Government do-gooders and conservatives who are worried that America is becoming a nanny state have one more thing to fight about in 2016: soda taxes.

Public health advocates, flush from victories in Mexico and Berkeley, California, are plotting to bring voter referendums and legislation to tax soda in as many as a dozen U.S. cities in 2016. It’s all part of an international strategy backed by billionaires in New York and Texas, including former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, to reduce consumption of sodas, juices and other sugary drinks in the fight against spiraling rates of obesity, diabetes and other diet-related diseases.


“We think that 2016 is going to be a very important year for the sugar-sweetened beverage tax discussion,” said Kelly Henning, director of public health programs at Bloomberg Philanthropies. “We think the Berkeley tax and the Mexico tax are really pushing the debate forward.”

If that discussion catches fire, it could turn out to be an unintended gift for Republicans. The timing of the initiatives, coinciding with a presidential campaign already brimming with anti-government vitriol, all but guarantees a white-hot debate in which even a super-sized Slurpee could be turned into a symbol of freedom.

Sin taxes and other measures aimed at changing behavior have long been red meat for those who argue that such government meddling is paternalistic, punitive and infringes on Americans’ freedom — whether it’s Obamacare’s mandate that Americans buy health insurance, ordinances that ban smoking in public places or first lady Michelle Obama’s push to get school kids to eat their vegetables.

Even in liberal New York City, the reaction to Bloomberg's anti-soda crusade was ferocious. The New York Times derided his effort to prohibit the sale of sodas larger than 16 ounces as “a ban too far.” An illustration of city dwellers, backed against a wall grasping plastic beverage cups in fear, graced the cover of The New Yorker. The soft drink industry ran a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times, caricaturing the mayor as a nanny, under the headline: “You only thought you lived in the land of the free."

Sin taxes are nothing new, of course. Those levied on alcohol, cigarettes and gambling already provide a steady stream of revenue to state and local governments and have changed purchasing behavior if the taxes are high enough. Whether adding sugary drinks to the list might galvanize voter backlash is an open question, but nanny state issues tend to play well in campaign seasons animated by populist anger.

“What I think it provides is yet another reminder, certainly for Republicans and the Republican-leaning electorate, of ongoing government social engineering and government overreach,” said Scott Gessler, a Republican and a former Colorado secretary of state.

At least one GOP presidential candidate, Sen. Ted Cruz, is already on the record against such efforts, lampooning Bloomberg’s 2012 ban, which was later struck down by the courts. Cruz introduced a budget amendment in March 2013 that would have prohibited federal regulations on the size or quantity of food and drinks — a purely symbolic stand against a federal government that was not considering such a move.

And Bloomberg, whose private foundation poured millions into the soda tax efforts in Mexico and Berkeley, continues to be a conservative target even though he’s not running for public office. A television ad sponsored by the National Rifle Association during the Republican presidential debate in August linked the billionaire’s anti-soda and anti-gun stances to the decision facing voters.

“Even if he doesn’t run for president, Bloomberg will try to pick the president,” the ad warns. “Bloomberg spends his billions backing politicians who want to take away your rights, limit your freedom.”

Coming to a polling place near you

But at the grass-roots level, health advocates who support soda taxes are starting to feel like they’re finally getting traction. They won’t name which cities might be next to carry the soda tax banner — fearing Big Soda will crush fledgling efforts — but possibilities include progressive communities like Seattle, San Francisco, Oakland and Austin, Texas.

Before the successful Berkeley initiative last year — just months after Mexico’s Legislature passed a 10 percent soda tax as part of a broad revenue package — the beverage industry had defeated about 30 tax proposals, from Philadelphia to Telluride, Colorado.

Berkeley, for all its quirkiness, was widely seen as a crack in Big Soda’s armor — especially after the industry spent some $30 per voter trying to scuttle the initiative but lost three out of every four votes. This next election cycle will be the first real test of whether advocates can build on their landmark win.

Even more significant was the beverage industry’s loss in Mexico, where lawmakers passed a 10 percent tax on soda and an 8 percent tax on junk food like chips and pastries.

“The Big Soda script is now predictable, so groups feel better able to handle the industry tactics,” said Jim Krieger, a former health official for King County, Washington, who now leads Action for Healthy Food, a newly formed 501(c)(4) in Seattle that’s advocating for the soda taxes.

Each time, advocates say, the message from the beverage industry has been the same: Soda taxes are regressive, falling heaviest on the poor. They are riddled with loopholes (milkshakes are not covered, for example) and raise grocery bills — all the while doing nothing, the industry claims, to fight obesity.

The playbook is reminiscent of the one used by Big Tobacco, advocates say, and they are using similar strategies to fight back: Focusing on local campaigns is key because health groups lack the funds to compete with the beverage industry on the federal level. Advocates are also sharpening their anti-soda messaging, so that even when they lose local battles they're winning the broader PR fight.

“They are powerful, but it doesn’t mean they are unbeatable,” says Tom Farley, who served as New York City health commissioner in the wake of Bloomberg’s attempted Big Gulp ban. “There was a day when the tobacco companies were considered unbeatable, too.”

Sugary drink makers dispute the idea that health advocates are gaining momentum heading into 2016, but the industry is still lobbying aggressively to make sure a soda tax bill by Rep. Rosa DeLauro, which has just two co-sponsors, fizzes out faster than a warm can of Coke.

The federal legislation, which the Connecticut Democrat introduced in 2014 and again this year, would levy a tax of a penny per teaspoon of sugar on sweetened beverages in all 50 states — with the potential to raise as much as $10 billion a year, according to the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a proponent of soda taxes.

Lobbying figures show the American Beverage Association has spent north of $350,000 a quarter lobbying against the bill, among other issues, even though the bill has virtually no chance of passing. Coca-Cola has been spending from about $2 million to $3 million per quarter and PepsiCo more than $1 million per quarter lobbying, including against the tax.

The industry has been known to pour tons of money and cozy up to local community groups: In Philly, $10 million was donated to a children's hospital. In San Francisco, $45,000 to the progressive Harvey Milk LGBT Democratic Club. In New York, the industry teamed up with the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation to oppose Bloomberg’s soda size limits.

Industry money is difficult to track, but the NAACP received at least $235,000 in grants from the Coca-Cola Foundation in 2011 and 2012 and the Federation lists Coca-Cola as one of its funders.

“I think a lot of elected leaders see that it’s a dead end,” William Dermody, vice president of policy for the American Beverage Association, said of the soda tax idea. “People don’t want their grocery items taxed or any single grocery items taxed in a discriminatory fashion.”

Dermody’s group, which represents Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Snapple Group and other sweetened-beverage makers, is focusing its efforts on a campaign that stresses the need to balance calories with exercise and a varied diet. To that end, ABA has created a youth-targeted social media website called Mixify that provides drink recipes and guidance on how to do ab workouts and other calisthenics using hip GIFs and memes.

“We’re going to be out there getting the message out of [the need for] balance,” Dermody said. “There is a trend that I think you’ll see increasing next year, a trend toward cooperation between the industry and the public to find ways to work together to maintain balance in their diets for all foods and beverages.”

The billionaire factor

Another key dynamic that’s changed is that health advocates are now getting significant financial backing to scale up what had previously been largely disorganized, boot-strap efforts.

Bloomberg became the face of the anti-soda crusade with all the press over his failed Big Gulp ban. But what’s not well known is that his foundation has poured more than $18 million into the successful campaign in Mexico to pass the soda and junk food taxes that took effect last year.

That effort, pushed by Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, was driven by both health and budgetary imperatives. The average Mexican drinks 43 gallons of sugary beverages a year, say Mexican health officials, and it shows: About 70 percent of the population is overweight and nearly one-third is obese — statistics that make Mexico a rival to the United States for the title of world’s fattest country.

Brazil, Colombia and Peru, which all face ballooning obesity epidemics, are considering similar taxes as well, Henning said. Chile recently instated a soda tax, along with a crackdown on junk food marketing.

Meanwhile, Houston billionaires Laura and John Arnold, who made a fortune in energy trading, have poured $40 million into research to bolster the scientific basis of federal dietary recommendations and launched Action for Healthy Food in late 2014, with a $1.7 million budget and the sole aim of getting people to eat less sugar.

In July, the group held a meeting in Oakland, California, with supporters from around the country to map its soda-tax strategy.

The Arnolds’ Action Now Initiative, a separate nonprofit, spent $55,000 as nearly the sole funder of a failed soda-tax push in the tiny ski town of Telluride, where the couple owns a vacation home. The Arnolds also contributed $70,000 to the Berkeley effort, making them the second highest donor after Bloomberg, who dropped a whopping $657,000.

In addition, the Arnolds are now working with conservative political consultant Anthony Holm, a former spokesman of Texas homebuilder Bob Perry, a major GOP contributor who helped fund the “swift boat” attack against former Sen. John Kerry. Advocates say Holm attended the July strategy meeting. Neither Holm nor the Arnolds responded to POLITICO inquiries.

The Berkeley experiment

It’s too soon to know whether the tax Berkeley voters passed in 2014 will reduce soda consumption, but a study in October suggests the bulk of the tax is being passed on to consumers, which could affect choices in the grocery aisle. The city is on its way to making its first million dollars from the measure, with at least $600,000 raised so far.

The soda industry, however, is quick to dismiss the liberal enclave as a political outlier that doesn’t represent the views of mainstream America — and some tax advocates agree.

Michael Jacobson, president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest and a longtime supporter of soda taxes, said he was more impressed with the effort in San Francisco, which, while ending up shy of the two-thirds majority needed for approval, did win 55 percent of the vote despite more than $9 million in opposition spending.

“I think San Francisco is more important,” Jacobson said. “People don’t even really drink soda in Berkeley. They drink kombucha.”

Health arguments aside, many advocates are hopeful soda taxes might take hold more broadly as financially pressed public officials look for new revenues to close budget deficits and to help pay for rising health care costs.

“Berkeley certainly whetted the appetite,” Jacobson said. If lawmakers in a less-progressive state like Illinois, where soda tax proposals have languished for years, approved a tax, “that would be huge,” he said. “That would make it OK for other states to say, ‘OK, that’s a legitimate source of revenue.’”

Proponents say the tax could raise up to $600 million a year in Illinois. In California, a sugary drink tax — which will likely be reintroduced next year in the Legislature — could bring in more than $2.5 billion a year.

The Mexico proof of concept

Mexico, meanwhile, has become test case not just because it proves that such a tax can be imposed, but because it is changing purchasing behavior, which advocates hope will improve health.

Preliminary data indicate purchases of sugary drinks dropped about 6 percent over the first year and that trend appears to be accelerating. The measure also put 18 billion pesos, or more than a $1 billion into the Mexican government’s coffers last year.

“Industry is now reluctantly recognizing that the tax is working,” said Juan Rivera, director of the Center for Nutrition and Health Research at the National Public Health Institute in Mexico and a leading proponent of the tax. “Some of the people in academia and also people in NGOs and the government, we are now really thinking about the correct amount of a tax.”

If a 10 percent tax on sugary drinks appears to have caused a modest drop in consumption, Rivera said, “maybe you will start to have effects that may be very meaningful” with a 20 percent tax rate. Advocates have since called on the Mexican government to double the tax.

U.S. universities, nongovernmental organizations, and public health and nutrition advocacy groups are paying close attention, Rivera said. “They are very, very interested,” he said. “We have a lot of invitations to present, more than we can attend.”

Rivera said he’s optimistic other countries will follow Mexico's lead in the foreseeable future.

“In Latin America … awareness about the effects of obesity, the costs of obesity to society and to the health systems, is something that worries a lot of politicians these days.”

He predicted several U.S. cities will jump on the soda-tax bandwagon within the next five years, and that could be the tipping point for a global trend. “Once the U.S. does it," he said, "it’s widespread.”