CA Voters Would Pass Billionaire Tax, Poll Finds

California voters are poised to approve the state’s proposed billionaire tax as of January, according to a recent poll.

A survey of 907 likely California voters showed 60 percent supported the tax on an initial ballot test, Dallas-based finance and government affairs firm Nestpoint found when it conducted the poll, noting opposition was at 24 percent and the rest were undecided.

Support dropped to 54 percent “after sustained opposition messaging,” according to a Nestpoint blog post.

“California voters are signaling something very clearly,” John Thomas, co-founder and managing director of Nestpoint, said in the blog post.

“They are far more concerned with cost of living and public services than with the financial well-being of billionaires or the warnings coming from political and economic elites.”

The Service Employees International Union is attempting to place the proposal before voters in November. If approved, it would impose a one-time 5 percent tax on the assets of billionaires to backfill federal funding cuts to health services for lower-income people that were signed by President Donald Trump last year. It would apply retroactively to billionaires living in the state as of Jan. 1.

California has more billionaires than any other state — a few hundred, by some estimates. Nearly half of its personal income tax revenue, a financial backbone in the nearly $350 billion budget, comes from the top 1 percent of earners.

An online war of words has tech leaders pondering a hollowing out of Silicon Valley, and millions of dollars are flowing to political committees engaged in the fight. That includes $3 million from billionaire Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, to a committee tied to a business group opposing the tax.

It's not clear if the proposal will make the ballot, with more than 870,000 petition signatures required for it to qualify.

Gov. Gavin Newsom has long opposed state-level wealth taxes, believing such levies would be disadvantageous for the world’s fourth-largest economy. At a time when California is strapped for cash and he is considering a 2028 presidential run, he is trying to block the proposal before it reaches the ballot.

If voters do have a chance to weigh in on the tax, Nestpoint concluded that “stopping the measure would require extraordinary financial resources and even then, success is far from guaranteed,” according to the blog post.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.