A Good Start to a Bad Ballot Election Season

Historically Bad Tax Measures are on Statewide Ballots, but Results in Missouri Show the Tax Justice Movement is Here to Stay

By Jeron Mariani, SRA Campaigns Director

The summer is nearly over, but there’s no doubt this is a breakthrough year for revenue campaigns and advocacy as states move to raise taxes on the wealthy. 

Predictably, we also face a fierce reaction from anti-tax advocates. 

For many years, politicians have been feeding tax cuts for the wealthy into their state’s ballot initiative process. Designed to be boring, these ballot questions sound innocuous and measured – reducing a percentage here, a higher valuation limit there – at least in terms of taxes, politicians have found that voters rarely rally against the seemingly mundane.

In stark contrast to the usual playbook, this year’s crop of tax ballot initiatives is anything but measured. They are uniquely brazen, undemocratic, costly, and dangerous, and often make it nearly impossible for voters or future politicians to undo. The worst tax changes of the year will appear on ballots across the country.

That’s why we are proud to support outstanding Missouri partners who united to defeat Amendment 5. They did everything possible to protect their neighbors, communities, and the state’s future by educating, organizing events, and showing broad and diverse opposition.  

Amendment 5 would have been the first time that voters effectively scrapped their income tax in favor of enormous increases in the sales tax. 

A victory in Missouri isn’t just an awesome way to start the countdown to November 3. The margin and breadth of Amendment 5’s defeat is a hopeful sign for the Fall when anti-tax measures from Iowa to Florida and from North Carolina to Washington will be on the ballot.

SRA maintains a database of revenue and tax ballot initiatives, measures, and constitutional questions. We took a look and found that Amendment 5 is the worst-performing major tax ballot in at least 14 years (that’s as far back as our records go)!

• Nationally, 26 other ballots have a margin over 61% since 2012

  • None were major battles or even contested  – ALL were minor tax rate and technical changes. 

  • Amendment 5 is the worst defeat for any income tax ballot.

  • No Missouri county voted yes on Amendment 5; only 1 county voted NO by less than a 52% margin.

The numbers from August 4 are remarkable, a close-to-being-unbelievable result. So, check out the details if that’s your thing: here are county-level results for Amendment 5 and all state ballots that had at least a 61% margin. 

Including Amendment 5, we believe 2026 ballot measures that propose cutting taxes represent at least $20 billion in direct or potential lost public revenue each year, while several would make it significantly harder for future generations to reverse course, either through ballot initiative or legislative means.

Here’s a quick rundown of the threats on November ballots. 

• Getting a lot of attention is Florida's Amendment 3. It would cost $12 billion a year and could permanently reduce local governments' ability to function or provide safety and emergency services.

• Perennial anti-tax ballot activists and billionaires are bankrolling initiatives in Washington state that would repeal recent progressive tax increases. 

• The North Carolina legislature, potentially sensing an electoral loss in November, has steamrolled incompatible income tax and property tax measures that tie the hands of both state and local governments to respond to budget pressures.

• In California, there’s a 3-pack of cynical ballot initiatives that would create incredibly difficult obstacles to raising revenue in the future.  Propositions 41, 42 and 43 are all troubling examples of how the ultra-wealthy can manipulate the citizen-led ballot process for their own benefit, and if either passes by a higher margin, props 41 and 42 would fully cancel out Proposition 40’s temporary wealth tax to fund health care. 

• In various ways, Colorado, Iowa, Oklahoma, North and South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and Wyoming voters will be asked to cut property taxes by hundreds of millions of dollars or raise barriers to future revenue increases, making it more difficult for future legislatures to respond to changing economic realities.

Any one of these would be a national story in a normal election year. But in this moment–with federal “One Big Beautiful Bill” fallout putting state budgets in a bind at the same time that the state tax justice movement grows in strength–these pernicious ballot efforts signal that something has changed. 

Corporate lobbyists and their politician friends worry that without these disingenuous, restrictive ballot pushes, communities may keep driving successful efforts to make state codes fairer and more equitable. 

In this context, politicians' efforts to starve state budgets and pursue deep tax cuts to lure billionaires are not just ill-advised and set their states up for future fiscal crises, but also as the Missouri results prove, tone-deaf and out of touch with their communities. 

Voters are not falling for it and recognize that governing requires offering solutions, not slogans.