Campaign to nix capital gains tax gets more money but hasn’t launched a signature drive

A right wing effort to repeal Wash­ing­ton’s new state cap­i­tal gains tax on the wealthy via ini­tia­tive has report­ed receiv­ing a big chunk of new cash receipts and pledges dur­ing the month of April, but has yet to launch a sig­na­ture dri­ve, with less than two months to go until the sig­na­ture sub­mis­sion deadline.

The effort, head­ed by Repub­li­can oper­a­tives J. Van­der Stoep and Mark Funk, filed its April month­ly reports to the Pub­lic Dis­clo­sure Com­mis­sion last night as required by law. The com­mit­tee, which hopes to qual­i­fy Ini­tia­tive 1929 to the Novem­ber bal­lot, report­ed receiv­ing $443,650 in cash and in-kind con­tri­bu­tions last month, along with four new pledges total­ing $215,000. The com­mit­tee’s cumu­la­tive receipts total $702,750, while expens­es have reached $307,881.42.

Despite hav­ing spent more than a quar­ter of a mil­lion dol­lars already, the I‑1929 effort is still not yet in the field. It also has­n’t tak­en the pass­word pro­tec­tion off of the cam­paign web­site that a ven­dor was paid sev­er­al thou­sand dol­lars to create.

With May fly­ing by and June is right around the cor­ner, the I‑1929 camp is run­ning out of time to get a sig­na­ture dri­ve operational.

Though it might sound like they have plen­ty of mon­ey at their dis­pos­al, the real­i­ty is that half of what they have raised is in the form of pledges.

And with a high ini­tial burn rate, their cash on hand is $245,450.91, which is less than a quar­ter of a mil­lion dol­lars. Van­der Stoep and Funk are report­ed­ly try­ing to find around five mil­lion dol­lars to make I‑1929 happen.

Many of their donors could eas­i­ly afford to sin­gle­hand­ed­ly pro­vide the mon­ey they need. So why aren’t they open­ing their check­books? State law allows them to donate as much as they would like to an ini­tia­tive com­mit­tee. As the old Tim Eyman refrain goes: there are no lim­its on how much can be giv­en.

Per­haps the hes­i­ta­tion stems from the fact that I‑1929’s prospects of pas­sage are down­right awful. All the polling that we know of (includ­ing our own) sug­gests that I‑1929 starts out well under fifty per­cent, which is a ter­ri­ble place for an ini­tia­tive cam­paign to be. A statewide poll con­duct­ed for the oppo­si­tion coali­tion by one of NPI’s poll­sters ear­li­er this month found that the final, court-ordered I‑1929 bal­lot title polled at just 40%, with 43% of respon­dents indi­cat­ing opposition.

A sec­ond poll con­duct­ed in tan­dem with the first found that when a sim­u­lat­ed fis­cal impact state­ment was added to the bal­lot title, sup­port fell to 32% and oppo­si­tion rose to 50%, with 19% not sure. Those num­bers are dis­as­trous.

The method­ol­o­gy for those polls is as follows:

• Con­duct­ed May 2nd — 3rd by Pub­lic Pol­i­cy Polling
• Sam­ple sizes were 690 like­ly Wash­ing­ton State vot­ers for the first sur­vey and 639 like­ly Wash­ing­ton State vot­ers for the second
• Sur­vey A has a mar­gin of error of +/- 3.7% and Sur­vey B has a mar­gin of error of +/- 3.9%
• 60% of inter­views for both sur­veys were con­duct­ed by text mes­sage and 40% by telephone
• Respon­dents were asked to react to the final court-ordered bal­lot title, which is as fol­lows: Ini­tia­tive Mea­sure No. 1929 con­cerns tax­es. This mea­sure would repeal a 7% tax on annu­al cap­i­tal gains above $250,000 by indi­vid­u­als from the sale of stocks and cer­tain oth­er cap­i­tal assets (exempt­ing, for exam­ple, real estate and retire­ment accounts).
  

No mat­ter which way you slice it, I‑1929 looks like an incred­i­bly bad invest­ment. Why pour mil­lions of dol­lars into some­thing with such a low chance of success?

Wash­ing­ton State’s right wing has insist­ed for years that we’re wrong about the pop­u­lar­i­ty of pro­gres­sive tax reform. They’re free to dis­miss our research if they want. But with I‑1929, it’s put up or shut up time. The risk is huge. If they go to the bal­lot and they lose, it would be a water­shed repu­di­a­tion of their posi­tion, and it would vin­di­cate decades of pro­gres­sive research and organizing.

Do wealthy folks like Matt McIl­wain real­ly want to spend mil­lions of dol­lars prov­ing that a cap­i­tal gains tax on the wealthy is pop­u­lar with Wash­ing­ton voters?

We know what they con­sid­er to be their most potent argu­ments don’t work. We’ve test­ed them, repeat­ed­ly, and every time, we find that they fall flat.

The Wash­ing­ton Pol­i­cy Cen­ter’s Jason Merci­er can yell it’s an ille­gal income tax until he’s blue in the face…  that argu­ment sim­ply does­n’t res­onate with vot­ers. Incon­ve­nient­ly for Mercier’s fun­ders, Wash­ing­to­ni­ans want a bal­anced tax code. They want to require the wealthy to pay their fair share. They want to increase fund­ing for ear­ly learn­ing, K‑12 schools, child­chare, and high­er education.

Those are pri­or­i­ties that I‑1929’s bene­fac­tors should want, too. We all win when we pool our resources to get things done. The edu­ca­tion of Wash­ing­ton’s youth is our para­mount duty, and that is what the new state cap­i­tal gains tax on the wealthy funds. The hoard­ing of wealth by a rich few isn’t going to secure a great future for Wash­ing­ton State. But invest­ment in a more robust com­mons can.

The I‑1929 cam­paign faces a July 8th dead­line to sub­mit 324,516 valid sig­na­tures. To off­set dupli­cate or invalid sig­na­tures, they’d need about 400,000 sig­na­tures in total. Iron­i­cal­ly, to get those sig­na­tures, they need labor, because gath­er­ing sig­na­tures is a labor-inten­sive task.

With each pass­ing day, their sit­u­a­tion becomes logis­ti­cal­ly tighter and tougher.

If they move for­ward, they’ll need to be pre­pared to run a fast sig­na­ture dri­ve. And that won’t be cheap. They’ll need mil­lions to pull it off, then mil­lions more this autumn to try to per­suade Wash­ing­to­ni­ans to give the super rich a big tax cut.

Will Van­der Stoep and Funk pre­vail upon donors to take a huge risk with I‑1929? Or will their rich marks say, no thanks, we’ll see where the legal chal­lenge Rob McKen­na filed gets us? We’ll know the answer at the lat­est in a cou­ple months.