California's Proposition 40 billionaire tax leads by seven points in a new UC Berkeley poll — but at 48%, it's stuck below the majority that ballot measures usually need to survive the fall.

The Berkeley IGS/Los Angeles Times survey released this week is the clearest read yet on a November ballot measure that has triggered a fierce, expensive fight — with Bay Area unions behind it and Gov. Gavin Newsom among the Democrats warning it will drive the wealthy out. It shows the union-crafted wealth tax ahead but soft, two well-funded "kill switch" measures that most voters haven't registered, and a governor's race that is already looking decided. For a measure The Dissent has tracked since it was a labor-vs-Newsom brawl, the poll's real story isn't the lead — it's the ceiling.

Likely voters favor Proposition 40 by 48% to 41%, with 11% still on the fence, per the Berkeley IGS/L.A. Times poll released Aug. 14 (external source, opens in a new tab). Written by healthcare workers to backfill roughly $100 billion in federal cuts, the measure would impose a single 5% levy on the fortunes of people who were California billionaires as of Jan. 1.

A seven-point lead sounds comfortable. Poll director Mark DiCamillo says it isn't. It's "not a majority," he told the Times, and on ballot measures the yes side usually wants to be sitting above 50% by now. The logic is a rule of thumb every California campaign knows: undecided voters tend to break against measures they don't understand, so a "yes" side short of a majority in August is climbing.

That matters more here because of what most voters haven't seen yet. The same ballot carries two competing measures (external source, opens in a new tab), Propositions 41 and 42, engineered so that if either draws more votes than Prop 40, the wealth tax dies even if it passes. Awareness is thin and the numbers are muddy: the poll put Prop 41 behind, 35% to 37%, and Prop 42 ahead, 40% to 37%, with about a quarter of voters undecided on each. DiCamillo said he expects the opposition — better organized and better funded, in his telling — to move those figures as the no campaigns spend.

The Times reporting also captures why the Democratic coalition is at war with its own measure. Some Democrats, Newsom among them, warn the tax will drive the wealthy out of a state whose budget leans heavily on its richest filers; the California Democratic Party and prominent progressives back it, and Sen. Bernie Sanders has stumped for it as a modest ask to offset Republican cuts. The survey shows that split by demographic: Democrats and younger, lower-income, minority and union-household voters tilt yes, while Republicans, seniors and households earning above $200,000 tilt no. It's the same fracture The Dissent has documented all summer.

The governor's race, by contrast, looks close to settled. Former Attorney General and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra leads conservative commentator Steve Hilton 55% to 37%, with 7% undecided, in the IGS poll released a day earlier (external source, opens in a new tab). Dan Schnur, who teaches political communication at USC and Berkeley, called the contest essentially predictable. Hilton has worked harder than most recent GOP nominees to hold the national party at arm's length, Schnur said, but an "R" beside his name and Trump's endorsement may be "hurdles too big to overcome" in a deep-blue state.

Becerra's campaign called the numbers "further confirmation" of his cost-of-living message; Hilton's campaign did not respond to ABC7's request for comment. The survey reached 4,207 registered voters, 2,310 of them likely voters, from Aug. 3–9, with a margin of error around 2.5 points among likely voters. Fourteen measures sit on the Nov. 3 ballot. On the one drawing the most money and noise, the honest read is that no one has won it yet.