- State & Local
- California
- California Decides
His name isn’t on the November ballot—indeed, he last set foot in California in August, for a Republican fundraiser dinner at his golf course in Rancho Palo Verdes—yet Donald Trump remains an oversized part of the Golden State’s election-year conversation.
How so?
If you happen to be curious about California’s Proposition 45, which aims to speed up environmental reviews by amending the Golden State’s notorious CEQA statute, the initiative’s opponents want you to know that a vote for Proposition 45 is tantamount to a vote for America’s forty-fifth president: “The timing is no accident,” one "No on 45" ad reads.
“President Trump has spent the last two years rolling back the clean air and clean water protections Californians spent fifty years winning. Now oil and gas companies, for-profit utilities and data center developers are following his lead, spending tens of millions of dollars to weaken California’s own safeguards. Their motivation has more to do with their profits than Californians’ cost of living.”
Further up on the fourteen-initiative slate, opponents of Proposition 39—if approved, it would require California voters to provide identification when voting in person—are none too shy about playing their “Trump card.” Here’s the argument against the measure, as it appears in California’s Official Voter Information Guide:
VOTE NO. Donald Trump lies about elections and uses those lies to grab power.
STOP TRUMP’S POWER GRAB. Trump wants revenge on California—he has delayed LA wildfire relief, undone laws to keep our air and water clean, and constantly attacked our immigrant friends and neighbors. Now he wants to undo our freedoms and democracy with Prop. 39. Trump’s cronies want to rig California elections so they can seize and keep control of Congress and the White House. Trump will do whatever it takes to tear apart our right to vote, dodge accountability, and hold onto authoritarian power.
CALIFORNIANS WON’T FALL FOR IT. We have a chance to fight back and stop Trump by voting NO on Prop. 39. Don’t let California become the next state where politicians pick which voters count.
WASTES HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF DOLLARS. Trump and his accomplices want California to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to chase their election lies and conspiracy theories. Californians are struggling, and Trump wants YOU to pay for his conspiracies.
If that’s not enough Trump-hating for the wavering Golden State voter, there’s also an anti-39 television ad that begins with these ominous words: “Donald Trump is coming for California.” The ad then turns to former state attorney general Xavier Becerra, currently favored to be California’s next governor, bragging about taking the Trump administration to court 122 times (the fact that Becerra is speaking to events mostly from the previous decade, as opposed to forward-looking ideas, speaks volumes about his policy-light campaign).
Elsewhere on California’s ballot, the presidential surname shows up in the debate over Proposition 40, a proposed one-time 5 percent tax on California’s billionaires, with the windfall going to state health care spending. The measure’s proponents contend: “Vote YES on 40 to tax billionaires. Trump slashed health care funding to pay for billionaire tax breaks, eliminating coverage for over a million Californians and doubling health insurance premiums for millions more. It’s time to make billionaires pay their fair share and stop sticking the middle class with the bill.”
And while Trump isn’t named directly, it’s clear that the backers of Proposition 38, which seeks an $8.4 billion bond for immunotherapy research, also want voters to think about East Coast menaces. Thus the reference to “massive federal funding cuts” in the voter guide.
However, there’s one instance of Trump’s name being invoked when he has nothing to do with an issue before California voters. That’s Proposition 3, which seeks to make permanent a “temporary” tax increase for high-end California earners that otherwise expires in 2031.
Trump’s relationship to Proposition 3? A television ad that starts with a veteran Orange County teacher’s claim: “Donald Trump does not care about our students. But I do.”
The question is: why did Proposition 3’s backers see the need to take a swipe at Trump when polls show the measure comfortably ahead?
Besides, it’s not as if the topic is a new one for voters—for the third time in less than fifteen years, the tax increase is being offered to California as a means of getting the wealthiest earners to kick in for public education (higher tax rates applying to the top 2 percent of California taxpayers—income over $371,000 for single filers or $742,000 for joint filers).
A little history on the “temporary” tax hike: back in 2011, the all-powerful California Teachers Association organized a protest-centric “State of Emergency” week and a call for higher taxes devoted to education spending (under California law, Proposition 98 requires roughly 40 percent of the state’s general fund to be dedicated to education spending).
A year later, then-governor Jerry Brown championed Proposition 30, which increased California’s state sales tax from 7.25 percent to 7.50 percent and created four new tax brackets for high-end earners. The governor also offered a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down: the tax increase would last for just four years, which is one reason why the measure earned 55 percent (also helping: a good year for Democrats in California, with voters giving the party its first simultaneous legislative supermajorities since 1933).
Four years later, Brown stayed true to his word and said he opposed extending the “temporary” tax increase for an additional twelve years in the form of 2016’s Proposition 55—Brown reportedly troubled by the notion that none of the measure’s tax revenue could be diverted into the state’s rainy-day fund for general state spending.
However, the governor didn’t take that policy beef to the campaign trail while the tax increase was in the process of winning bigger than it did in 2012. That’s because undoing the “temporary” increase would have meant parting ways with an annual $6 billion in revenue—extra revenue that, in the years since, helped to fuel an explosion in state spending.
Fourteen years after Golden State voters first signed off on a “temporary” tax increase to paper over a budget deficit in 2012, two things hold true: California’s population has grown less than 4 percent (from 37.9 million in 2012 to 39.3 million at present); and the state budget has soared over the same time from $142 billion to nearly $352 billion at present, an increase of almost 150 percent.
Unfortunately for California, that kind of spending spree only is sustainable as long as two things that happened in the past year continue in budget cycles ahead: a vibrant tech sector showering Sacramento with surprise windfalls (the state’s general fund tax revenue was up an extra $16.5 billion, thanks in large part to California’s AI sector); and, second, lawmakers’ willingness to rely on taxation rather than slowing the rate of spending to keep the books nominally balanced (California’s current budget including an extension of a sales tax on prewritten computer software and a higher tax rate on commercial health care providers).
Such determination to keep spending on a steady northward course comes at a cost: an unwillingness on the part of address a structural deficit that will be passed on to the next governor. All of which means that Becerra, assuming he becomes California’s forty-first governor, might want to take a page from Newsom’s playbook and send a “burner” phone to the heads of Anthropic and OpenAI—should those two companies and other California-based AI pioneers offer initial public offerings in the months and years ahead, producing more potential windfalls for Sacramento.
And if those IPOs don’t materialize and lawmakers are forced to scrounge for other forms of revenue?
Rest assured, it will come from taxes either new or extended.
And, somehow, it will be Trump’s fault.
