UPDATED: "I voted!" but, does it matter when billionaires can buy elections?

 

UPDATED: Nov. 2 to clarify the conclusion urging Asian American voters to take part in the democratic process.

I voted early to avoid the rush on Election Day, Nov. 2 by dropping off my ballot in a Drop Box.  The next day I got an email from the Secretary of State telling me that my ballot had been received. Easy! 

However ... here's my concern: If you want a masterclass in how hyper-concentrated wealth can casually hijack a democratic system, look no further than California’s November ballot.

I'm deeply troubled by the huge amount of money being spent to defeat Proposition 40, the Billionaires' tax. According to media reports, the campaign against the wealth tax has rapidly escalated into one of the most expensive ballot initiative fights in California history. 

The polls appear to indicate that the $333 million being spent by the 70-o-so billionaires against the measure has succeeded in confusing enough of the electorate that the proposition will probably be defeated Tuesday.

FYI: Consult official election materials and California voter guides for a comprehensive overview of the upcoming ballot measures, polling numbers, and constitutional amendments.

Designed by progressive advocates to raise an estimated $100 billion to backfill Donald Trump's cuts to healthcare, education, and food assistance, the measure has instead triggered a multi-million dollar defensive playbook by the state's ultra-rich.

Seeing how successful the uber-rich have influenced the Donald Trump administration,  California's billionaires are  following that federal blueprint. Here is exactly how billionaire money is reshaping the race, flipping the polls, and setting a dangerous blueprint for the future of direct democracy.

1. The raw math of soft power

A political action committee named Building a Better California has raised over $333 million to defeat the measure. The donor list reads like a Silicon Valley directory: Google co-founder Sergey Brin personally dropped more than $100 million. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, venture capitalist John Doerr, Stripe CEO Patrick Collison, and crypto executive Chris Larsen have followed suit with massive checks. Separately,cPaypal CEO Peter Thiel poured roughly $100 million into a parallel opposition committee led by the California Business Roundtable.

This isn't just about throwing money at a problem; it works. Over the summer, the tax measure enjoyed a slim majority. When you have the capital to systematically re-engineer public sentiment in a matter of weeks, "one person, one vote" starts to feel like a polite fiction.

RELATED: 

• What AAPI voters are saying about the Midterms
• How California's billionaires are playing voters

2. The weaponization of "counter-propositions"

Talk about gaming the game: The real genius — and danger — of the billionaire strategy isn’t the attack ads. It’s how they are using their wealth to alter the actual structure of the ballot.

This triggers a deep glitch in California law: if multiple conflicting propositions pass, the one with the highest number of "yes" votes supersedes the others. 

By bankrolling these companion measures, wealthy donors have built a multi-layered legal defense web. Even if regular voters approve the wealth tax, it can be legally nullified by a higher vote count on alternative propositions. 

It’s an asymmetric game where billionaires can buy extra slots on the wheel to guarantee the house always wins.

3. Divide, confuse and fracture allies

If you want to win a political war, you don't just attack your enemy — you break their alliances.

While the wealth tax is strongly championed by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and Senator Bernie Sanders, the opposition’s bottomless war chest has successfully fractured the state's traditional progressive coalition. Established progressive-leaning organizations like Planned Parenthood, the California Teachers Association, and the California Medical Association have publicly broken ranks to oppose the wealth tax.

They argue that the measure's wording is ambiguous, lacks a sustainable long-term funding mechanism, and contains loopholes that could inadvertently allow future legislatures to target retirement accounts. 

By funding the research, polling, and messaging necessary to amplify these policy flaws, billionaire-backed campaigns have effectively turned progressive allies against one another, neutralizing the grassroots power that usually drives these initiatives.

Will billionaires thwart Prop. 40, a measure meant to fund healthcare and education.

View from the Edge

Opponents of the wealth tax will tell you this is a necessary defense of California’s economic competitiveness — a justified exercise of political speech to stop a flawed policy. But step back and look at the macro picture. This fight has exposes an alarming reality: when a tiny fraction of the population possesses more capital than entire state budgets, the ballot initiative process ceases to be a tool for grassroots democracy.

Instead, it becomes a testing ground for a disturbing new blueprint. If billionaires can routinely outspend, out-maneuver, and out-organize the voting public to rewrite the rules of engagement, direct democracy stops being a mechanism of the people. It transforms into a corporate franchise where consent is manufactured, policy is bought, and the future of self-governance is effectively privatized.

But for the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community, this isn't just another political fight — it represents a profound internal fracture. The financial warfare over Prop. 40 exposes a widening chasm between working-class AAPI immigrant families who rely on the social safety net and the elite class of Silicon Valley tech executives reshaping the political landscape.

What's really scary is that the conservative-leaning 250-or-so billionaires living in the state may just be flexing their muscle. If successful in defeating or neutering Prop. 40, they likely will become more involved in politics in "guiding" California laws and policies to their liking. 

“People with wealth and extreme wealth are getting much more brazen than they used to be,” said millionaire and Prop 40 supporter Scott Ellis, in an interview with Politico. “These people have tremendous resources. They have an incredible range of choices to make, including choosing to oppose this kind of ballot measure.”

This concentration of wealth creates a stark paradox within the Asian American community. While media narratives often focus on the staggering success of South Asian and East Asian tech entrepreneurs, the reality on the ground is that the vast majority of working-class AANHPI families — particularly Southeast Asian, Pacific Islander, and newly arrived immigrants — are disproportionately vulnerable to the very cuts in healthcare and language-accessible public services that Prop 40 aims to fund.

Today it’s a wealth tax in California; tomorrow, it’s the wholesale capture of every lever of public policy. When the highest bidder gets to lock the doors behind them, the rest of us are left watching from the sidelines — waiting to see if democracy survives the auction.

Dropping a ballot in a drop box feels easy, but it won't matter much if the ballot box itself has already been stuffed and bought. Nevertheless, I still have faith that democracy can still overcome the dollars if enough voters take part in the process. Democracy is not for bystanders. Go out and vote!.

EDITOR'S NOTE: For additional commentary, news, views and chismis from an AANHPI perspective, follow me on Threads, on X, BlueSky or at the blog Views From the Edge. If you find this perspective interesting, feel free to repost.

Filipino American History Month: How Filipino farmworkers became style icons — and targets of anti-Filipino backlash

Filipino  American farmworkers didn't let their work in the fields define them.

EDITOR'S NOTE: This commentary draws on historical reporting by Ethan Johanson for the National Museum of American History, read his article here.

When we look back at the history of the early Filipino manongs — the first wave of agricultural laborers who arrived on the West Coast in the 1920s and 1930s — the conventional narrative usually focuses on backbreaking conditions. We picture men hunched over crops under a burning California sun, enduring low wages and racial slurs like "stoop labor."

But when the workday ended, these men completely transformed the narrative. They didn't just wash off the dirt; they stepped out into the streets of Stockton, San Francisco, and Watsonville dressed like Hollywood stars.

Through carefully tailored "McIntosh suits"—named after MacIntosh Studio Clothes, the San Francisco tailoring shop famous for dressing silver-screen icons—Filipino farmworkers became some of the most sharply dressed, fashion-conscious men in the country. Yet, as history shows, this undeniable charisma and sartorial elegance sparked a deep-seated panic among white establishment men, contributing to one of the darkest chapters of West Coast anti-Asian resentment.

The "McIntosh Suit" and the art of self-fashioning

As curator Ethan Johanson notes in his feature for the National Museum of American History, many Filipino farmworkers pooled their meager earnings to invest in high-end apparel. These weren't off-the-rack clothes; they were custom three-piece suits with sharp shoulders, wide lapels, high-waisted trousers, Stetson hats, and silk ties.

Influenced by Hollywood movies that had flooded the Philippines during the American colonial era, these young men brought a deep appreciation for glamour and consumer culture with them. Posing in studio portraits and taking photos beside late-1920s Ford Model A cars, they projected elegance, confidence, and cosmopolitan sophistication.

For men relegated to hard manual labor, high fashion was an act of quiet defiance. It was a refusal to be defined solely by work boots, dirt and stereotypes, asserting instead their right to leisure, self-expression, and status.

10-cents a dance 

This dedication to style naturally extended to their social lives. Excluded from many mainstream venues due to Jim Crow-style segregation laws, Filipino men gravitated toward taxi dance halls — venues where patrons paid 10-cents a dance with female dance partners, many of whom were white women.

In these dance halls, the McIntosh suit was essential attire. Filipino men were renowned for their slick dance moves, polished manners, and immaculate grooming. To many women of the era, these cologne-smelling, sharply dressed young men, represented style, vitality, and romance—a sharp contrast to the rugged, unpolished dress of many local working-class men.

However, this dynamic ignited severe racial hatred and sexual anxiety among white men on the West Coast.

View from the Edge: Zoot!

In the 1920s and 1930s, strict anti-miscegenation laws and restrictive immigration policies meant that the Filipino community was overwhelmingly male. As Filipino men formed relationships and socialized with white women at dance halls, racist fears of interracial intimacy boiled over.

The zoot suit was merely the
excuse for racist attacks.

White nativists and labor leaders frequently framed Filipino men not merely as economic competitors taking farm jobs, but as "threats" to white women and racial purity. The fact that these young immigrant men were visibly stylish, attractive, and popular in social spaces directly challenged the racial hierarchy that sought to keep them at the bottom.

This toxic mix of racial prejudice, sexual jealousy, and social anxiety culminated in violent anti-Filipino riots across California — most notably the Watsonville Riots of 1930, where mobs of white men targeted Filipino dance halls and living quarters resulting in beatings of the Filipinos and the fatal shooting of 22-year old Fermin Tobera, who was killed while sleeping in his bunkhouse.

No one was ever charged with Tobera's murder. Seven men were later convicted of rioting but received either probation or 30 days in jail.

Watsonville foreshadowed another attack on Filipino men because of their clothing. In the 1940s,the infamous Zoot Suit Riots of 1943 took place in Los Angeles. The history books describe the riots as patriots objecting to the excessive material used in the suits and pants during wartime.

The narrative is almost always framed exclusively around the clashes between white US servicemen and Mexican American pachucos. But if you look closer, you find a much broader, uglier campaign of white supremacist violence on the WWII home front. The mobs of soldiers, sailors, and off-duty police officers who tore through Los Angeles didn't just target Latino youth — they systematically hunted down Filipino and African American young adults wheter or not they were wearing a zoot suit.

The Zoot Suit Riots were fundamentally a racial witch-hunt disguised as wartime patriotism. By ignoring the Filipino and Black victims of June 1943, mainstream history sanitizes the event as an isolated "culture clash" rather than what it truly was: a coordinated, multi-ethnic assault on communities of color who dared to assert their dignity and space in wartime America.

In the 1930s and 40s, young Filipino men working grueling hours in agricultural fields and canneries used their hard-earned money to buy high-end, custom-fitted McIntosh suits. They were widely recognized as some of the sharpest-dressed men on the West Coast, frequently out-styling their white peers and commanding the dance floors of local taxi-dance halls.

Decades later, the discovery of 26 steamer trunks in the basement of Stockton's Daguhoy Lodge — including the trunk of farmworker Anastacio Atig Omandam —brought this history back into the light. Alongside work tools, Omandam’s trunk contained his monogrammed three-piece suits and ties, perfectly preserved.

As featured in the museum's exhibition How Can You Forget Me: Filipino American Stories, these garments tell a complex story. The McIntosh suit wasn't just a fashion statement; it was a symbol of pride, desire, and resistance. By daring to look good and live fully, early Filipino Americans claimed space, defied stereotypes, and carved out an unforgettable legacy in American history.

EDITOR'S NOTE: For additional commentary, news, views and chismis from an AANHPI perspective, follow me on Threads, on X, BlueSky or at the blog Views From the Edge. If you find this perspective interesting, feel free to repost.