The Brief

On a recent Thursday morning, Los Angeles City Councilmember Kevin de León walked along a line of hundreds of people outside his Eagle Rock office, greeting them with handshakes and hugs — and boxes of eggs, produce and bread.

The occasion was De León’s monthly food giveaway.

“I'm glad they have this type of service because I don’t know what I would do,” said Barbara Bourland, a retired teacher. This was her first time at the giveaway. Her husband of 61 years died two months ago. Money is tight.

“After paying the bills, it doesn’t leave much money left over,” she said.

Bourland, 79, knew about the secretly recorded audio that surfaced more than a year ago in which De León, who is running for reelection this year, was heard participating in a conversation that included racist and derogatory remarks. In a discussion about redistricting with two other council members and a labor leader, he accused a white colleague of using his adopted Black son like a political prop akin to a luxury handbag.

The recordings prompted a flurry of calls for his resignation, including from President Joe Biden.

Bourland said she recalled receiving a campaign mailer from De León's office a few weeks ago. It was an apology letter. And she said she plans to support him in the March 5 election just like she did four years ago when he first ran for the office.

“Everybody has their faults,” Bourland said. “God is forgiving, so why shouldn’t I be?”

The incumbent council member is counting on the forgiveness of voters like Bourland in his battle to continue to represent the 14th L.A. City Council district, which stretches from downtown L.A. and Boyle Heights to Highland Park and Eagle Rock.

De León faces seven challengers, all of whom are looking to stop his attempted Rocky Balboa-style comeback from a hailstorm of criticism in the wake of the October 2022 leak of the tapes.

(Read more about De León and his challengers in the LAist Voter Game Plan.)

De León apologizes but remains defiant

On the one hand, De León expressed remorse about his role in the conversation. In an interview with LAist, he said he was “profoundly apologetic and deeply sorry to those I hurt.” He said he should have stopped the conversation when racist comments were made by his colleague, former Council President Nury Martinez, who did resign.

He also has admitted what he said about his colleague and his adopted son was wrong.

Los Angeles City Councilmember Kevin de León.

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Patrick T. Fallon

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AFP via Getty Images

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But the 57-year-old longtime politician is also defiant. De León said he believes he is a victim of a “false narrative” that he is a racist. He denied accusations he was engaging in backroom dealing to redraw council district boundaries to keep himself and other allies in power. He pointed out that a majority of the City Council voted in favor of the redistricting maps that were discussed in the meeting.

The protests in the wake of the scandal were intense. Demonstrators calling on De León to resign shut down council meetings. People protested outside his house. There is still a lot of angry sentiment among his constituents.

A 32-year-old man, who identified himself only by his last name, Garza, was one of about 100 people who attended a debate at the Delores Mission in Boyle Heights earlier this month.

“What he said was racist and wrong,” said Garza, who works at a nonprofit. “He disappointed the community not only with his racist remarks but by trying to gerrymander the district so he could stay in power.

He added: “Take the bench, dude.”

Challengers weigh in about the controversy

Eviction defense attorney Ysabel Jurado is among those seeking to unseat De León. In an interview with LAist, she pointed out that he was stripped of all his committee assignments after the entire City Council called on him to resign.

“We, as a district, have suffered while he was being censured and not being on any committees,” she said. “I think this has been a huge distraction for this district.”

Jurado describes herself as a progressive who would have opposed a hefty pay raise for Los Angeles police officers and the lifting of a rent freeze — measures De León supported. She said the police labor contract adds to a projected budget deficit of up to $400 million that will take resources away from other programs and that the rent hike will increase homelessness.

De León has said officers deserved the raise and that he worked to reduce the allowed rent increase from 7 to 4%.

Two Democratic members of the state assembly also are challenging De León in the non-partisan race, both with similar politics to the incumbent.

Assemblymember Wendy Carrillo’s district overlaps much of the council district. She said De León’s participation in the secretly recorded conversation should disqualify him for reelection.

“What I heard was a conversation about benefiting the individual versus the benefits of a community,” she said.

Carrillo came under criticism after she was arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol in November and crashing into two parked cars in Northeast L.A. She pleaded no contest to misdemeanor DUI and is attending a substance abuse program at Kaiser and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, she said.

“I’m doing the work to be a better version of myself,” she said.

Miguel Santiago is the other assemblymember running. He called De León’s comments on the tape “shameful.”

“I think this district wants change,” he said.

Santiago is the only candidate to benefit from outside money. Independent expenditure committees have spent more than $600,000 on his behalf, including groups representing the L.A. County Federation of Labor and a group of Latino-elected officials.

The other less-well-funded candidates in the race include health care professional Nadine Dias, community advocate Genny Guerrero, attorney Teresa Hillery, public school teacher Eduardo “Lalo” Vargas.

A 'tough election' for De León

Inside his Eagle Rock office last week, De León stood amid a sea of glass statues. They are awards from community groups he’s received over his years as a politician. The wall is adorned with photos of him with other politicians, including two former governors.

“I’ve dedicated my life to the well being of all individuals, regardless of who you are,” he said. “That’s who I am, and that’s why I did not step down.”

De León was once a Democratic Party powerhouse, rising from labor organizer to leader of the California Senate. He unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate and L.A. mayor along the way. His story is compelling. He is the son of an unauthorized immigrant mother who raised him and his siblings alone, cleaning houses for a living. He was the first to graduate high school in his family.

He admits he faces “a tough election … given the circumstances.”

“But we’ve leaned in hard,” he said, touting the building of multiple homeless shelters and nine new playgrounds in the district.

It is the provision of those kinds of city services that may determine his fate.

Joe Gonzalez said he has voted for De Leon multiple times over the years — for state assembly, state senate, and for council member in 2020. The tape scandal is not his top concern.

“Everybody screws up once in a while,” said the retired letter carrier.

But he’s unhappy about the dirty streets he sees in his working class Boyle Heights neighborhood. “I see the lack of effort to do something in this neighborhood,” he said. “We’re being ignored here.”

“Community members have to gather together with their own brooms and mops and trash bags and go clean up areas,” he added.

So this time he’s looking for another candidate to support. “I will not be voting for De León.”

Peter Dreier, professor of politics at Occidental College, said it’s unlikely any of the candidates will win a majority of votes in the primary, meaning the top two finishers would face off in the November general election. He said De Leon has more name recognition on his side than the other candidates, and he has city slush fund money that he’s using to hand out “turkeys and such.”

“The real question is who is going to come in second to De León,” he said.

Sacramento State political science professor Kim Nalder was working out at a Sacramento gym in 2003 when she overheard a conversation about the upcoming recall election of then-Gov. Gray Davis, a Democrat.

She remembers “guys in the weight room just saying, like, 'How cool would that be to have Arnold Schwarzenegger as our governor?'" she said. “It had nothing to do with policy at all.”

A few months later, the international action film star triumphed in a field of 135 candidates to replace Davis, who’d been re-elected the year before but had come under fire for rolling blackouts in the state and unpopular vehicle license fees. “The Governator” went on to serve nearly two terms.

If the election were just about whether or not Davis should keep his job, and not also who should replace him if he were recalled, Nalder doubts the Republican Schwarzenegger would ever have taken office. Accompanying him on the ballot were a host of other colorful characters, including actor Gary Coleman and porn star Mary Carey. Per the rules of the recall, the candidate with the most votes, not necessarily the majority, wins.

“I just think the recall probably wouldn't have happened — because there wasn't that much upset at Davis himself — if we didn't, you know, have any fun alternatives,” she said.

California voters this year are deciding whether to approve Proposition 5, which would do away with “the second question” of who should replace a state elected official if they are recalled. Instead, depending on the office and the timing, a replacement would be appointed or elected in a special election.

The measure was placed on the November ballot by Democratic lawmakers in 2024 with the support of the secretary of state and good governance groups Common Cause and League of Women Voters. It came in response to the 2021 attempted recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom. Republican lawmakers voted against it, arguing that it would dilute the power of the voters and add costs associated with follow-up special elections.

However, with 14 propositions on the ballot and not a dollar raised so far in support or opposition, both sides may have to rely on voters’ gut reactions.

The “weak gazelle”

Aside from the recall of Davis, the only other successful state recall this century was that of the author of Prop. 5, Democrat Josh Newman.

In 2017, Newman was a freshman lawmaker representing a purple Southern California district when he joined 27 of his colleagues in approving the gas tax, which added a 12 cent surcharge to every gallon of gas purchased in California to fund transportation projects. Republicans fiercely opposed the effort, arguing new taxes weren’t necessary. The bill passed with the bare minimum of votes.

Less than two weeks later, then-conservative commentator and now-San Diego Assemblymember Carl DeMaio told Orange County talk show hosts that gas tax opponents needed to use the “gazelle strategy,” to begin taking out lawmakers who’d approved the tax.

“We’ve identified that weak gazelle, the slowest gazelle, the one with the limp,” he said. “And that’s Josh Newman, in Orange County.”

Why Newman? Because he was elected by the slimmest margin of any senator, fewer than 2,500 votes.

In the ensuing weeks, DeMaio’s organization, Reform California, led the effort to recall Newman, helping to collect more than 64,000 signatures — equivalent to 20% of voters in the last election — and centering its campaign on Newman’s “deciding vote” on the tax.

Close to 60% of voters chose to recall Newman in June 2018, replacing him with Republican Ling Ling Chang. The recall ended the Democrats’ supermajority in the state Senate.

Gov. Gray Davis speaks at an anti-recall labor union rally in San Jose on Oct. 5, 2003.

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David McNew

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Getty Images

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In a recent interview with CalMatters, DeMaio stood by his “weak gazelle” strategy.

“If voters want to stop something from happening and being repeated, then mid-term, sometimes the only thing they can do is to use a recall as a way of expressing their opposition,” he said.

But Newman said that kind of “political gamesmanship” was not what former progressive governor Hiram Johnson intended when he proposed the law in 1911.

In a speech, Johnson characterized the recall process as “the precautionary measure by which a recalcitrant official can be removed.”

Newman said he doesn’t feel he fit that bill.

“I didn't do anything other than cast a tough vote,” he said. “Was I malfeasant? I hardly think so. Especially given the state of the state's road systems at the time.”

Newman made recall reform one of his priorities when he was elected back into office in 2020. After an expensive recall election for Newsom, other Democrats had the political will and Newman put forward Senate Constitutional Amendment 1, which became Prop. 5.

Newman said the title of the proposition, which says that it “Changes Recall Election Process for Statewide Officers,” may confuse voters, since legislators do not hold statewide office, though all California legislative races would be affected by the change.

How would it work?

If Prop. 5 passes, eliminating the replacement question, the governor would call a special election within about four months to replace a recalled state senator or assemblymember. If the governor was recalled within the first two years of their term, the secretary of state would call a special election. If they are in the second two years of their term, the lieutenant governor would finish the governor’s term. The ousted official would be allowed to run for the same office in the special election.

If a statewide official such as the state treasurer, attorney general, or insurance commissioner were recalled, the governor would appoint their replacement to serve until the next scheduled election.

If Prop. 5 were to pass, DeMaio said the gap in representation may dissuade voters from approving a recall, even if they want a change.

“The argument will now be made, if Prop. 5 passes, that if you vote yes on recall, then you're going to be without a representative for months, if not longer, and so you're going to silence your community,” he said.

He said extra special elections would lead to higher costs to taxpayers. The 2021 attempted recall of Newsom cost about $200 million to administer — a cost that would double if there were two separate elections.

However, Nalder suspects the change would lead to fewer recalls in general, likely a guiding force in Democrats’ support of the effort.

“It's relatively easy to get the signatures, and it causes a lot of chaos and costs a lot of extra money,” she said. “That's easier for Democrats to want to change because they're the ones who win more in the races.”

A Public Policy Institute of California poll in early September found the measure faces long odds, though: 59% of likely voters said they likely would vote “no” and just 35% said they would vote “yes.”

Nalder said the poll was conducted before voters had done their ballot homework, and upon learning more, they’ll likely align with their party’s positions.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

California voters will soon be asked whether they want to keep taxing the incomes of the rich.

And they’ll be asked whether to start taxing the accumulated wealth of the even richer.

Wait, there’s more. They’ll also get to weigh in on whether we should ban wealth taxes altogether, subject the money raised by future taxes to a state spending cap and make it harder for voters to pass certain local taxes.

That doesn’t include any of the other propositions on the November ballot that are likely to affect the state budget. Nor does it include the roughly 300 tax and bond measures that will be popping up in local elections across the state.

And you thought tax season only came in April.

With 14 measures in total, the 2026 California ballot is a busy one. Voters haven’t been presented with this many choices in a decade. It’s an especially active year for tax-related measures — those that hike taxes, cut them, introduce new ones, jettison old ones or change the rules by which taxes are approved and enacted.

Five of those are on the ballot this time around, the most since 1994.

Altogether they have the potential to reshape the state’s finances, beef up or starve some of our largest public spending programs, change the rules around taxation and — if opponents of the proposed wealth tax are to be believed — trigger a Randian exodus of the state’s wellest-to-do.

The 'black hole' on the ballot

Though five tax measures are on the ballot, voters are really just seeing three big questions.

The first: Should California be the first state in the nation to introduce a wealth tax?

That question is “the black hole into which all political energy is going right now,” said Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, a group that advocates for low taxes.

Three measures — Propositions 40, 41 and 42 — provide opposing answers.

Prop. 40 would slap every Californian with a net worth of at least $1 billion (all approximately 200 of them) with a one-time 5% tax on their wealth, excluding real estate and retirement accounts.

This isn’t an income tax, which skims off a share of a person’s earnings, but a tax on the assessed, unrealized value of investments. Think of this like the property tax that homeowners pay on their houses, except it applies to stocks, bonds, business shares, Bugattis and the occasional machine gun collection.

A sign displayed at the Billionaire Tax Now booth at the 2026 California Democratic Party State Convention in San Francisco on Feb. 21, 2026.

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Jeff Chiu

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The Legislative Analyst’s Office estimates that the measure has the potential to raise tens of billions of dollars. Almost all of it would be set aside for the state’s public health insurance programs, which are bracing for dramatic federal cuts.

That’s assuming the measure passes and survives the blizzard of inevitable legal challenges. Though a number of countries have introduced wealth taxes at either the national or regional level, California’s would be the first in the United States.

No surprise, many of the state’s billionaires are pushing back hard. They’re doing that in the usual way, with literally hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign spending. But they’re also doing it with two additional measures on the ballot itself. Prop. 41 would, among other things, ban the state from collecting taxes that circumvent a 1970s state spending limit, which Prop. 40 is written to do.

Prop. 42 would ban new taxes on financial assets, private businesses and most other forms of wealth outright — an explicit reversal of Prop. 40.

If both the wealth tax and either of the countermeasures are approved by the voters, the one with the higher vote tally becomes law. That’s why the wealth tax could go down in defeat even if a majority of voters support it.

But voters shouldn’t think of Props. 41 and 42 as mere “no” votes on Prop. 40, said Kayla Kitson, a tax policy analyst at the California Budget & Policy Center, a left-leaning think tank. Prop. 41 would also require the state’s auditor to conduct a “pre-election” analysis of any program set to be funded by a future tax measure and then make recommendations on how to cut costs by 10%.

Beyond banning future wealth taxes, Prop. 42 would also prevent future taxes from applying retroactively before a tax is approved. That could remove the state’s ability to keep people or businesses from avoiding a tax they know is coming, said Kitson.

Two more tax questions

The other two tax measures have nothing to do with the wealth tax. One would make permanent a boosted income tax rate for higher earners. The other would make it harder for local governments to raise certain taxes in the future.

The high-earner tax is the third, and possibly final, installment in a decade-long electoral trilogy.

First proposed by former Gov. Jerry Brown as a temporary solution to fund education in the fiscal hangover of the Great Recession, the measure sticks a higher tax bracket on the state’s top 2% of earners. Re-authorized by voters in 2016, the tax has https://lao.ca.gov/ballot/2025/250421.pdfgenerated between $5 billion and $16 billion annually. Most of that money has gone to schools.

The tax expires in 2030, which is why the California Teachers Association, the state’s largest K-12 public school educators’ union, was eager to put its permanent renewal on the ballot this year. If it fails, the union will have two more chances.

Hence, Proposition 3, which would make the boosted tax rates for individually earned income above $360,000 per year a perpetual part of the state’s tax code.

Proposition 43’s backstory also goes back nearly a decade.

The measure would hike the share of votes needed to pass certain local taxes. Specifically, these are taxes that raise money for a specific program or purpose and that are placed on the ballot by citizen signature-gathering efforts, as opposed to local elected officials. If Prop. 43 passes, this very particular type of tax would need the support of at least two-thirds of local voters.

Business groups and anti-tax advocates have been wanting to put some version of Prop. 43 on the ballot since 2017 when the state Supreme Court ruled that so-called citizen-initiated special taxes only need a simple majority of the vote to pass. The anti-tax advocates got close two years ago, but were stymied by another court ruling. This year, the measure finally made it, but only after negotiations with the Democrats in the Legislature pared it down, applying the rule to future taxes only.

California tax measures tend to fail

This all makes for a tremendously confusing voting experience for most Californians.

That’s probably bad news for the supporters of these measures, since uncertain voters tend to err on the side of “no,” said Mark Baldassare, survey director at the Public Policy Institute of California.

“When voters aren’t sure how to proceed, staying with the status quo and letting someone else decide at a later date is a safe bet,” he said.

That may partly explain why tax measures, which are inherently complicated and tend to come with unpredictable consequences, fare especially poorly on the ballot. Since 2000, a solid majority (57%) of non-tax ballot measures have passed compared to a mere third of tax propositions.

The sheer number of open questions surrounding the proposed wealth tax (Is it constitutional? Can the state effectively implement it? Will all the billionaires flee to Florida?) puts it on shakier footing with an electorate that tends to reject uncertainty, said Baldassare. A narrow majority of 52% percent of likely voters said they supported the measure in a recent PPIC poll.

The tax on high earners in Prop. 3, may face better odds because it makes permanent an existing tax rather than introducing a new one. In the same poll, 58% of likely voters indicated that they would support the measure.

“When people see the words ‘renew’ or ‘extend’ it gives them a sense that this is the status quo, we’re not being asked to make a change here,” he said.

But Prop. 3’s backers shouldn’t take too much comfort in that. Support for propositions tend to decline as Election Day approaches. The sheer number of tax measures on offer could also inflict voters with “tax fatigue” leading them to vote “no” across the board, said Baldassare.

Then there’s the general political vibe.

Earlier this year, PPIC asked a sample of Californians whether they preferred lower taxes and fewer services or higher taxes and more services.

Fifty-five percent said they’d prefer the lower tax bill.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

Food assistance to pay for groceries is still available to many low-income California families who receive summer food assistance for their kids.

Nearly $106 million of the federally funded SUN Bucks benefits are still unspent — but eligible families have just a few weeks left to tap the money, according to the California Department of Social Services. The benefits are only available to households that have already gotten the SUN Bucks in the mail this summer.

Families must spend the funds within 122 days of receiving them, or they expire and return to the federal government.

The program works like this: Every summer, California sends eligible low-income families electronic benefits (EBT) cards preloaded with $120 in food benefits per child. The state provides two meals a day to all public K-12 students, and the cards are meant to help families afford groceries for their kids throughout the summer when school is out.

Families receiving SUN Bucks cards have kids who are eligible for a free or reduced school lunch or who are enrolled in other assistance programs such as Medi-Cal or CalFresh. This year the state automatically mailed cards to the families of 3.8 million children.

Though the state tries to remind families about the benefits through text messages and other nudges, households sometimes still leave a lot of money on the table. Last year, nearly a quarter of the summer food benefits — $118 million — went unspent, according to records from the Department of Social Services obtained by New York-based public policy consultant David Rubel and shared with CalMatters. And nearly a fifth of cards mailed out last year were never activated by the recipients.

Many of the cards this year haven’t expired yet because California mailed SUN Bucks to families in different batches throughout the summer. If a family got a card in mid-June, they may only have a couple of weeks left to use the benefits. The last cards were mailed out in late July and expire in mid-November.

If a family receives both SUN Bucks and the traditional CalFresh food assistance program, Social Services spokesperson Jason Montiel says the state recommends they use the SUN Bucks first because they expire soon.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.