From San Francisco to San Diego, voters are done writing blank checks

For years, the playbook was simple. Wrap a sales tax in the language of crisis, line up the labor endorsements, outspend the opposition 10-to-1, and watch the measure sail through.

As chairman of the Los Angeles County Taxpayers Association, I felt like we were shouting into the wind.

This June, in three of the bluest counties in arguably the bluest state, the playbook collapsed. Voters in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Contra Costa County took the tax hikes their own elected officials placed before them and voted them down.

That isn’t a protest. It’s a verdict. It should stop every Sacramento legislator, county supervisor, and city council member cold. 

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In Los Angeles County, voters were asked to approve Measure ER, a half-cent per dollar countywide sales tax increase projected to generate roughly $1 billion annually. Supporters dressed it up in the language of health-care crisis and federal funding threats: compassionate on its face and urgent in its tone.

Our association opposed it and ran “No Blank Checks LA,” the grassroots opposition campaign. 

The latest results show Measure ER trailing, with “no” leading 52.3% to 47.7%. In a county where Democrats hold every lever of political power and tax measures routinely sail through on the strength of organized labor and well-funded campaigns, this is unprecedented, and a sharp reversal for an electorate that had previously approved three countywide tax increases in successive elections.  

The measure of any tax proposal isn’t the cause it claims to support. It’s whether the government has earned the right to ask.

Right now, it hasn’t.

LA County has not demonstrated fiscal discipline, has not proven existing revenues are managed responsibly, and has not made the case that additional billions would be spent any differently from the billions already flowing through the system.

Consider the bigger picture: California’s state budget has doubled under Gov. Gavin Newsom. Sacramento has had plenty of money, enough to fund just about every progressive pet cause on the wish list.

Yet when it comes to the priorities that truly matter to working families, there’s never enough. Voters are finally connecting those dots.

AFP via Getty Images

San Francisco and Contra Costa County tell the same story. In San Francisco, competing tax measures both lost, not because voters sided with business over labor, but because they rejected the entire framework.

In Contra Costa, Measure B, a sales tax sold as a health-care lifeline, lost with nearly 59% of voters saying no. 

What California’s governing class never fully reckoned with is the cumulative burden assembled over years of individual decisions: energy mandates, housing restrictions, permitting delays, wage mandates, regulatory layers, and local fees piled on top of state fees.

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At a time when California families are already stretched to their limits, paying some of the highest income, gas, and sales taxes in the country, politicians returned with more ballot measures wrapped in moral urgency.

They failed.

This isn’t just taxpayer advocates winning an argument. It’s ordinary voters, Democratic voters, in Democratic counties, represented by Democratic officials, arriving at the same conclusion on their own.

They want hospitals, libraries, parks, and emergency services that show up. What they are rejecting is the assumption that more money automatically leads to greater competence.

Prove the money is being spent wisely. Prove existing funds aren’t being wasted. Prove reforms have been exhausted before the hand goes out again.

At the Los Angeles County Taxpayers Association, we intend to hold that standard, measure by measure, election cycle by election cycle.

Based on what voters just told us in June, we won’t be holding it alone.

Aidan Chao is chairman of the Los Angeles Taxpayers Association. He also serves as an adviser or leader on multiple LA-based campaigns and boards.