Education Helped Power the Blue Wave

10 surprising election takeaways

Democrats won everywhere this week, and public education played a surprisingly central role in powering their success. Here’s a look at what went down, why it matters, and what happens next.

School Board Sweep

I’m old enough to recall when Steve Bannon declared that “[t]he path to save the nation is very simple — it’s going to go through the school boards.” Which is why it feels so significant that candidates endorsed by the conservative culture warriors at Mom’s for Liberty fared so poorly this week. Whether they actually lost 31 out of 31 contested races, as the Political HQ alleged, is unclear (and at odds with M4L’s version of events). But what is clear is that the pattern of poor performance at the polls we’ve seen in election cycle after cycle appears to have held once again. In state after state, boards that have been consumed by controversies over book bans, religious prosthletizing and attacks on LGBTQ students saw voters say ‘enough.’ The good news: our most recent round of school culture warring may at last be winding down. The bad news: Moms for Liberty is adjusting accordingly. As Laura Pappano noted in her coverage of the group’s recent summit, running for office is out, while suing school districts under the expanded powers granted to parents via the Supreme Court’s Mahmoud decision is most definitely in.

Party Like It’s 2015

While the rebuke of conservative school board candidates was the big local election story, the attempted comeback by education reform candidates–pro charter school, anti teachers union, pro accountability–deserves some attention too. Take Denver, for example, where 11 candidates were vying for four seats on the seven-member school board. The contest had a decided throwback air to it, with the same dark money groups that have devoted millions to the cause of ‘portfolioizing’ urban school districts, making another run. But as voters seemed to have noticed, it’s not 2015 anymore, or even 2023. Dark money, particularly the kind linked to billionaires, is a growing turn off for voters, and at a time when the Trump Administration is gunning for public schools, including those in Denver, the sales pitch for education reform is falling flat. As one of the winning candidates explained to Chalkbeat, the election results reflected the ‘state of the world.’ “People don’t have food right now. They’ve seen so much on a global and federal level and they’re worried about their kids. They know they can trust teachers.”

Lone Star Surprise

The local GOP may be fond of proclaiming that Texas’ Tarrant County is the largest red county in America (or perhaps the reddest large county?), but the results of this week’s special election told a different story. The race to fill a vacant North Texas Senate seat, in a district which voted for Donald Trump by over 17 points last year, was nearly won outright by an out-of-nowhere Democrat: union leader and veteran Taylor Rehmet. One eye-popping detail from the contest: Rehmet spent just $68,000 vs millions shelled out by his opponents and their deep-pocketed PACs. Rehmet ran as an economic populist and ardent defender of public education–in other words, exactly the sort of candidate this page has been rooting for. He’ll now go head-to-head with Leigh Wambsganss, the chief communications officer of Patriot Mobile, “America’s only Christian conservative wireless provider,” not to mention a taker over of school boards. Look for Texas’ controversial school voucher program to be a major issue in the race. Rehmet wants to end the program, while Wambsganss, who once opposed vouchers as government overreach, now supports them.

No Miracle in Mississippi

First, a brief digression. If you needed proof that the ‘Mississippi Miracle’ has jumped the shark, allow me to proffer up this excruciating podcast discussion on whether feminism has ruined the workplace, where Mississippi is cited as proof of something having to do with the innate differences between men and women. Anyway, back to Mississippi where Democrats flipped three legislative seats this week, breaking the GOP super majority in the state Senate for the first time in thirteen years. Which got me wondering, how do Democrats in Mississippi talk about the state of the state’s schools, given that so much of the sales pitch outside of Mississippi centers on its relatively low level of spending? Alas, their upset victories appear to have been fueled at least in part by demands to increase school spending. Here’s Senator-elect Johnny Dupree, pledging “to protect and expand funding for public education—not cut it under the guise of tax breaks for the wealthy.” And Justin Crosby, who flipped Mississippi House District 22, made fully funding the state’s schools and protecting teacher pay his top issue. In other words, as I argued on this page recently, the miracle looks a little different from the inside.

The Educated Precariate Arrives

Call them Park Slope populists or the emergent coalition of the precariate, voters who are both highly educated and struggling to survive financially officially arrived as a political force this week. Which led to consternation among certain conservatives about the right’s inability to speak to this constituency. (See, for example, Fox’s Jesse Watters mocking Zohran Mamdani’s voters as women who majored in southeast Asian feminist literature when they should have gotten a degree in finance or the hard sciences, or economist Stephen Moore insisting that college leads to socialism.) But here’s the thing. Centrist Democrats have nothing to say to this constituency either. Presidential aspirant Rahm Emanuel wants to rally the nation around a vision of restoring the American Dream, “one student, one opportunity at a time.” As Jack Schneider and I wrote last year, this message fails utterly with voters who followed the Democrats’ prescription for success, but continue to struggle economically. The big question, one that I’ll be exploring on this page and elsewhere in the months to come, is what do Mamdani and other left-wing populists have to say about education? The answer so far seems to be ‘not much.’

Can We Please Stop Talking About Glenn Youngkin Already?

Since Glenn Youngkin’s upset victory in Virginia in 2021, I have churned out roughly a bazillion words, making the case that 1) the media has misunderstood the role education and parents’ rights played in Youngkin’s win and 2) that the unlikely coalition he assembled, of disaffected affluent parents and rural voters, has never been replicated. Good thing that’s over! As polls like this one indicated in the leadup to the vote, Virginians trusted Democrat Abigail Spanberger over her opponent on the precise issues that supposedly powered Youngkin’s victory four years ago. While Winsome Earle-Sears hammered relentlessly on trans issues, specifically in schools, and ran as the candidate of school choice, voters were left cold. That even Virginia turned out not to be ‘Virginia’ is instructive, or it should be. As the New York Time’s Nate Cohn concluded in his 2025 election ‘take’ piece, this week’s Virginia outcome didn’t matter as much as Glenn Youngkin’s win…

Conventional Wisdom Takes a Hit

It wasn’t just in Virginia where the media consensus on education took a hit. Perhaps we can finally retire the baseless insistence that Democrats have lost their edge on education as an issue. As for the smart kid chorus that Dems must embrace school choice in order to be competitive at the polls, we got a real-life test of that claim too, as GOP candidates in both Virginia and New Jersey ran as supporters of vouchers. Jack Ciatterelli’s plan to fix New Jersey’s education system included making it more like Mississippi and Florida. In fact, all sorts of claims that we’ve heard repeatedly over the last few years came up short at the polls. Barely had Ezra Klein put the finishing touches on his latest 25K word column for the NYT, pronouncing that Democrats had moved left on education and lost ground with Asian American voters as a result when Asian American voters turned out to be Mamdani’s single largest block of voters. This despite Mamdani ‘declaring war’ against gifted and talented education programs in NYC. Then there’s the opposition to teachers unions that supposedly helped power Trump’s re-election. Union-backed candidates romped last week, and this poll helps explain why.

The Education/Populism Connection is Potent

Did you hear about that resounding vote by Coloradans to fund free school lunch for all students by soaking the rich? The specifics of the two ballot measures are complicated, but essentially they limit income tax deductions for the state’s wealthiest residents, and allow the state to redistribute revenue that otherwise would have been returned to voters under the spending handcuffs known as the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. So a win win, and a great example of how the populist mood of the country can be channeled for good.

Democratic Centrists Aren’t Going Anywhere

The day before voters went to the polls, Arne Duncan made an appearance in the Washington Post, urging Democrats to support the federal school voucher program that was included in the federal budget behemoth. None other than Betsy DeVos showed her approval, praising Duncan’s willingness to set politics aside and put kids first. Right. So what exactly is going on here? Chicago’s Fred Klonsky thinks that Arne is fronting for Rahm Emanuel, testing the waters for his old pal’s presidential run, and the return of the sort of bi-partisan school reform agenda (choice! testing! Mississippi! getting tough on teachers!) that makes a centrist’s heart pound. That this agenda is a wild mismatch for the moment and mood of the voters makes little difference. In fact, as we’re likely to see in the months ahead, the more left-wing populism, with its demands for income redistribution, is ascendent, the harder centrist Democrats are going to cling to the notion that education is the path to individual prosperity.

Nth Time is the Charm

Earlier this year, I featured a group of parent activists in the small Pennsylvania burg of Souderton on my podcast. Since the pandemic, they’d been attempting to break the conservative stranglehold on their local school board, getting a little closer each time. Well, this week finally made the difference. The slate of candidates, Democratic newcomers, swept all four open seats, defeating the board’s current president and VP and cutting into the GOP’s 9-0 majority. A huge shout out to Corinne DeGeiso, Alexandra Wisser, Rosemary Buetikofer and Andrew Souchet and the “Souderton Area for Responsible Leadership” team for their victory. As you can hear for yourself on this episode of Have You Heard, “All Politics is Local,” these candidates really understand that local politics hinges on persuasian. It’s time consuming and messy, but the story of Souderton tells us, once again, that it’s possible.