Billionaires spend millions persuading voters to spare billionaires from a tax, and it is working.

…(cont) By September 21st, a stack of actual Nobel laureates in economics — people who've won the prize, not people who just talk about it — looked at Prop 40 and called it a potential turning point in the fight between democracy and oligarchy. That happens when the same handful of guys writing checks to stop a five-percent tax are also the fortunes the tax would touch.

A month of ads, and the number that started above half slid under it. You don't spend that kind of money talking people out of a tax that doesn't touch their wallet unless it's working on the roughly forty million Californians who would not pay a cent of it either way.

So this weekend, Bernie Sanders, Ro Khanna and Aisha Wahab hold a Saturday rally in San Francisco, and Sanders follows it with one in Los Angeles the Monday after, both billed "Ballots Over Billionaires," hosted by the healthcare workers' union that put the measure on the ballot in the first place. They are not really fighting two hundred billionaires. They're fighting two hundred billionaires' advertising budget, which turns out to be the better-funded opponent.

Two hundred people can outspend forty million if the forty million don't notice what happened to the poll number in between. That's the whole trick of it. Watch November 3rd — not because the vote is close, but because of who paid, in advance, to make it close.