Another Right-Wing Tax Revolt Is Brewing. Will the Dems Blow It Again?: As Americans head to the polls, their list of grievances reads like a dispatch from the 1970s: an unpopular president, a conflict with Iran, soaring prices at the pump, persistent inflation, and stagnant wages. Add the decidedly twenty-first-century menace of AI, which threatens to take our jobs, raise our water and energy bills, and possibly kill us all, and it’s no wonder Americans are mad as hell. And just as in the ’70s, many are channeling that anger at a familiar target: the local property tax.
This fall, voters in seven states—Wyoming, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Tennessee, and North Carolina—will decide on a dozen ballot measures, most of which would either limit property tax assessment and rate increases or expand the number of exemptions for property owners. These initiatives come on the heels of property tax cuts or caps enacted by 11 states in 2026 alone, as well as a growing movement to eliminate the property tax entirely. This is a worrying trend that the Democratic Party, in particular, will have to contend with very soon.
The property tax is easy to hate. It is America’s only broad-based tax on wealth, and it centers on the home, which is not only the physical and symbolic heart of the middle-class “ownership society” but also the largest store of middle-class wealth. In other words, ordinary homeowners pay a wealth tax every year, at a time when billionaires are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to avoid one on their exploding fortunes.
It is also the only tax that a person might literally be unable to pay. Income and sales taxes are paid out of money already in hand. The property tax is owed on an asset, not on income. Particularly in times of rapidly appreciating home values, the only way to pay it may be to sell the very thing being taxed.
What someone owes in property taxes bears no relation to their ability to pay. The pandemic-era run-up in home prices pushed the median single-family property tax bill up by roughly a quarter between 2019 and 2023, and because… https://newrepublic.com/article/217165/property-taxes-midterm-ballot-right-wing-revolt