Election 2026: Marxist and Islamist Wolves at the Gates

After two months in Europe, I came home to Los Angeles and found my ballot waiting. I sat down expecting half an hour. Three hours later I was still at the table, six browser tabs open, trying to work out what a charter amendment on airport and harbor financing would do. Fourteen statewide propositions. Nine local measures beneath them. Across California this November there are two hundred seventy-three local tax and bond measures, and at the last election anyone counted in full, four of every five local measures were a request for money. I am about as politically informed as a man can be without doing it for a living. What is the average voter doing with this?

He is voting the party line and saying yes to anything that sounds like it pays for a school, a park, or a fire station. Proposition 3 would make permanent the “temporary” income tax surcharge voters approved in 2012 and extended in 2016, titled “Provides Permanent Funding for Schools and Health Care.” Proposition 40, a five percent levy on billionaires’ worldwide net worth, is sponsored by the health care workers’ union and routes its proceeds into a fund placed outside the General Fund and exempt from the state spending limit. Every one rests on the same premise: There is not enough money.

There is plenty of money. California imposes the highest top marginal income tax rate in the country, 13.3 percent, and 14.6 percent on wages with the payroll surcharge, along with the highest state sales tax and gasoline tax in the United States. Our property tax rate is low only because Proposition 13 caps it; the median homeowner’s bill is still nearly double the national median, because the values are multiples of everywhere else. The American Society of Civil Engineers grades our roads a D. That is not scarcity. The state’s auditor has put numbers on what it is.

In April of 2024 the state auditor reported that California had spent twenty-four billion dollars across more than thirty homelessness programs in five years and cannot show that any of it worked. During the pandemic at least twenty billion dollars in unemployment benefits, one dollar in nine, went to criminals; last December the auditor again called that department high risk.

Money like that does not evaporate. It is distributed. The two largest political spenders in California in the last measured decade were both public-employee unions: the teachers at two hundred twelve million dollars, the service employees at one hundred seven. No Republican has held any statewide office here since January of 2011. Democrats hold supermajorities in both chambers sufficient to raise taxes without a single opposing vote. The unions finance the party, the party finances the unions, and every other November an electorate that cannot realistically read its own ballot ratifies the arrangement.