The property tax promise that’s built to fail

How Scott Herndon turns voter outrage into a fundraising engine, and why that’s the whole point

By Gregory Graf
Political Potatoes

Kill the property tax. That’s the pitch.

You own your home. You paid for it. So why keep writing a check to the county every year for the privilege of living in a thing you already bought? Put that way, it sounds like common sense. It feels conservative. It feels like freedom.

Scott Herndon, the former North Idaho state senator who’s been desperately trying to stay in power in North Idaho and recently defeated Sen. Jim Woodward in the May primary, is running on some version of that promise again. Woodward was the kind of Republican who read the budget before voting on it. Herndon devises cunning ways to gaslight voters. There’s a difference, and Idaho is about to feel it.

Herndon is a Christian nationalist with fringe views; he intends to impose them on Idahoans. He is not interested in compromise. His actual agenda goes well beyond taxes: stripping away genuine religious freedom, overriding parental rights that don’t match his ideology, and dismantling local government control in favor of top-down, state-mandated rules that would dictate what parents can and cannot do while enforcing a singular religious viewpoint on everyone else. The property tax promise is the bright, shiny object he uses to get elected. The rest of the agenda is what he does once he’s in office.

The claim that sounds like math but isn’t

Herndon says it plainly: “Idaho has grown state spending $1.2 billion above inflation and population growth in just six years. We don’t need new taxes. We contain that growth and redirect the money to phase out $2.3 billion in annual property tax. The math works over time.”

It sounds precise. He’s counting on you not checking it.

Here’s what he’s omitting.

First, the gap. He’s describing $1.2 billion in what he calls excess spending growth and promising to use it to eliminate $2.3 billion in annual property tax. That’s a $1.1 billion hole he glossed over with the phrase “over time.” “Over time” is doing enormous work in that sentence.

Second, property taxes are not state revenue. Property taxes are collected locally by counties, school districts, fire districts, and cities. The state legislature does not control that money. Herndon is describing a mechanism that does not exist. He cannot “redirect” local property tax revenue by containing state spending growth, because those are two entirely separate pots of money governed by entirely separate legal structures. Saying otherwise is deliberate misdirection, not a misunderstanding.

Third, the $1.2 billion in spending growth includes Medicaid expansion, which Idaho voters approved directly by ballot initiative, school funding increases, public safety costs, and infrastructure maintenance that had been deferred for years. Containing that growth means cutting services that real Idahoans depend on. Herndon never names them because naming them would end the coalition.

Fourth, “phase out over time” is not a timeline. It is an escape hatch. Herndon’s rage bait fuzzy math does not provide any real solutions.

This is what makes the claim manipulative rather than merely optimistic. Herndon uses real numbers to create the impression of a worked-out plan while skipping the part where the numbers actually connect to each other.

The number they skip right past

Property taxes fund your fire department, your schools, and your roads. The Tax Foundation has analyzed property tax repeal proposals, and its conclusion is direct: there’s no good way to pay for property tax repeal. You either replace the revenue with a different tax, meaning your sales tax or income tax goes up, or you cut the services. There is no third door.

So when a candidate says “we’ll just cut government waste to cover it,” ask him for the line items. Ask him which schools. Ask him which fire stations. With Herndon, he pivots to whoever’s blocking him because specifics are the one thing this operation cannot survive.

And then, because he has so little faith in voter intellect, suggests that renters don’t pay property taxes and therefore you are carrying that burden. Seriously? Has Herndon never heard of investment properties? Of course, he has. Gaslighting voters is a feature, not a bug, of Herndon’s political machine (Idaho Freedom Caucus).

States tried aggressive property tax limits in the 1970s and 1980s. ITEP’s research found that these limits led to reduced local services, instability in local finances, a heavier reliance on regressive taxes that hit working families hardest, and benefits that flowed primarily to wealthy property owners rather than to young families in starter homes.

Idaho already has a smarter tool: the circuit breaker, a targeted property tax credit for older, disabled, and widowed Idahoans of modest means. The Idaho State Tax Commission runs it. That’s relief that actually works: aimed at the people who need it, with the cost covered.

The playbook underneath the promise

This is classic donut diplomacy: the strategic use of a promise designed to fail, because losing on the right issue is more useful than winning.
The far-right playbook works like this. He tells you what to be angry about, a real grievance, weaponized on purpose. He hands you a demand with no legislation behind it, dresses the vagueness in specific-sounding figures, then gets his white nationalist amplifiers to push out his coordinated narratives on X and Facebook. When nothing passes, as I’d argue was always the plan, Herndon won’t take responsibility. He’ll blame the RINOs and their “conservative” allies who wouldn’t fall in line. Then comes the ask: “re-elect me, send reinforcements, we just need more people like me in that building.”

The absence of passable legislation is the quiet part Herndon won’t say out loud. A bill that passed would end the grievance, and the grievance is the whole business model. When nothing passes, the loop resets: new outrage, new fundraising email, rinse and repeat. This is the operation Herndon is running alongside his Las Vegas campaign operative, Rory McShane, a consultant whose recent winning record is thin.
Let’s look at two recent examples of this in action. Remember all the outrage over the grocery tax? Or the furious fits thrown over legislator pay increases? Nothing happened, but the far-right managed to raise and spend nearly $2 million to try to install their loyalists in office over that outrage in this last election.

This is gaslighting of voters. Herndon uses a popular, legitimate frustration about property taxes to get himself elected, then uses the inevitable failure of an unworkable promise to argue that Idaho needs more Christian nationalists with his particular brand of inflexible, top-down ideology. The tax limitation is the vehicle. The destination is a state where his religious viewpoint is enforced by law, and parents who disagree have no recourse.

What real property tax relief looks like

Property taxes pinch. Assessments jump, budgets balloon, and a retiree on a fixed income can get taxed out of a paid-off home. That grievance is legitimate and deserves a serious answer.

A serious answer looks like the circuit breaker, expanded and funded. It looks like homestead exemptions are indexed to real home values. It looks like spending caps that local voters actually control. 

It does not look like burning down the majority of your local budget and promising the ashes will pay for the empty fire station.

How to spot the gaslighting

When a candidate runs on outrage with catchy bumper-sticker slogans with math that clearly omits honest context and has no real plan for passing legislation, that’s the tell. Ask them for the line items. Press them on what gets cut. Make them name one school, one station, one road. Ask them to explain, in plain terms, how state spending restraint eliminates a local tax collected by entities the state does not control. If they answer with “waste, fraud, abuse, plus something about guns and liberty,” then pivot to who’s stopping them, that’s when your own eyes tell you that their words are absolute bullshit. Chances are you’ll get blocked on Facebook by them after asking your first question.

Property taxes are worth fixing. Herndon’s let it all burn thinking works for those who are convinced we don’t need schools, healthcare, roads, or police. Unfortunately for him, most Idahoans would strongly disagree with that absurd notion. Backwards thinking hurts us all, so tell your legislator to strongly ignore whatever nonsense policy ideas Herndon is shoveling. He deserves to be made irrelevant, just like the go-nowhere policies he’s preaching.

Gregory Graf is a lifelong conservative Republican living in Star, Idaho. He is the creator of Political Potatoes and the Idaho Voter Guide.