"Only a Large Majority Now Supports Plan, Down From Ginormous Majority!"

I'm writing this post primarily because I think the gist of this article is nuts.  From Chris Megerian and Evan Halper in the L.A. Times, here's the headline:

Support Slips for Brown's Tax Hike

Uh oh! California has a terrible budget problem caused in large part to the basic fact that the legislature keeps spending money without casting the politically perilous votes to raise taxes.  So this year the powers that be have decided to put the onus of a tax hike on the voters themselves.  Proposition 30, backed by Governor Jerry Brown, is one solution that was engineered to affect only the rich and be just modest enough to win a statewide vote, and there are many funding initiatives (like higher education funding) that are tied to it.  So if it goes down, California suffers fiscal-cliff-like spending cuts.  Here's the subheadline:

Backing for Prop. 30 drops to 55% amid concerns about the way lawmakers spend money, poll finds

Wait, 55% is still definitely a solid majority.  Barack Obama is polling about 55% in the latest polls, so 55% is a great number.  But I guess we could be in some sort of transition phase, like what happened in Oklahoma in 2010 with State Question 744, which at one time had polled at 65% in favor to 21% opposed but which ended up cratering 19% for to 81% against on election day.  Is that what's going on here?

... a drop from May, when 59% supported it.

That's ... not that much of a difference.  Four points is not nothing, but the tone of the article makes it sound much more dire.  Maybe the no-votes are rising?  There were 36% opposed in May.

The new poll shows 36% of voters opposed, with the remainder undecided.

So, unchanged. This means the proposition supporters are still leading opponents by a whopping 19 points, 55% to 36%.  

The findings suggest that voters are leery of sending more cash to Sacramento in the wake of a financial scandal at the parks department, spiraling costs for a multibillion-dollar high-speed rail project to connect Northern and Southern California and ill-timed legislative pay raises.

Translation: 4% of voters may be leery of Republican talking points. 

Sixty-three percent of independent voters approve.

Yeah, going down in flames then.