[Bdhclof2006]

What chemically allows paint to  adhere to tape over spray paint?

Example: While spray painting a cardboard box that had leftover packing tape on it, I noticed the spray paint would just drip off. Thinking to myself.."this just won't work!" I then started to paint the remaining boxes....and guess what !?!?!! The paint stuck with no problem. Covering the entire box, tape and all.

[Borek]

You should start looking for intermolecular forces, hydrophobicity and hydrophilicity. The answer is somewhere there and it is not about a specific chemical, rather about properties that are shared by quite a large groups of compounds.