With Senator Mary Landrieu’s defeat last weekend in a runoff election, Mark Warner (who barely scraped through a closer-than-expected race) will be the only Senator who voted for the Marketplace Fairness Act (MFA), from a competitive state, in the 114th Congress.
This election cycle, there were 12 races that were estimated to be competitive (New York Times election map).
In four of those elections, Senators who voted against MFA won: Jean Shaheen (D-NH), Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Pat Roberts (R-KS), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK).
Interesting, the only Democrat to win a “toss-up” voted against MFA…
Then we saw the four Senators from these competitive states who voted for MFA suffer electoral defeats: Mark Udall (D-CO), Mark Pryor (D-AR), Kay Hagan (D-NC), and, most recently, Mary Landrieu (D-LA).
Add to that three retirements: Michigan, Georgia, and Iowa all moved on from MFA-supporting Senators.
An NTU/R Street poll revealed an Internet Sales Tax like MFA was highly unpopular, with 57 percent of respondents opposing it, a clear warning that proponents were at risk in the 2014 elections. These results should come as no surprise. Subsequent state-specific polls only made this reality more clear.
MFA is a policy that would hammer taxpayers and small online businesses, not to mention consumers, and cannot stand up to public scrutiny. Perhaps that’s why the MFA crowd has taken to trying to sneak it through as part of another piece of legislation.
Taxpayers want to know if the next Congress will learn from this lesson, or if they will have to be held accountable at the ballot box once again.