8 October 2018 — 1419 mdt
The 2004 Montana tobacco tax increase ballot measure
In 2004, Montanans voted by an almost two to one margin to increase tobacco taxes to discourage smoking and to pay for various good things. The for and against I-149 arguments in the 2004 Voter Information Pamphlet were quite similar to the arguments for and against I-185 in the 2018 Voter Information Pamphlet.
Only two small counties, Garfield and Golden Valley, voted against the 2004 tobacco tax increase. Support for I-149 was highest in the largest counties, and probably was positively correlated with both educational attainment and income.
The surprising ease with which I-149 passed may have lulled the proponents of I-185 into believing that the voters would also whoop I-185 into law. If so, they paid insufficient heed to the nation’s rightward lurch over the last 14 years. The Tobacco Boyz and the fanatical anti-tax teabaggers are mounting a clever, well financed, campaign this time, recycling arguments from 2004 and producing new mendacities and red herrings as they attempt to keep Montanans on the Lung Cancer Trail and off expanded Medicaid.
Initiative 185 might yet pass, but Healthy Montana, the umbrella group for the ballot measure’s proponents, needs to mount a heroic campaign for I-185 — and it needs to get lucky.
About that submarine on the Montana Voter Information Pamphlet. Montana Secretary of State Corey Stapleton, a former naval officer, is receiving some flak for putting a dynamic photograph of a nuclear submarine on the VIP’s cover. He doesn’t deserve those cheap shots. The USS Montana, a Virginia class attack submarine, SSN 794, is under construction, scheduled to be commissioned in 2020. The VIP’s cover therefore is related to Montana. Furthermore, although it does resemble the cover of a Tom Clancy novel, it’s a conversation starter that might get more people to read the pamphlet, which would be good. Stapleton’s putting the sub on the cover is fine with me.