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.
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.
The assessment process is notoriously unfair toward poor and minority homeowners, who are forced to pay higher taxes relative to home values than their wealthier, whiter neighbors. Nationally, the poorest fifth of Americans pay more than 4 percent of their income in property taxes each year, while the richest 1 percent pay less than 2 percent.
Until progressives—and, especially, Democratic elected officials—take voters’ frustrations with the property tax seriously and work to make local taxes fairer and more equitable, the threat of right-led tax revolts in times of economic uncertainty will remain.
In response, voters rejected school bond measures at an unprecedented rate. Nationwide, bond approval rates fell from over 70 percent in the early 1960s to less than 50 percent by the mid-1970s. Surveys consistently pointed to pocketbook pressures and frustration over the loopholes and hidden tax breaks enjoyed by the wealthy and well-connected as the driving forces. Grassroots activists on the left sensed an opportunity to channel voter discontent into a movement for progressive tax reform.
In Chicago, Saul Alinsky’s Citizens Action Program targeted the outrageous undertaxation of the city’s largest industrial properties, which had left the city’s coffers bare and forced the poor to pick up the check. The group demanded tax relief for poor and working-class neighborhoods and reinvestment in struggling schools and public services.
That December, on the two-hundredth anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, organizers and activists from a broad cross-section of the progressive left converged on Philadelphia for the first T.E.A., or Tax Equity for America, Party convention. There they outlined an agenda that included repealing sales taxes on food, drugs, and other basic necessities; reforming property assessments for accuracy, transparency, and targeted tax relief; and passing state and local corporate and progressive income taxes.
Liberal Democrats’ failure to respond to voters’ demands for tax justice created an opening for the political right to offer the half-loaf of tax cuts. In 1978, anti-tax crusaders Howard Jarvis and Paul Gann put before California voters Proposition 13, an extreme across-the-board reduction in local property taxes, coupled with strict limits on future assessment and tax rate increases. For most Californians, it was the only meaningful relief on offer—albeit in the form of a measure that promised to deliver its greatest benefits to the state’s wealthiest residents and most profitable corporations.
Other states soon followed with their own measures restricting local governments’ ability to raise assessments or tax rates, including Massachusetts, where voters approved Proposition 2½ in 1980. An adviser to Boston Mayor Kevin White explained afterward that “the people were very patient waiting for the political leadership to do something.” With lawmakers unwilling to act, Prop 2½ “was the only tool [voters] had.”
But conservatives were quick to claim Prop 13 as a mandate for their own agenda. Reagan, whose Prop 1 had been rejected by voters just five years earlier, now argued that it had been “an idea whose time had not quite arrived.” Soon he was pitching upwardly skewed federal income and capital gains tax cuts as extensions of Prop 13. “What these Republican proposals in Washington have in common with Proposition 13 here in California is that they are aimed at economic growth,” Reagan said. Few Democrats pushed back, and the press largely accepted the right’s reading of the vote.
The forgotten origins of the 1970s tax revolts offer crucial lessons for progressives and the left today. But based on the initial response to these latest stirrings of revolt, we are not confident that liberals have absorbed them.
The reasons today are much the same as they were in the 1970s. In an inflationary era, home values have outstripped both overall price increases and working- and middle-class wages, which, after a short period of relatively strong growth, have stalled again.
Today’s tax revolts should be seen not simply as a threat but also as an opportunity for the left. While orchestrated by anti-tax extremists intent on defunding the state, these campaigns consistently draw their support from average Americans with pocketbook concerns and valid frustrations at a patently unfair tax system. Those voters should not be mocked and dismissed as selfish adversaries but embraced as potential allies, whose mounting anger can—and should—be channeled into a movement for structural reform.
For any of this to happen, though, Democrats must avoid the mistakes of the 1970s. Dismissing the property tax revolt won’t make it go away. It’ll merely cede the revolt—and the voters behind it—to the right, as Democrats did half a century ago.
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