The Billionaires’ Boy

Yesterday, the Prospect posted my colleague David Dayen’s completely justified savaging of California’s Democratic establishment, which is, in equal measure, both hegemonic and corrupt. Having spent my first half-century in the Golden State, and a dozen years of that stretch as the political editor of the L.A. Weekly, I’m compelled to chime in with my two cents.

The glaring anomaly of last week’s election was that while voters in the 49 other states were backing candidates who were excoriating billionaires and passing ballot measures hiking taxes on the rich, presumably liberal California was defeating a billionaires’ wealth tax whose only real-world impact would have been to provide funding for hospitals slated to close when the cuts in President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill kick in next year. The blame for this belongs, as David argued, to a political system in which money plays even more of a dominant role in the universe of ballot measures than it does in candidate races and lobbying elected officials. But that doesn’t mean that blame can’t be accurately showered on particular individuals and institutions, too.

The two individuals most culpable for the disgraceful defeat of Proposition 40 and the even more disgraceful enactment of Proposition 42 (which copies a Texas law that limits a host of progressive taxes) are its ostensible proponent, SEIU health care worker local leader Dave Regan, and its most prominent opponent, outgoing Gov. Gavin Newsom. Over the past decade, Regan had grown accustomed to placing, or threatening to place, measures on the ballot that would help some of the members of his local by targeting new laws or regulations on the rather obscure industries in which his members worked—in particular, the state’s chiropractors. He’d spend a good deal of his local’s money on the signature-gathering efforts to place these measures on the ballot, in the hope, often realized, that his target would feel compelled to reach a deal with him before the deadline to withdraw the measure rolled around. If no deal was reached, the local’s cupboard would be bare—depleted by the expense of the signature gathering—when it came to actually campaigning for the measure, but often as not, he could reach a deal before the deadline and yank it from voters’ bewildered consideration.

In the narrow confines of such wars of position against small-time industry, this plan often worked. But the wealth of California’s most hysterical billionaires exceeded that of, say, California’s chiropractic establishment by a factor of several gazillions. In total, those billionaires spent close to half a billion dollars to defeat the wealth tax, even as Regan’s campaign lacked the money to campaign for it in a way that was visible or audible to state voters.

That’s partly because, as he was accustomed to doing in his war with the chiropractors, Regan steered whatever funds would be forthcoming if Prop 40 passed to the hospitals that employed his members, with effectively nothing left over for anything or anyone else. No money to schools, to housing, to the myriad other causes that addressed Californians’ needs. So, the real sources of campaign money that should have been there for Prop 40—the state’s biggest unions: the California Teachers Association and all the other locals of SEIU—never gave the measure a dime.

But there was another factor besides Regan’s alienation of potential allies, and that was Gov. Newsom’s threats to potential allies to steer clear of the effort. One state labor leader has complained to me that as public-sector unions that get much, and sometimes most, of their funding from the state’s budget, both CTA and SEIU feared challenging Newsom. While the right regularly complains that public-sector unions have come to dominate state and local government, it’s often the case that state and local governmental officials dominate public-sector unions. That’s clearly what happened in California this year.

When I was editing the L.A. Weekly in the 1990s, I noted that in one election after another, those SEIU locals whose members worked for city and county government tended to endorse incumbents for fear of estranging them, while the SEIU local that represented private-sector workers—chiefly, the janitors who worked in L.A.’s high-rise office buildings—endorsed on the basis of which candidate they thought would be better for workers more generally. If any of my readers were looking to unions as a way of informing their votes, the advice I offered was “Follow the Mop”—that is, pay attention to the janitors.

But it wasn’t only public-sector unions that Newsom lined up in opposition. At minimum, he provided protective cover for Democratic officials and candidates who didn’t want to rouse the ire, and spending, of the state’s newly mobilized billionaires. Incoming Gov. Xavier Becerra assured the fat cats that he opposed the measure, too. In Los Angeles, Mayor Karen Bass joined Newsom in opposing Prop 40, while her (successful) challenger Nithya Raman, though nominally a member of DSA, took no position on it. The list of California electeds who backed the proposal was brutally short—chiefly, Rep. Ro Khanna.

Two decades ago, Newsom entered politics with the backing of then presumably liberal Silicon Valley multimillionaires, with a number of whom he’d had long-standing social relations. As he progressed from San Francisco mayor to lieutenant governor and then governor, a number of those backers progressed from mere millionaires to billionaires, and from nominal Democrats to bigtime Trump donors. When one of his longtime backers, Google founder Sergey Brin, told him how Prop 40 was really Stalinism’s foot in the door, Newsom probably thought that Brin might be exaggerating but also surely thought that he didn’t want to lose Brin’s support, and that of his comparably paranoid peers, as he positioned himself for a presidential run.

Given the resoundingly anti-billionaire themes that carried such non-California Democrats as James Talarico to victory last week, Newsom must sense that his billionaire-buddy status isn’t all that helpful for his upcoming campaign. His post–Election Day commutation of the death sentences of the more than 500 California convicts currently on death row was commendably civilized and just, but also a way to try to rebuild his standing among the liberals whose support he’ll be needing.

Nice try, governor, but it doesn’t negate the identity you’ve already established: Gavin, the Billionaires’ Boy.