November 2026 General Election

Scott Wiener is the most accomplished legislator in the State Senate. He has single-handedly passed some of the most important housing legislation in California, and he is more responsible than anyone for the state's wholesale rethinking of housing policy.

Chan, by contrast, has been one of the worst, most anti-urban members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Her main accomplishments include opposing bike lanes, wanting to reopen the Great Highway to cars, and a general hostility to the idea of urban density. Her candidacy is only viable at all because of some stupid Pelosi-Wiener beef, which is not a reason to send her to Congress. She fucking sucks. Do not vote for her.

Becerra is an extremely mediocre politician who won the nomination basically by accident. I do not have high hopes for to be anything other than an average governor. Hilton is batshit crazy tho.

Wicks is one of if not the very best legislators in the state assembly and a good representative for her district. Rendon is a fucking moron.

Haney is one of the best pro-housing legislators in the state. Losing him would be a travesty.

I'm not opposed to public campaign financing. San Francisco has run a program since 2000 and the sky hasn't fallen. The problem with Prop 4 is that it doesn't actually establish anything. It just repeals the 1988 ban and leaves every design question for later: whether participating candidates have to give up private money, how many candidates can qualify, how much they can draw, and where the money comes from. Voters would be signing off on an idea with no terms attached, and the terms are what matter. A public financing program that still lets candidates take special interest money alongside public money is worse than no program at all. California has rejected this twice before, in 2000 and 2010, and the Legislature's answer was to come back with something even vaguer. Bring back a real proposal with a real program in it and I'll vote for it.

Recalls are usually anti-democratic. They let a motivated minority force a do-over of an election the rest of us already held, at enormous cost, on a timeline the recall backers get to choose. California's version is especially bad because of the replacement question: a governor can be removed by 50% plus one and then replaced by whoever leads a field of dozens with a fraction of that support. That is how we nearly handed the state to a radio host in 2021. Prop 5 fixes the worst part. If a recall succeeds, the office is filled by a special election or an appointment, the same way any other vacancy is, instead of by a simultaneous free-for-all. I'd rather raise the bar for recalls altogether, but this is a sane step and it costs nothing. Vote yes.

This one is close to free. The program is funded by revenue bonds that the borrowers themselves pay back, not by the general fund, so taxpayers aren't on the hook for the loans. It's opt-in on both ends: nobody has to use it, and no builder has to participate. And it only applies to new construction, which means every loan it makes is a unit that got built. California's housing problem is a supply problem, and the state's middle class is the group that has been squeezed out of ownership the hardest, so a program that nudges demand toward new homes rather than bidding up existing ones is pointed in the right direction. I don't expect it to move the needle much on its own, but there's no real downside. Vote yes.

Read the fine print. Prop 38 borrows $8.4 billion, which costs the state $500 to $600 million a year for twenty years, and hands half of it, about $4.2 billion, to a single nonprofit research institute. The measure was written, qualified, and almost entirely bankrolled by Gary Michelson, the billionaire who co-founded that same institute. The eligibility rules are drafted so narrowly that UCLA itself confirmed only his institute qualifies. He has put more than $60 million into the campaign. There is essentially no money on the other side, because there is no constituency against immunology research. That's the point: nobody is going to run ads against curing cancer, so the only check on a ballot measure like this is voters noticing what it actually does. And somehow the California Democratic Party endorsed it. The party that will tell you with a straight face that billionaires have too much influence over our politics looked at a billionaire buying himself a $4 billion earmark and said yes. It's fuckign embarassing. Research funding should go through the budget and through competitive grants, not through an initiative that names its own beneficiary. If you want the state to fund immunotherapy research, this is the most expensive and least accountable way to do it. Vote no.

Prop 39 is a solution in search of a problem. You already have to prove who you are to vote in California. Registering requires a driver's license number or the last four digits of your Social Security number, which the state checks against the DMV and the Social Security Administration. First-time voters who registered without that are already required by federal law to show ID. Every mail ballot is signature-verified against your registration. Voting as a non-citizen is already a felony, and the handful of cases that turn up each cycle get prosecuted. Prop 39 doesn't add a check that doesn't exist. It replaces a system that works with one that adds friction at the polling place and strips people who moved, lost a wallet, or never drove of a vote they're entitled to. The bigger problem is what a constitutional ID requirement does after election day. Every close race becomes an invitation to litigate: which IDs count, whether a county verified "citizenship" correctly, whether ballots from a precinct should be thrown out over paperwork. We have watched that playbook run in other states for a decade and it is not an accident that the people funding this measure are the same people who fund that playbook. This is a lawfare machine dressed up as a security measure. Vote no.

The thing to know about Prop 40 is that it was never really meant to pass. SEIU-UHW, the union behind it, routinely qualifies ballot measures as bargaining chips: the three dialysis initiatives from 2018 to 2022 were the same move. In June the union offered to withdraw this one if Newsom backed a smaller 2% tax through the Legislature. He declined, the deadline passed, and the bargaining chip ended up on your ballot. That's also why the groups you'd expect to support a health care tax, including the Medical Association, the community clinics, and Planned Parenthood, are against it: they weren't consulted. On the merits, a one-time wealth tax is a poor fit for a permanent funding gap, and wealth is the easiest tax base to move, which is why the state's own estimate comes in well under the union's and expects some ongoing income tax loss. Income, property, and land value taxes do the same job with far less leakage. Vote no.