Democrats had a big night on Tuesday. If you stop at the top of the ticket, you’d think the country swung hard left. Keep reading down the ballot, however, and the picture is murkier. As the Washington Post’s Editorial Board points out, in some states, voters who wanted a check on Trump and republicans also want a check on the taxing power of the states.
This distinction matters. A vote against a president is a vote against a president. In some not insignificant cases, voters have shown that it is not a mandate for wealth taxes or bigger government.
The Post’s examples are worth listing:
North Carolinians capped their income-tax rates. The state elected Democrat Roy Cooper to the U.S. Senate and, on the same ballot, put a 3.5% ceiling on personal and corporate income-tax rates into its constitution. The rate drops to 3.49% next year, so the cap protects cuts already on the books. Voters also required the legislature to cap how fast total local property-tax collections can rise by restraining the overall burden without the distortions of assessment caps.
Iowans made it harder to hike state income taxes. They elected a Democratic governor and senator, but the voters approved a constitutional amendment requiring a two-thirds vote to raise income-tax rates. It passed with 56%. As the Post notes, Iowa has gone from nine brackets and a top rate of 8.53% in 2019 to a flat 3.8% today, and voters want to keep it that way.
Wisconsin went after the governor’s veto pen when applied to tax hikes. According to The Post, voters appeared ready to bar the governor from using the line-item veto to raise taxes, a direct response to Tony Evers using it to authorize school district tax increases for 400 years (see below for explanation).
The Post’s list leaves out some of the night’s other results. Here’s what else passed, based on other reporting:
Californians rejected the wealth tax itself. Proposition 40 would have taken 5% of the net worth of every resident worth $1 billion or more, allegedly only once. In the bluest large state in the country, voters rejected this soak-the-rich scheme by about 13 points. The state also adopted a constitutional measure to make it very difficult to adopt wealth taxes and retroactive taxes in the future. Prop 42 bars the state from creating new taxes on what people own, from retirement accounts and savings to stock and business stakes. It also forbids taxes that reach back to hit people for where they lived or what they held before the law passed. It won with roughly 55%. Adopting Prop 42 is a big deal.
Arizonans overwhelmingly voted to cap grocery taxes. Under Prop 316, cities can’t add or raise taxes on food without a public vote, and the rate tops out at 2%.
Of course, there was some bad news on the fiscal ballot box. As Jared Walczak of the Tax Foundation notes, Colorado looks poised to drop its flat tax for graduated rates, California made its surcharge on top earners permanent, and the State of Washington kept its millionaires tax. Utah and California voters also turned down measures that would have raised the bar for approving tax increases at the ballot box.
Walczak’s overall conclusion is that voters were cautious about sweeping tax changes no matter which party proposed them. The new Democratic U.S. Congress should take note.
PS: I was confused by the Wisconsin 400-year authorization mentioned in the Washington Post article, so I asked ChatGPT what that was about. Here is the answer:
This refers to a remarkable use of the governor’s veto power in Wisconsin.
In 2023, Democratic Governor Tony Evers used his line-item veto to extend the duration of a school funding provision from two years to 402 years.
Here’s what happened.
Wisconsin governors have unusually broad line-item veto powers. Rather than simply approving or rejecting an entire spending provision, they can strike individual numbers and words from certain budget bills.
The Republican-controlled legislature had approved a provision allowing school districts to increase their revenue limits by $325 per pupil annually for the 2023–24 and 2024–25 school years.
Evers used his veto pen to delete certain digits and punctuation, transforming the end date from 2024–25 to 2424–25.
That effectively extended the annual $325-per-pupil increase in school district revenue limits until the year 2425.
Because school districts can levy property taxes to fund spending within those limits, the maneuver potentially allowed higher property taxes for centuries without another legislative authorization.
The important distinction is that Evers did not directly impose a 400-year tax. He gave school districts the authority to increase revenue limits, which could translate into higher property taxes.
And voters have now acted. On November 3, 2026, Wisconsin voters approved a constitutional amendment, approximately 51% to 49%, prohibiting governors from using partial vetoes to create or increase taxes or fees.
However, the amendment does not undo Evers’s original 400-year veto. It restricts future governors.
From a constitutional perspective, the controversy is about much more than school funding. It raises a fundamental separation-of-powers question: Should an executive be able to transform a temporary spending authorization into a centuries-long commitment simply by deleting a few characters from legislation?