Prop 40

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

Mark Di Camillo at the Institute for Governmental Studies:

The state ballot initiative that is drawing the most attention in California’s upcoming general election is Proposition 40, the Billionaires Tax initiative. Nearly three in four likely voters report having already heard of the initiative, and when presented with its official ballot title and summary, slightly more are inclined to vote Yes (48%) than No (41%). The controversial initiative calls for imposing a one-time 5% tax on the assets of the state’s billionaires, with most of its funds devoted to health care.

The poll finds voting preferences on Proposition 40 to be highly partisan and related to the ideological leanings of the electorate. Support is greatest among Democrats and strongly liberal voters, while Republicans and conservatives are solidly on the No side. On a regional basis, Proposition 40 is receiving strong support from voters in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles County, but trails among voters in Orange County, the Central Valley, and the state’s North Coast/Sierras region. D fferences in support are also observed by age, gender and the race/ethnicity of voters, with majorities of younger voters, women and voters of color voting Yes, while pluralities of voters ages 65 or older, males, and whites are voting No.

Opponents of Proposition 40 have qualified two counter initiatives, Propositions 41 and 42, for the November election ballot that are primarily aimed at nullifying the Billionaires Tax should it pass. Yet, voter awareness of these two counter measures is low and when presented with the official ballot titles and summaries of each initiative voters are divided, with many undecided.

Newsom's opposition to Prop 40 is significant. 

In 2022 (updated 2024), Ben Christopher wrote at KQED:

Voting down Proposition 30 might seem a little off-brand for the California electorate.

These are the voters, after all, who showed no qualms just a decade ago about hiking income taxes on top earners and who also hit up millionaires in 2004 to pay for mental health services. These are the California majorities who, as recently as June (PDF), told pollsters that they were either considering purchasing or had already purchased an electric car. Most named air pollution, wildfires and climate change as areas of major personal concern.

And yet the ballot measure that would have increased taxes on about 43,000 multimillionaires (on income above $2 million a year) to fund electric-car rebates and to combat wildfires has suffered an unambiguous defeat. In the statewide vote count as of late Wednesday, 59% rejected the proposal.

At first glance, the fate of Proposition 30 may be the most compelling head-scratcher of the 2022 California election. But for the campaigns on both sides of the highly contested measure, and for many independent political observers to boot, there’s an obvious answer to this electoral mystery — and its name is Gov. Gavin Newsom.

“You can’t remove the governor from it,” said Matt Rodriguez, campaign manager for No on 30. “He’s a credible messenger on the opposition side, simply because I think a lot of people and a lot of Democrats take their cues from him.”

Campaign Influencers for Hire

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.

 Ken Bensinger and Stuart A. Thompson at NYT:

[Josh] Greene, who lives in Southern California and is best known by his handle @joshtheprogressive, is among a growing number of influencers who, at a moment when campaigns are increasingly willing to pay for online attention, appear willing to put their mouth where the money is.

As more people spend time scrolling on their phones, campaigns view these shows of support from influencers as a vital way to reach voters. They are also significantly less expensive than traditional advertising.

But unlike campaign mailers, billboards and television spots, these messages fall into a legal gray area.

There are no federal regulations requiring disclosure of payments for political support on social media, and only a few states have such rules. That allows influencers, in most instances, to endorse candidates for a fee without ever disclosing those payments in their posts. Creators say some campaigns have even asked them to actively conceal the fact that they’re being compensated, making it impossible to know what’s genuine support — and what is pay-for-play.

In most cases, the only way a viewer would know an influencer is being paid would be to search a candidate’s campaign finance reports, as The New York Times did to discover the payments. Even then, such compensation is regularly obscured by funneling the payments through middlemen.

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Other political efforts have employed a different strategy, contracting private firms that pay little-known content creators smaller sums to put out a large volume of posts. Those companies, known as user generated content platforms, or U.G.C.s, operate on the principle that carpet bombing the internet with hundreds of nearly identical posts is more likely to generate viral content than paying one large influencer the same amount of money to make a single post.

Downward Optimism

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

War and economic woes will hurt the GOP in November.  The only question is how much.

Erica Pandey at Axios:

The big picture: Your grocery store is fed by a vast global supply chain, and pressures are building all along it.The Iran and Russia-Ukraine wars have driven up diesel prices, making it more expensive to operate farm equipment for harvesting and to truck food from suppliers to stores.

The war in Iran has also disrupted fertilizer supply and price, as a large share of the world's fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz.

Corn and wheat prices are surging, this week hitting their highest level in three years. Bad weather has hit corn crop yields, and the Russia-Ukraine war has roiled wheat exports.

Friction point: Wheat's a key ingredient in pantry staples and corn is a major animal feed, so as they go up, so can meat, dairy and eggs.

The intrigue: Don't assume those soaring commodity prices are a bonanza for farmers, either.They're still getting squeezed by all the other crises. Even the president of the National Corn Growers Association told Axios Future of Energy author Ben Geman that he himself wouldn't be profitable this year.

Add all these pressures to the list of already inflated food items:Instant coffee is up 15.8% year-over-year; tomatoes, 12.8%; beef roasts, 13.5%; apples, 11.1%.

In the latest Economist/YouGov poll, about three-quarters of people said grocery prices are still rising where they live.

Eleanor Mueller at Semafor:

Consumer sentiment among Republicans and independents is “starting to fade” ahead of the midterm elections, The Conference Board Chief Economist Dana Peterson told Semafor.

The Conference Board said last week that its overall consumer confidence index had dropped to its lowest level since January. Economists had predicted it would remain higher.

“There’s just a general shift of downward optimism,” Peterson said on the sidelines of the Kansas City Federal Reserve’s annual economic policy symposium, pointing to expectations that inflation and interest rates will remain elevated.

“Democrats are the least optimistic, but I’ve noticed that more recently the independents are moving with Republicans” in a negative direction, she continued. Consumers have been citing issues like “oil and gas prices, food, and also war and conflict” on surveys.

Is Trump a Secret Asset of the DSCC?

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

War and economic woes will hurt the GOP in November.  The only question is how much.

Jonathan Martin at POLITICO:

As the traditional start of the campaign season draws near, though, Republicans are increasingly worried they may be consumed by a worsening prairie fire.

“He’s in serious trouble in farm country,” Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) told me. “He being Trump — and Trump is us. I’m not very optimistic.”

The triple-whammy of tariffs, expensive diesel and fertilizer and now imported beef has created a crisis for agriculture-state Republicans.

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The culprits are obvious: the exorbitant cost of living, Trump’s deep unpopularity with the political center and the massive enthusiasm gap Democrats enjoy over Republicans.

The fear, GOP officials tell me, is that these sentiments are increasingly becoming locked in with voters; that the grim political environment — caused by spiking gas prices after the ceasefire with Iran collapsed last month — is close to irreversible. Or to borrow from Haley Barbour, that sage of Mississippi: In politics, good gets better and bad gets worse.

For months, the shorthand conversation among political professionals has not been if this will be a difficult election for Republicans but whether it will be 2018 or 2006.

Which is to say: Will 2026 bring a backlash against the party in power, but one largely confined to House losses because of polarization, limiting Democratic strength in Senate races? Or will there be a greater wave that grows high enough to sweep out Republicans thought to be safe, flipping both chambers of Congress in the process?

Once Iran hostilities restarted and it became clear that there would be no Supreme Court vacancy, as there crucially was in 2018, the answer became clear. Republicans would not be able to get off defense and lacked the court fight that would hand them their best opportunity to go on offense.

 WSJ editorial: 

The November midterm elections will be in part a referendum on President Trump’s border taxes, and most polls show them losing. A new poll by Overton Insights and the Texas Public Policy Foundation finds that tariffs are unpopular in the Lone Star State, especially among Hispanics. Houston, Republicans have a tariff problem.

The survey, which was shared with us exclusively and will be released next Wednesday, shows that Texans overall disapprove of his tariffs, 54% to 46%. Texans who didn’t vote in a party primary—generally independents and folks who are less partisan—disapproved of them, 68% to 32%. Hispanics gave them the thumbs down, 69% to 31%.


The latter is especially notable because Mr. Trump won 55% of the state’s Hispanic vote in 2024, no doubt in part owing to frustration with Democrats’ handling of inflation. But Hispanics also strongly oppose the President’s blunderbuss border taxes targeting trade partners like Mexico and Canada, which raise costs for consumers and businesses.

The Texas economy is heavily exposed to tariffs because of its cross-border trade and integrated supply chains with Mexico. Texas traded $303 billion in goods with Mexico and overall exported $299 billion of manufactured products in 2025. The latter include electronics and computers ($71 billion), chemicals ($55 billion) and transportation equipment ($29 billion).

Because Texas is the largest state exporter of goods, it suffers a bigger brunt from retaliatory tariffs, such as those that Canada plans to levy on the U.S. in response to Mr. Trump’s tariff escalation. In case he hasn’t noticed, the tariffs have become an albatross for Republicans in close races across the country, including Texas.

Cabinet Members Trying to Defend Trump

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

War and economic woes will hurt the GOP in November.  The only question is how much.

Megan Messerly, Myah Ward and Alex Gangitano at POLITICO:

Energy Secretary Chris Wright visited New Hampshire last week to tout natural gas pipelines and got hit with questions about $4 gasoline prices. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins was in Iowa over the weekend ostensibly to rally farmers and instead had to defend Trump’s decision to import foreign beef, which sparked outcry among cattle ranchers.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in Florida to talk about school nutrition, faced questions about a Pennsylvania measles outbreak and ended up in a protracted fight with Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro over whether the virus is responsible for two deaths.

Even Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a veteran of Wall Street, is struggling to win over some of his former colleagues, who are skeptical of his “economic D-Day” plan to end the Iran war and downright hostile to his attempt to lower the interest rate the federal government pays on long-term debt.

The Cabinet kerfuffle comes at a time when the president’s envoys are needed most. The midterms are less than three months away, the president’s approval rating is near record-lows and the White House is on a mission to remind voters of all it believes it has accomplished in the last two years, including a spate of tax cuts, improved border security and reductions in violent crime.

Cookery: Polls and Betting Markets

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

Reid J. Epstein at NYT:

Three purported polls of the Los Angeles mayor’s race, the Wisconsin primary for governor and the Nevada governor’s race turned out to be entirely fake — a “short-term social experiment,” according to the website that released them. The fakery’s discovery, by The Los Angeles Times, came only after Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles posted approvingly about one of the polls, which showed her ahead.

Another pollster acknowledged that in a survey of Florida’s primary for governor, it had shifted some respondents’ support from the candidate they had said they backed to another candidate because the initial results “did not align with our read of the race.” (None of the polls above were included in The New York Times’s poll trackers or coverage because they did not meet its basic transparency and professionalism standards.)

All of this is happening at the dawn of the 2028 presidential primary season, when dozens of candidates are likely to be defined in part by polls that cement impressions and set narratives that may not be tethered to political reality.

“Every candidate in 2028 will have their own cooked poll factory,” said Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist who was a senior aide on Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 campaign for president. “Polls now are not just a way of measuring the horse race. It’s a way for candidates and their allies to influence the horse race.”


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While betting-market odds are often based on the wisdom of crowds and opaque measurements, they are amplified by powerful companies and reported on by legitimate news organizations that in some cases have financial partnerships with the prediction firms. CNN has such an arrangement with Kalshi and regularly shows the prediction market’s betting odds on television. The Wall Street Journal’s parent company has a partnership with Polymarket to display its odds within Journal content.

Voters and donors now see those numbers, which can be manipulated by all manner of polling and news events, and use them as a proxy for how a candidate is faring.

Sean Clegg, a senior adviser to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, who is likely to run for president in 2028, said prediction markets had a growing influence on Democratic strategists, donors and primary voters.

“Momentum is everything and poll numbers move prediction markets, which influences strategic voting,” Mr. Clegg said. “The progressive subset of the political class is hyper online, and they are pushing these polling narratives like never before.”

All About Trump

 Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. 

War and economic woes will hurt the GOP in November.  The only question is how much.

Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, Michael Scherer, and Ashley Parker at  The Atlantic:

President Trump gathered his top political advisers in the Oval Office early this month to solve a problem of riches: how to spend his super PAC’s $400 million political war chest with fewer than 100 days to go before the midterm elections.

Republican strategists are concerned about Trump’s low approval ratings and voter anxiety about the economy. One person familiar with the Oval Office strategy meeting put it this way: “When the issues that you typically campaign on don’t move voters—or voters are pissed off at you about those issues—the question becomes: What do you campaign on?” Some GOP strategists favor focusing entirely on specific races in an effort to convince voters of the merits of individual candidates and local issues.

But Trump himself has rejected that approach. House and Senate Democrats, the president noted during the meeting, will make their fall campaigns a referendum on him. His advisers told him that the poor polling reflects the fact that the voting public still does not know about many of his accomplishments—the dozens of new stock-market highs, a decline in fentanyl deaths, the “sealed” southern border, the increase in domestic-manufacturing production.

The solution Trump settled on, according to three people familiar with the meeting, was to lean into the Democratic strategy of focusing on himself. The president ordered a series of television advertisements about his own record that will serve as a backdrop to the hundreds of individual House and Senate contests. Trump wanted what one person described to us as “environmental lift” ads—commercials that would focus on nationalizing the midterms broadly around his victories—and he suggested that the ad makers mine his own on-camera statements as building blocks. “Go look at the clips,” the president told his team, according to this person. “I cite accomplishments all the time.”

Lotsa luck with that.  Jason Lange at Reuters:

• Support for US military action against Iran falls to 31%, Reuters/Ipsos poll shows
• Trump job approval stays at 33% for second straight survey, matching record low
• Poll finds 83% of Americans expect war to continue for ​an extended period