Adam N. Michel
Republicans repeatedly tried to buy votes this election cycle. It doesn’t seem to have worked. But the wide margins for Democrats in the House and Senate also didn’t come with strong support for new and significantly higher taxes. If anything, the lesson is the opposite.
The most memorable recent example of attempted vote buying was President Trump’s promise to send every adult citizen $5,000 if Republicans kept Congress. This $1.2 trillion promise was never a serious gambit, but it illustrates how Trump and some in his Republican Party think about policymaking.
Using the fiscal system to reward political constituencies is a losing strategy, particularly for Republicans. One problem is that Democrats can always outbid them. For example, Republicans touted the $200 increase to the child tax credit in the 2025 tax and spending reconciliation bill; however, $200 seems paltry compared to the more than $1,600 increase many Democrats want to restore from the one-year 2021 COVID-19 expansion.
In addition to expanding existing tax programs, Trump ran his 2024 campaign on adding new deductions for tips, overtime, car loan interest, and seniors. The massive 2025 reconciliation bill delivered all four. There is little evidence any of these helped his party in the election.
In Nevada, where tipped workers make up a nationally high share of employment and where Trump first announced his “no tax on tips” proposal, Democrats are projected to hold their three House seats and pick up the fourth open Republican seat.
Similarly, voters over age 65 backed Republicans in the last two election cycles. This year, despite the new $6,000 senior deduction, they broke 6 points for Democrats.
One of the biggest fights in the 2025 tax package was over lifting the $10,000 cap on federal deductibility of state and local taxes (SALT). Ultimately, the so-called “SALT caucus,” which included members from New York, California, New Jersey, and other higher-tax states, secured a temporarily higher SALT cap of $40,000. Reps. Mike Lawler (R‑NY). whom the president calls “Mr. SALT,” and Tom Kean Jr. (R‑NJ) are projected to lose. And the margins for others who won reelection, including Reps. Nick LaLota (R‑NY) and Chris Smith (R‑NJ), were much closer than in 2024 and what markets predicted a few days out from the election.
It wasn’t just targeted tax cuts that were on the ballot; Trump’s taxes on trade were also a key election concern. As Cato’s Alfredo Carrillo Obregon noted before Tuesday’s vote, high tariffs are bad politics, and after two years of Trump’s policies, “most Americans disapprove of tariffs or blame them for raising prices and the cost of living.”
The state results generally point to a similar skepticism toward new and higher taxes. Most notably, in California, the billionaire wealth tax appears to have been voted down. As of this writing, Proposition 40 trails the new Democratic governor’s vote share by almost 20 percentage points. Projections indicate that voters in North Carolina, Florida, and Iowa approved new limits or exemptions from income and property taxes. However, similar measures didn’t fare well everywhere, such as in Oklahoma and Wyoming.
In Colorado, the results are harder to interpret. It looks like Amendment 87 will narrowly pass, overturning the state’s flat tax and replacing it with a graduated income tax. As I’ve written before, flat taxes are protective against future tax increases and boost growth. Amendment 87 overturns those protections and raises top marginal income tax rates. But supporters sold the measure as a tax cut, a marginal tax cut for people earning less than half a million dollars. However voters interpreted it, the amendment will just barely pass and is running about 10 points behind the Democratic governor.
Whether Democrat or Republican, it seems that both targeted tax policy and new taxes are broadly unpopular with voters, or at least those policies cannot overcome bigger political forces. Policymakers would do well to return to a tax agenda that lowers rates by eliminating special treatment so that similar people are taxed similarly.
