Voters rejected both of SEIU boss Dave Regan’s proposals: a billionaire wealth tax and a measure to punish community health clinics resistant to unionizing.
During their postelection podcast this week, NR’s editors offered their nominations for Tuesday’s biggest winners and losers. Their choices were national, of course, and not state actors. In that latter category, California’s Dave Regan — the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) boss behind the billionaire wealth-tax measure and a separate proposition that would punish community health clinics that refuse voluntarily to unionize their employees — is among the cycle’s biggest losers.
Here’s the backstory: The Supreme Court’s 2018 Janus decision (the one that says governments can’t require employees to join a union) dealt a serious blow to California’s government unions, and the SEIU is still feeling it in the kishkes. Nearly 50 percent of SEIU Local 1000 members have dropped out since 2018, with a commensurate drop in inflation-adjusted dues collections. That’s what your Wall Street guys (and average citizens) might call a “financial crisis.”
In addition (and related) to the dramatic revenue decline, the SEIU’s troubles now include its inability to control Regan, boss of the union’s health-care affiliate. Despite opposition from other government unions (especially the teachers’ unions, who view any threat to the state’s income-tax revenue as existential), Regan took two expensive schemes to voters Tuesday: Proposition 44 would have imposed punishing financial penalties on nonprofit community health clinics; Proposition 40 would have taxed billionaires to (Regan claimed) pump billions into health-care programs employing SEIU members. On Tuesday, California voters rejected both — Prop. 40 trails by about ten points today; Prop. 44 is losing by a remarkable 82 percent to 18 percent.
Wipeouts like these are rare on the California left. Regan owns both. And his terrible 2026 isn’t over: A federal racketeering lawsuit alleges that he offered to drop Prop. 44 if health clinics helped him organize 25,000 workers, potentially worth $28 million a year in union dues. (Regan denies the allegations.) So, Regan spent some $40 million of his members’ money pursuing ill-advised ballot measures. He will now likely spend millions more defending himself in a federal court.
And this week’s longshot winner? That’d be Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Hoover economists Joshua Rauh and Benjamin Jaros challenged the union’s calculation showing that taxing billionaire assets would generate $100 billion in new, one-time revenue; Rauh and Jaros concluded that the tax would actually lose California nearly $39 billion over time as wealthy taxpayers fled the state — and took their future income-tax payments and business payrolls with them.
Billionaires deployed millions against the wealth tax, as did other government unions and Governor Gavin Newsom. These players have little else in common, but they agreed that California couldn’t tax its way to prosperity by driving away the people who help create it. Regan managed to unite people who might otherwise never agree on lunch.