Do Americans Really Want Higher Taxes?

Democrats should be wary of reading too much into the polling.

T he latest Fox News Channel–sponsored national poll is liable to upend some of the conventional wisdom that prevails in Washington.

When respondents were asked which of the two parties would do a “better job” on a variety of issues, Fox’s pollsters found that the GOP is still trusted by a majority of voters to better steward border security (15 points), national security (twelve points), and even immigration (five points). That last finding conflicts with other recent polls, which have shown that voters are souring on Trump’s deportation regime if not his border-policing initiatives.

That’s the good news for Republicans. The bad news is more prolific.

Respondents trust Democrats over the GOP when it comes to “transgender issues” by a massive 22 points. The public trusts Democrats to handle health care and vaccine-related policy by 21 and 16 points respectively. With profound implications for the upcoming midterms, voters say Democrats also have the edge over the GOP when it comes to affordability and “helping the middle class,” by 14 points each. Ominously enough for the GOP, the Democratic Party is now favored over Republicans even when it comes to tax policy, albeit by a single point (49 to 48 percent).

That is a significant shift. The Democratic Party has not secured even a nominal lead over Republicans when it comes to taxes in this survey since 2006. More troubling, that preference shift is underway even as the most prominent members of the Democratic Party promulgate tax-code reforms that would raise Americans tax burden in just about every conceivable way. Is the public really that desperate to hand over more of their income to the federal government?

That depends on how you look at it. At least, the picture is complicated when you evaluate Americans’ revealed preferences. Take, for example, how they vote with their feet:

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A pretty clear pattern: people are moving from blue states to red states. pic.twitter.com/UIRBu906kZ

— Zachary Donnini (@ZacharyDonnini) January 29, 2026

VoteHub data scientist Zachary Donnini’s findings were interesting, although they were quickly criticized for failing to account for other factors such as state climates and the partisanship of those doing the moving.

Well, Donnini accounted for that:

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Because a million people are asking me, no, this pattern does not go away when you control for climate.

Controlling for partisanship, people are not moving to warmer states.

Controlling for climate, people are moving to redder states. https://t.co/lHG82dcE9s pic.twitter.com/Xau6OhOSLO

— Zachary Donnini (@ZacharyDonnini) January 29, 2026

It can’t be as simple as that, can it? Surely, dozens of factors contribute to an individual or family’s decision to pull up stakes and relocate to another state. Indeed, the research on the subject concludes that there are a lot of considerations that go into a lifestyle change as significant as that.

In 2023, the U.S. Census Bureau determined that a “change in marital status” was the primary reason to make a move, although it also notes that most relocations take place within a state’s borders and not across them. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities dismissed the phenomenon of “tax flight” as illusory, citing survey data showing that most people who make an interstate move do so for “job- or family-related reasons.” Or maybe interstate émigrés are leaving because the cost of housing has become too high. That’s the Fiscal Policy Institute’s conclusion.

Perhaps people aren’t moving at all. “Only a small percentage of people move to another state in a given year,” the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, a think tank that exists to defend the high-tax status quo of Washington, D.C. “Large numbers of people move from states with lower taxes to states with higher taxes every year, and the large majority of households (overall or high income) moving out of higher-tax states are replaced by ones moving in.”

You can practically hear the authors’ exhaustion radiating out from the text. “While the myth that increased taxes will drive mass flight of high-earning residents from a state has survived on cherry-picked anecdotes,” the DC Fiscal Policy Institute’s bedeviled scholars sighed, “researchers have disproved this claim many times over.”

It’s easy to overthink the matter. But Occam’s Razor would suggest that the measurable flight of high-tax state residents to lower-tax locales has a lot to do with tax rates.

In late 2023, the Tax Foundation’s Noah Peterson presented the evidence for this rather intuitive conclusion:

• Nine of the top 10 states with the largest population gains from 2019 to 2020 have no or low individual income taxes (the most visible of all the tax types, and highly connected to where you live).

• Of the states that saw more income tax filers move in than out, nearly 80 percent had below-average state and local tax collections per capita in fiscal year 2020, while half of the states that experienced more filers moving out than in had above-average collections per capita.

• Similarly, 19 of the 28 states with more people moving in than out had a top marginal income tax rate below the national median, while 16 of the 22 states plus D.C. with more people moving out than in had above-median top income tax rates.

• Among the 25 best-ranking states on the 2020 State Business Tax Climate Index, 20 states gained taxpayers between 2019 and 2020. Among the 25 worst-ranking states on the Index, 17 lost taxpayers to interstate migration.

Sure, but 2020 was five years ago. And given the conditions that prevailed in that demonic year, 2020 is hardly a sound baseline against which to compare any current socioeconomic trend. A lot has changed in the intervening years. Maybe one of them was a paradigmatic revolution in the interim in which the voting public concluded that they were retaining too much of their own incomes.

Probably not, according to the National Taxpayers Union Foundation’s Interstate Commerce Initiative. As of late year, the states gaining the most out-of-state residents were still low-tax, GOP-led states such as Florida, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. The states shedding voters are still high-tax, Democrat-run states such as California, Illinois, New York, Massachusetts, and New Jersey. Indeed, the forecast ahead of the next decennial redistricting cycle anticipates that California, New York, and Illinois will lose a combined ten seats in the House by 2031. By contrast, Texas and Florida alone will gain eight.

As the NTUF notes, high-tax states would not be actively attempting to impose new tax burdens on non-state residents — commuters unfortunate enough to work across state lines, for example, and the unrealized progressive vision for an “exit tax” on residents who would attempt an escape — if taxes weren’t one of, if not the, determinative factor for population outflows.

The simplest explanation for the public’s choices is that they’d much rather keep more of their incomes at a time when consumer costs are voters’ foremost concern. So what explains the Fox News poll’s findings? Perhaps, as was the case in 2006, voters are expressing a general preference for Democratic governance amid their increasingly dim views of how Donald Trump’s GOP is running the show. Democrats would be mistaken to conclude that voters are suddenly desperate to fork over more of their hard-earned cash to federal and state treasuries. But that’s what they are likely to tell themselves. The temptation will be too much to resist.