perfect solution, but it at least makes it a little clearer what you’re voting for at each step in the process.

How I’m voting: Yes

This one would create a $25 billion bond issuance to fund supplemental fixed-rate mortgages for middle-class California homebuyers. A nice idea in theory, but I tend to be skeptical of homebuyer assistance programs; speaking as a member of a potentially qualifying household, I don’t think we’re the ones who really need subsidies. I’d rather the state focus on expanding the supply of for-sale housing (say, by making it easier to build condos), which will drive down the cost for households like mine without the need for a demand-side subsidy. Then the state can allocate its finite revenue from taxes and bond sales to the households that really need help—not those who would like to own their homes one day, but those who are struggling to find a safe and sustainable housing situation of any sort.

It’s unclear if Prop 37 would even help the households it targets. If the state continues to subsidize demand without spurring a commensurate growth in housing supply, then virtually all the benefit from Prop 37-style subsidies will be captured by sellers; because they’re selling a scarce good, they can name their own price, and they would probably respond to the passage of Prop 37 by naming a price that accounts for the fact that middle-class homebuyers can now afford to pay more.

This argument is probably familiar to readers who are embedded in housing policy debates. But in the interest of fairness, I should note a couple of features of Prop 37 that make it superior to the usual middle-class demand subsidy. The first is that Prop 37 may turn out to be revenue neutral; repayment on the bonds will come from beneficiaries’ mortgage payments, not state coffers. The second is that qualifying homebuyers can only use the Prop 37 mortgage on newly constructed homes. In theory, then, this is both a demand-side subsidy and a supply-side subsidy, because it will provide some guarantee of demand to developers who build new for-sale starter homes.

In theory. I’m skeptical Prop 37 would have an effect on supply because developers already benefit from the near certainty that any new for-sale housing they build will be greeted by a horde of interested purchasers. That’s why they’re able to set prices at such a high level. Lack of steady demand is not the binding constraint on housing production in California, not by a long shot.

To the extent that Prop 37 does create any incentive to build, though, I fear it will be creating an incentive to build more suburban sprawl. That’s where the regulatory conditions for new for-sale home construction are most favorable under California’s current land use system, and Prop 37 would do nothing to change that.

How I’m voting: No

This is another one that looks good at first glance and then a whole lot worse once you examine the details. The topline is that this would create an $8.4 billion bond issuance to support immunology and immunotherapy research. Sounds reasonable, especially given that the Trump administration has eliminated so much of the federal funding for medical research and development.

But why immunology and immunotherapy, specifically? What makes this area of medical research worthy of special consideration? Well, it turns out that the whole proposition is carefully worded to ensure that half of the $8.4 billion raised goes to a single, specific nonprofit called the California Institute for Immunology & Immunotherapy (CIII). Quite the coup for a research institute that doesn’t even have its research campus yet.

So why this nonprofit? Because Prop 38 is backed by the same people who are establishing the institute in the first place. For example, one of the institutional backers for Prop 38 is the Milken Institute, established by CIII co-founder Michael Milken, a former Wall Street financier who served time in the early 1990s for securities fraud and various related infractions. Trump pardoned him in 2020.

In other words, this whole thing smells like a racket—an attempt to pocket more than $4 billion in taxpayer money under false pretenses. A lot of rackets make it onto California’s ballot, but this has to be one of the most obscenely blatant examples I’ve ever seen.

How I’m voting: No

Voter ID laws are a form of voter suppression, ostensibly meant to solve the virtually nonexistent problem of non-citizen voter fraud. This is an easy one.

How I’m voting: No

This one is a little more challenging. In principle, I support confiscatory taxes on the uber-rich; if I could wave a magic wand, one of the first things I would use it for is taxing every billionaire into a humble centimillionaire. But I have misgivings about the design of this proposition, which I covered in the below post.

The tl;dr is that I have serious qualms about one-off tax levies, and the measure is designed in such a way that it may discourage investment in housing production. Further, I have my doubts about the state’s capacity to implement Prop 40 as written, and I think supporters are a little too quick to dismiss capital flight concerns. So I will reluctantly be voting no.

How I’m voting: No

Ugh, FINE. I guess we need to talk about the State Appropriation Limit again.

In 1979, the year after California passed the disastrous Prop 13, Paul Gann—Howard Jarvis’s partner in crime—spearheaded a successful effort to write what is alternately called the Gann Limit and the State Appropriation Limit. Henceforth, public spending would be capped at fiscal year 1978-79 levels, adjusted for inflation and population. There are some exceptions that allow the state to collect certain types of revenue and make certain types of expenditures that are not subject to the limit, but overall it acts as a pretty hard constraint on efforts to expand the size of the state government—for example, through new wealth taxes.

Prop 41 would make it illegal to exclude any new special taxes from the SAL calculations. It would also require regular audits for state programs that are funded with special taxes. Given that the SAL should not exist in the first place, I don’t think we should be trying to make it more binding than it already is.

How I’m voting: No

This is a straightforward attempt to nullify Prop 40. And while I’m no fan of Prop 40, I’m even less of a fan of efforts to impose a constitutional ban on any new wealth taxes at all.

How I’m voting: No

While this proposition was added to the ballot by the legislature, there’s an asterisk: the legislature only forwarded Prop 43 to the voters as part of a deal with the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association under which the association would pull an even more extreme measure. As such, this is another attempt to hamstring public revenue-raising efforts, this time by raising the threshold needed to pass local, citizen-initiated special tax measures from a majority of the voters to a supermajority.

How I’m voting: No

Two ballot measures left to go, and we are finally done with the neo-Jarvisian propositions. Now we’re on what I think of as this year’s dialysis measure.

Those of you who have voted in more than a couple of California’s statewide elections probably remember that ballot measures regarding dialysis clinic regulation tend to pop up with bizarre frequency. The real-world impact of these proposed regulations tends to be both inscrutable and beside the point. The real point is that their sponsor, SEIU-UHW (United Healthcare Workers West, also the main backer of this year’s Prop 40), wants to unionize the dialysis clinic industry and tries to use the threat of these ballot measures as leverage to extract voluntary recognition agreements from the state’s big dialysis providers.

The same thing appears to be happening this year with community health clinics. Prop 44, which is also backed by SEIU-UHW, would require that community health clinics spend no less than 90 percent of their annual revenue on “program services” aligned with their mission. What expenses fall under that umbrella would largely be left up to the discretion of the attorney general.

Whether this solves a real and serious problem is unclear, at least to me. The Yes on 44 website lists a few examples of what it classifies as egregious misspending by community health clinics; for example, one failed to break even on its big annual gala, and another suffered a data breach after spending $0 on IT services. If these are among the most damning cases that Yes on 44 can muster, it’s pretty thin gruel.

The real tell, though, is that Yes on 44 notes that “multiple community clinics have had to pay out millions of dollars to resolve allegations of violations of California labor law.” If Prop 44 caps the amount these clinics can spend on legal defense, then that gives a large amount of leverage to SEIU-UHW, which can bury clinics in lawsuits if they don’t voluntarily recognize the union as their workers’ sole bargaining agent.

For the record, I think it’s imperative that the United States work toward rebuilding the sort of private-sector union density that it enjoyed in the immediate postwar era. But I don’t care for these kinds of tactics, which would allow SEIU to “organize” clinics while making a minimal investment in actually organizing the people who work there. Prop 44 is also a great example of why California’s ballot measure system is so broken: rather than empowering ordinary citizens of the state, it has mostly turned into a battleground between various well-funded interests chasing their own parochial objectives.

How I’m voting: No

Speaking of which. On its face, Proposition 45 sounds like exactly the kind of thing I should be in favor of: it streamlines environmental review for various “essential” projects, most notably housing. Sounds great, right? As I briefly mentioned in Part 1, and discuss at further length in my forthcoming book, the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) has long been a significant obstacle to housing construction. Ironically, given its ostensible purpose, CEQA enforcement tends to most severely penalize attempts to build dense infill housing—exactly the type of housing that we most need to build if we are going to preserve undeveloped natural habitats and cut the state’s transportation pollution to zero.

Over the past couple of years, as CEQA’s real costs to environmental quality have become more obvious, the dam has finally broken on CEQA reform. In 2025, Newsom signed legislation that streamlines review for projects that will help the state meet its environmental goals and turns the state’s long-dormant CEQA exemption for infill housing into something of real significance.

Which brings us to Prop 45. The strength of the 2025 reforms is that they better align CEQA with its ostensible goal of environmental protection. There’s still more work to be done, but I think future reform efforts should be carried out with that same goal in mind: turning CEQA into a real environmental planning tool instead of a cudgel that NIMBYs can wield against climate-friendly projects. But that’s not what Prop 45 does.

Instead, Prop 45 applies its streamlining rules to all types of housing, including the environmentally ruinous suburban sprawl. Similarly, it applies to all types of transportation infrastructure (with the exception of high-speed rail): not just transit and active transportation projects, but also car infrastructure like highway expansions. Which makes sense once you learn that one of the proposition’s main backers is the California Building Industry Association, which mainly represents single-family sprawl developers. CEQA needs additional reforms, but Prop 45 would take those reforms in precisely the wrong direction.

How I’m voting: No