A new NBCUniversal Local/Telemundo Station Group shows “yes” supporters leading 48% to 38% on the California ballot measure.
Page F4From§Eachthe breakfast edition — 30 September 2026
Billionaires' ad blitz enters sixth week; their tax polls 52, then 45, then 48 percent
As it ran on the front
Proposition 40 is arithmetic. Five percent, one time, on the net worth of Californians holding a billion dollars or more — about 200 people. The proceeds go to the state's healthcare system.
By August 25 an advertising blitz against it was under way, run by organizations backed by mega-billionaires. The item names Google co-founder Sergey Brin and the venture capitalist Peter Thiel among the backers, and names the two most prominent committees fighting the measure: Building a Better California, and Californians Against Wasteful Spending and Higher Taxes. What those committees have spent is not in anything on my desk. What came back is.…
…(cont) September 16: the New York Post reports 52 percent of likely voters in support, with pitfalls ahead. September 21: a group of Nobel-winning economists calls the vote a possible "turning point in the battle between democracy and oligarchy," the measure still at 52. September 22: the Berkeley Citrin Center-POLITICO poll puts support at 45 percent of registered voters, and The Hill writes that support is falling. September 30: NBCUniversal Local and Telemundo have yes ahead of no, 48 to 38, with fourteen points the item does not account for.
So: 52, then 45, then 48. Three readings in fourteen days, seven points from the top of the range to the bottom. I can't tell you which is the true one. That is the honest version, and I'd rather give you that than a trend line.
What I can reconcile is what the three do together. Not one of them has the measure collapsing. Not one of them has it safe. Every reading since the ads began sits in the same ten-point neighborhood, straddling the only number that matters, which is fifty.
That is worth sitting with, because the opposition's arithmetic is not the same as the measure's. A committee fighting a ballot initiative does not need to persuade a majority of anything. It needs to keep one from forming. Forty-five does that job. Forty-eight does that job. A stalled needle is not a failed campaign; on that side of the ledger it is the deliverable.
And the bill it is holding off: five percent, once, of one billion dollars is fifty million. That's the check at the very bottom of the bracket, for people whose defining characteristic is that they have at least a billion.
So the ledger reads, hon, like this. There is no money for the state's healthcare system.
“Five percent, once, on a billion — that's fifty million bucks from a guy who has a thousand million, and they're carpet-bombing the airwaves to stop it. They don't have to beat it, they just have to keep it under fifty, and look at that, three polls in two weeks and the thing won't move. Meanwhile the money it was going to pay for is my kid's clinic, and nobody's running ads for that.”
“Look, forty-five percent — forty-eight, whatever the number is today — the voters are clearly skeptical of a wealth tax, and that's organic, that's not ads. Did I say it's not ads? I didn't say that. These are grassroots coalitions, they happen to be funded by people in the bracket, which is a coincidence in the sense that it isn't one.”
The receipts
· Fewer than half of California voters back billionaire tax: Poll from the morgue, 22 Sep 2026
· California billionaire tax draws majority support in new poll — but there’s a big catch from the morgue, 16 Sep 2026
· Billionaire-Backed Groups Launch Ad Blitz Against California Wealth Tax from the morgue, 25 Aug 2026
· Nobel-Winning Economists Say California Billionaire Tax Could Be ‘Turning Point in the Battle Between Democracy and Oligarchy’ from the morgue, 21 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.