California puts 14 measures on the ballot; one exists only to cancel the one next to it.

…(cont) On September 22, the Berkeley Citrin Center-POLITICO poll found support for Prop 40 had slipped to 45 percent of registered voters, fewer than half.

On September 29, Senator Bernie Sanders announced he would return to California to rally for Prop 40 with Representatives Ro Khanna and Aisha Wahab, calling it the campaign's final weeks.

On October 1, John O'Farrell, a former Andreessen Horowitz partner, posted a twelve-part thread on X explaining why he is happy to pay the tax himself.

On October 2, the Washington Examiner reported what passage would do beyond California: make Prop 40 the first state-level wealth tax in the country, a template its backers hope to run in other states.

On October 11, Governor Newsom endorsed a competing measure built to cancel Prop 40 out and bar any wealth tax like it from passing in the future.

Today, the New York Post sorts California's statewide ballot into fourteen measures, "the good to the bad — and the ugly," and lists Newsom's cancellation measure as one entry among them.

It is not one more entry. Count what each one actually does. One does. That one exists because an ad campaign, funded in part by two of the state's richest men, spent a month arguing against a tax that polls show fewer than half of voters still support — and the governor built his answer the same month, on the same ballot, aimed at the same target.

The ad money did not need thirteen distractions to win. The ballot supplied them anyway. Prop 40 sits inside that stack, still outspent, still polling under half, still the only item on the list built to tax the people funding the campaign against it.

That's the find for today.