This piece was co-authored by Pete Sepp, executive vice president of the National Taxpayers Union.

According to conventional political wisdom, selling a bad tax idea to voters is simple – ignore the “t” word and instead stress themes like leveling the “playing field.” In reality, voters aren’t that gullible, but for anyone who needs a reminder, a new public opinion poll on the deceptively named “Marketplace Fairness Act” (MFA) is an eye-opener.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s 1992 Quill decision affirmed a state can only compel a business to collect its sales tax if it has a physical presence within its borders. MFA would destroy this important constitutional protection. For example, an Internet-based retailer with just one location in Texas would have to calculate sales taxes for every jurisdiction where their customers resided – from California to Maine – send payments there, and be subjected to each revenue department’s complex auditing and reporting procedures.

To explore MFA’s implications in-depth, National Taxpayers Union (NTU) and the R Street Institute commissioned a comprehensive survey from the respected firm Mercury. The poll concentrated on a sample of 1,000 likely voters and broadly confirmed results of a separate Gallup survey taken a month earlier. Both polls discovered that 57% of respondents opposed changes to Internet sales tax policies such as those provided in MFA, while just 35% favored such a legislative approach in Mercury’s survey. Predictably, self-identified Republicans and conservatives disliked MFA by 2 to 1 margins.

However, the Mercury poll drilled even deeper and found that self-described independents opposed MFA by 56%-37%; Democrats by 48%-43%.Voters who tended to split their tickets at the ballot box were against the Internet tax collection scheme 58%-36%. When told (correctly) that “the proposed legislation would allow tax enforcement agents from one state to collect taxes from online retailers based in a different state,” the margin against MFA swung to 70%, compared to just 23% in favor.

But would this steadfast aversion change if the best arguments of MFA’s proponents were presented? We asked, and it didn’t. The likely voters were confronted with several head-to-head tradeoffs of the plan: more home-state revenues vs. risking more interference from other states’ tax authorities, taxing all purchases alike vs. “opening the floodgates to more government regulation and taxation,” treating businesses the same vs. “imposing costly new tax burdens on small online retailers.” In each case, the argument against MFA won by 2 to 1 margins.

Congressional election-watchers take note: the MFA issue aroused serious opposition from the very swing voters (millennials, suburban residents, ticket splitters, and others) that Republicans, especially, will have to attract in order to win future elections.

There’s even bigger news for office-seekers facing GOP primaries. In a separate sample of 700 likely Republican primary voters, the poll asked respondents to choose which candidate they would vote for: A, who supported an MFA-type sales-tax collection approach or B, who worked against tax increases on the Internet. By a whopping 70%-16% proportion, Candidate B won, a clear indication this issue has the power to topple GOP incumbents who have unwisely embraced MFA.

Thanks to a well-orchestrated campaign from big-box retailers who see an advantage in hobbling competitors with new tax compliance burdens, MFA was rammed through the U.S. Senate in May. But the harder MFA’s supporters pushed to “educate” Americans with fawning newspaper editorials, “attaboy” events for pliant lawmakers, and even testimonials from Little League organizers, the more those Americans disliked what they learned. Members of the House of Representatives should take heed of this trend and give MFA the burial it deserves. Meanwhile, candidates on the campaign trail can take confidence that opposing MFA is smart politics as well as smart policy.

Pick any analogy – painting lipstick on a pig, hanging a sunny face on a rainy day, making lemonade out of lemons – and the upshot from our poll is the same. Pigs still wallow in muck, rain is still soaking wet, lemons are still sour … and, the public isn’t fooled by the Marketplace Fairness Act.

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