Despite the blue wave that swept the nation on Tuesday, voters were more cautious about making sweeping changes to their taxes.

Most states with tax policy on the ballot saw voters reject large-scale change, though some passed smaller changes or reined in officials’ ability to make changes.

“Even though there are big political shifts on the federal level, people are generally feeling the same about taxes as they always have,” said Janelle Fritts, senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan analysis and research organization.

One of the biggest examples: California’s much-discussed billionaire wealth tax looked likely to fail, with a ‘no’ vote of more than 55% by Wednesday morning. Proposition 40 is a measure no other state has tried: a one-time 5% tax on billionaires’ net worth to raise tens of billions to close budget holes in the state’s Medicaid, food assistance, education and other programs.

Opposition, led by California billionaires including Google co-founder Sergey Brin, raised more than $379 million to defeat the measure, outspending its supporters more than 250-1, The Washington Post reported.

But the campaign spending alone may not have fully accounted for its failure, Fritts said.

“The specific proposal had a lot of really strange structural issues,” she said, noting that it would have retroactively applied to any California resident who was a billionaire as of Jan. 1, 2026, and that it taxed everything a billionaire owned — from cars and yachts to art and collectibles — some of which could be difficult to place a value on.

“When people started understanding what was really in the bill, I think that was a deterrent,” she said. She expects it could influence similar efforts in other states to tax the wealthy.

Proponents of California’s billionaire wealth tax have already promised to try again.

Washington state voters appeared to be choosing to keep the state’s new millionaire tax, as a ballot initiative to repeal it was failing 58% to 42% by Wednesday morning. Earlier this year, Washington’s Democratic-led state legislature created a 9.9% tax on annual incomes above $1 million. The repeal measure, which failed to garner support in the state’s population centers, was a political victory for its champion, Democratic Gov. Bob Ferguson, according to the Washington State Standard.

“Washingtonians understood one thing,” Ferguson told a gathering hosted by a campaign opposing the measure, the Washington State Standard reported. “We’re not going to give tax breaks to millionaires when we can use those dollars to make life more affordable for working families all across the state.”

In Colorado, a sweeping income tax change remained too close to call Wednesday, though ‘yes’ votes had a slight lead. Amendment 87, if it passes, would hike taxes on the state’s highest-income households, and cut taxes for nearly everyone else by replacing the state’s flat 4.4% tax.

A ballot measure that would block Amendment 87 appeared short of the majority needed to pass, while a legislatively-referred measure to raise the revenue the state is allowed to keep appeared likely to pass.

Property tax wins, losses

Voters in Florida showed an appetite for change, overwhelmingly approving a constitutional amendment that will make one of the most significant alterations to their property taxes in decades.

Amendment 3 will gradually reduce Floridians’ property taxes — aside from those that benefit public schools — by increasing the state’s homestead exemption. That will let homeowners cut their property tax bills by exempting a bigger share of their home’s value from taxation.

The state GOP endorsed the amendment, but other groups — including law enforcement, child welfare advocates and municipal government officials — say it would blow a massive hole in local governments’ budgets. Florida’s state and local coffers could take a hit of up to $12 billion each year beginning in 2031, according to state projections.

“It will be a pretty big challenge for local governments,” Fritts said. “They’re going to have to shift a lot of things around.

“Not a lot of other states were willing to take as big a swing on property taxes as Florida,” she said.

Oklahoma voters rejected a measure that would have capped annual increases in property taxes. The state legislature proposed the initiative to address rising costs, but critics said it would hurt funding for public schools and other services. The state estimated local governments would have lost nearly $46 million in property tax revenue in the first year, had it passed.

Oklahoma House Speaker Kyle Hilbert, a Republican, said Tuesday night that the vote showed that Oklahomans “don’t want to see changes to property taxes, and so moving forward, we’ll take that into consideration,” the Oklahoma Voice reported.

In Wyoming, voters defeated a property tax cut initiative that would have exempted half of a primary residence’s assessed value from being taxed. Had it passed, Proposition 1 could have decreased the state’s annual property tax revenues up to $124.8 million, WyoFile reported. The initiative was opposed by a variety of groups including state hospital and education associations, as well as some Republican and Democratic officials.

Reining in government power

In North Carolina, voters approved both tax-related constitutional amendments.

The most controversial, which passed with 60% of the vote, will cap how much cities and other local governments can grow their revenue. It was a priority for Republican leadership focused on addressing constituent complaints over rising prices.

But critics say the new limits could torpedo local budgets, forcing local governments to cut services including public safety, libraries, parks and education, NC Newsline reported.

North Carolinians also approved a new maximum state income tax rate of 3.5% in a Republican-backed constitutional amendment that caps the rate for personal and corporate income taxes. Critics have said it will cement tax cuts that mainly benefit the wealthy and corporations.

An Iowa constitutional amendment to make it harder for state legislators to tinker with taxes looked as though it would pass. The GOP-backed measure would require a two-thirds supermajority of state lawmakers to raise personal or corporate income taxes.

The Iowa Capital Dispatch reported that Republican supporters argued the restriction was needed to preserve tax policies including 2025’s 3.8% flat-rate income tax.

But critics said it would lock in unsustainable tax cuts that mostly benefit Iowa’s wealthier households and could push the state to raise other taxes when it needs revenue, such as sales tax increases that have a bigger impact on low- and middle-income families.

In Massachusetts, a ballot measure that would change how the state’s tax revenue limit is calculated was still too close to call as of Wednesday morning. Current state law caps how much tax revenue the state can keep each year, and any extra beyond the cap is refunded to taxpayers as credits. But if voters approve the ballot measure, taxpayers would be more likely to get money back in a given year. Proponents say it would slow down state spending, while opponents have said it leaves less money available for public services.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

This year’s statewide ballot measures are written, on average, at a graduate-school reading level, according to a new report.

The readability of 2026’s ballot questions — which ask voters to weigh in on issues as varied as abortion, property taxes, voter ID and firearms — varies by state, political data tracking nonprofit Ballotpedia found in its newest Ballot Measure Readability Report.

The report analyzes the level of education voters would need to understand the titles and summaries of the measures put before them. Because ballot measures are often lengthy and full of legal language, states write shorter titles to be published on the ballot for voters to read.

Many of this year’s ballot measures don’t include summaries to supplement the titles. And many voters don’t read beyond a measure’s title before deciding how to vote, Ballotpedia researchers note.

This year, 164 measures have been or will be on the ballot across 40 states. The titles average a reading level requiring 17 years of education, which corresponds to a first-year graduate student. The summaries average a reading level requiring 15 years of education. About 42% of the U.S. adult population ages 25-54 have a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to the most recently available data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

Title readability ranges from a fifth-grade level for an Idaho question asking voters to choose an official state gun to a 48^th-grade level for a Colorado constitutional amendment that would establish a right to hunt and fish, Ballotpedia found. No formal education level corresponds to a 48th-grade level, but that rating indicates an extremely advanced language structure.

“The most significant factor driving readability differences isn’t the type or topic of the ballot measure, but which state it’s in,” said Ryan Byrne, managing editor of Ballotpedia’s ballots team, in a statement.

Kentucky, Massachusetts and Tennessee had the lowest average title readability grade level, at 10 years of education, while Colorado had the highest at 33 years, followed by Hawaii at 31 years and Nevada at 26, according to the report.

Research has found voters are more likely to skip ballot questions that have more complex language.

About half of states have enacted laws designed to make ballot measure language easier to read. Earlier this year, Maryland enacted a law requiring ballot questions to be written in plain and clear language. Last year, Arkansas required ballot titles to be written at no more than an eighth-grade level.

But still, the average readability score for state ballot measures since 2017, when Ballotpedia began tracking it, is about 18 years of education, or the equivalent of a second-year graduate student.

This year, Kansas had the longest ballot question title, at 927 words for a constitutional amendment that would have authorized the election of state Supreme Court justices and abolished an existing nominating commission. Voters defeated it in August.

Alaska will have the shortest title, at just five words, for a measure to amend state law to allow only U.S. citizens to vote in elections.

Ballotpedia uses two formulas to calculate readability, which includes looking at the number of syllables, words and sentences in a text.

Readability scores for each of the 164 ballot measures this year can be found in Ballotpedia’s report.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

It was a dreary, rainy Thursday morning when the state education department announced some depressing news: According to the final, official numbers, 62% of Wisconsin school districts will receive less money in state general aid this year than they did last year. 

Schools are struggling because, for the third year in a row, the state budget put no new money into general school aid, the Department of Public Instruction pointed out in an Oct. 15 press release. That’s after more than 15 years during which annual adjustments to per-pupil general operating revenue in Wisconsin schools has failed to keep pace with inflation. The latest school funding data arrived from DPI under the header: “Nearly two-thirds of districts will receive less aid due to flat state funding, antiquated funding formula.” 

About an hour later, a press release from Gov. Tony Evers’ office cheerfully announced that Wisconsin has ended the fiscal year with a $3.3 billion budget balance and a record  $2.1 billion in the state’s “rainy day” fund. The top line from the governor’s office message was upbeat: “Despite continued national economic turbulence, Wisconsin maintains strong fiscal position, reaching seven consecutive years of record-high General Fund balances during Gov. Evers’ tenure.”

These two announcements, although dramatically different in mood, are directly connected. The reason Wisconsin has a big budget surplus is largely because the state has abandoned its commitment to fund its public schools. 

A slide presentation by Anne Chapman, research director for the Wisconsin Association of School Business Officials, graphically illustrates the decline in annual adjustments to per-pupil general operating revenue for Wisconsin public school districts since the 2008-2009 school year. Using Legislative Fiscal Bureau data, Chapman shows the steadily widening gap between the annual adjustment in general operating dollars schools would have had each year if revenue had kept pace with inflation and what they actually got. This year the shortfall reached $3,571 per kid. 

At the same time, schools have been carrying about $1.29 billion in special education costs that are not reimbursed by state or federal aid.

Schools have never bounced back from the drastic cuts to education spending during the administration of former Gov. Scott Walker. But the current budget situation is unprecedented 

“The 2025-27 state budget provided no increase to general school aids. This was an extremely unusual policy choice, especially in light of the fact that the state had a $4.3 billion surplus going into the budget process,” she says. “The last instance of flat or negative general aids across both years of a biennial budget was the 2009-11 budget, at which time the state was facing a deficit.”

In other words, in a historic act of stinginess, the Legislature, while staring at a sizeable budget surplus, chose not to add any money to general school aid, the largest form of state support for K-12 schools. That was a deliberate policy choice, not some sort of emergency measure taken under duress. 

Wisconsin’s school funding formula is complicated —  a mix of state and local funds divvied up based on school districts’ property wealth, enrollment numbers and spending patterns. Different districts get different amounts of funding from the state — and some get none at all. When funding is flat, statewide, some districts get more and some get less. This is the “antiquated” system DPI referred to in its press release. It uses outdated metrics, and doesn’t account for the effects of high poverty or large numbers of English language learners. 

State schools superintendent Jill Underly expanded on this in her State of Education speech in September: “The formula places value on the wrong things. It values enrollment, district spending, and property value, rather than student needs. It fails to ask the most essential question: how much does it actually cost to educate the students who live in a district so that they have an equal opportunity to succeed? A student’s opportunity for success should not depend on their zip code. If we are going to improve the academic outcomes for ALL students, then the funding formula must prioritize student need.”

Because of the complexity of school finance, and the patchwork of have and have-not districts, it’s hard to figure the exact amount Wisconsin has underfunded its schools since 2009, when overall per-pupil spending stopped keeping pace with inflation. But you can get a rough, back of the envelope estimate by taking the three-year rolling average for calculating revenue limit and per pupil categorical aid  from 2025-26  — 781,367 students — and multiplying it by a calculation derived from the Legislative Fiscal Bureau’s data on the cumulative shortfall in annual adjustments to per-pupil general operating revenue, which was $3,468.60. The number you get is $2.7 billion in combined state aid and property tax levies. If the state returned to its much-discussed commitment to fund two-thirds of the cost of public schools, that would mean we’d have to allocate $1.8 billion of the current $3.3 billion surplus to make schools whole. Add to that the $1.29 billion in special ed costs the state has sloughed off on the schools, and it reaches $3 billion.

One of the main effects of the state deciding not to fund schools is that the burden has fallen instead on local property taxpayers, who are confronting another surge in referendum requests from their local school districts in the voting booth this fall.   

Gov. Evers has proposed, by his own estimate in an address to the Wisconsin Public Education Network, $7 billion in new funding for schools that was rejected by the state Legislature over his two terms. He was bitterly disappointed when the state Senate rejected a $1.8 billion deal he struck with Republican legislative leaders that included some money for increased special education funding and property tax relief along with income tax cuts. 

But in his latest message, the governor embraces the unspent money sitting in state coffers as “damn good news.” 

“We’ve ended every fiscal year I’ve been governor with a positive balance,” he says. “We’ve shown that state government can work, and work better for the people we serve, and I’m incredibly proud of our efforts.”

Along with the surplus, the governor’s office celebrates the “largest balance in the ‘rainy day’ fund in state history” — at $2.1 billion, it’s six times larger than when Evers took office.

Meanwhile, schools are in worse and worse shape, and all over the state, people are struggling to keep up with the cost of housing as property taxes rise. 

Whatever feeling of satisfaction there is in knowing the state has squirreled away a fat rainy day fund, when you look outside, it’s raining.