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 assessments lag the market, many homeowners are only now feeling the full force of a housing boom that has already cooled.
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.
Unlike most other taxes, the property tax is routinely put before voters, who decide on local levies and bonds. Voting down a property tax levy is one of the few ways to win a measure of direct financial relief at the ballot box. But none of the measures on the ballot this fall will offer much relief to those who need it most, and most of them promise to make things even worse for localities already struggling with their own inflationary cost pressures.
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.
We’ve been here before. In the early 1970s, just as America entered a period of prolonged economic stagnation, local property taxes soared relative to incomes for middle- and working-class households. At the same time, a bevy of scandals and investigations pulled back the curtain on rampant corruption and favoritism in local tax offices.
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.
Ralph Nader understood why the property tax had become the lightning rod. Because it was the only tax voters could regularly approve or reject, it had “borne the brunt of taxpayer dissatisfaction with the increasing unfairness of the entire tax structure,” the consumer advocate told Congress in 1972. Nader’s Tax Reform Research Group became a clearinghouse for the scores of public interest groups descending on local tax offices to expose the breaks enjoyed by the wealthy and the ruinously high burdens imposed on everyone else.
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.
In March 1973, the anti-poverty activist George Wiley launched the Movement for Economic Justice. “I believe today we need a taxpayer’s revolt,” he declared—one aimed at “the real chiselers,” the “multi-billion dollar corporations and very wealthy individuals [who] do not pay their fair share.”
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.
The Democratic Party establishment was largely absent from this movement for tax justice. George McGovern ran ads during his 1972 presidential campaign promising relief from unfair property taxes. But after his landslide defeat, most Democrats beat a hasty retreat from economic populism and redistributive politics, just as voter anger over regressive local taxes was cresting. In their place, they embraced the corporate-friendly, pro-growth policies that would later define the “New Democrat” movement. In California and Massachusetts, Democratic Governors Jerry Brown and Michael Dukakis rebuffed the grassroots left’s calls for reform while homeowners stewed in rage over property taxes that soared throughout the decade.
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.
Californians had been patient. Democrats had urged them to hold out for a fairer, more progressive plan, and they had obliged, soundly defeating nearly identical tax limitation initiatives led by Los Angeles County assessor Philip Watson in 1968 and 1972, along with Ronald Reagan’s Proposition 1 in 1973. Their ideology hadn’t changed since then, but their economic circumstances had. So voters took what they could get: Prop 13 passed with nearly two-thirds of the vote.
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.”
Studies conducted at the time found that, by and large, anger over taxes was not ideological. Voters’ views on taxes and spending had barely budged since Prop 1’s defeat. They did not want to “starve the beast.” Even most Prop 13 supporters opposed cuts to all but a handful of services, and many wanted more spending on schools, police, and fire protection. And while many middle-class whites traded in racist caricatures of welfare recipients and, when asked, tended to support cuts to social services for the poor, they expressed even stronger support for raising taxes on the wealthy.
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.
What began as a revolt against a tax system that rewarded the rich and punished the poor culminated in Reagan’s election to the presidency. He then enacted massive tax cuts for the wealthy and deep cuts in federal aid to cities and public schools, and presided over eight years of soaring inequality. Ultimately, Republicans used the 1970s tax revolt to exacerbate the very inequities that had fueled it.
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.
Media coverage and commentary have tended to focus on the political extremists pushing these ballot initiatives, while characterizing their supporters as selfish baby boomers seeking to tear up the social contract. Property tax defenders, meanwhile, have sought to remind voters of the essential goods and services that local property taxes fund: schools, fire and police protection, water and sewer systems, streets, and sidewalks. But few have acknowledged, or taken steps to address, why property taxes fall hardest on middle- and lower-income households, and why Americans feel that they’re paying more for local government while getting less in return.
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.
In the ’70s, the culprits were corrupt assessors who handed out obscenely low valuations on the most valuable properties. Today, it’s cities subsidizing real estate developers through tax increment financing and handing generous tax breaks to data centers, both of which shrink local tax bases and shift the costs of local government onto everyone else. It’s a tax appeals process designed by and for large real estate owners and their attorneys, who use it to win ever-larger reductions, while it remains virtually inaccessible to those most unfairly overtaxed. It’s a local political culture that caters to corporations and mobile capital and asks little in return. And it’s the steady withdrawal of federal and state support for local governments and schools. That process began under Reagan and, with a brief exception during the Covid pandemic, has continued ever since, leaving localities to fend for themselves. In short, average Americans are paying more, and local governments are still coming up short, because the wealthy are paying so little.
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.
Democrats have tools at their disposal to counter Republicans’ attempt to co-opt the tax revolt. Circuit breakers, which cap property taxes as a share of income, can better align the property tax with ability to pay. While most states offer some type of circuit breaker, only seven states plus the District of Columbia extend them to homeowners and renters of all ages, and few are generous enough to offer meaningful relief to low- and middle-income residents. The federal mortgage interest and state and local tax, or SALT, deductions, which currently flow primarily to upper-income taxpayers, could be refashioned into progressive, refundable credits. Most ambitiously, policymakers could restore the property tax’s original reach as a tax on all forms of wealth, not just the home. That ambition foundered in the nineteenth century largely because local assessors couldn’t track stocks and bonds. Those hurdles are far lower today. Florida taxed intangible assets like stocks and bonds as recently as 2006. Today, the bigger obstacle is political will.
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.
