It Ain't Over in Texas
Abbott and the pro-voucher movement just won a huge short-term victory, but at what political price?
In case you missed it, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has at last succeeded in nearly dragging a massive school voucher bill across the finish line. In the wee hours of the AM, Lone Star State legislators approved a bill that will create a $1 billion private school voucher program. Every Democrat in the chamber voted against the program. But unlike previous years when rural Republicans joined the Dems to keep vouchers out of Texas, the GOP, save for two lone holdouts, was a rubber stamp for the governor’s top policy priority.
The almost victory (the House and Senate still have to iron out the differences in their respective bills) is a vindication of the governor’s strategy of knocking out anti-voucher voices in the state legislature—or is it? Not only was the governor forced to expend an enormous amount of political capital to muscle a bloated, deeply unpopular bill over the hump, but a last minute charge by Dems to force a statewide vote on vouchers revealed what Abbott et al are most afraid of: the public. For the governor and the deep-pocketed voucher lobby may have solved one political problem here—eliminating their elected opposition—but in the process they’ve created another: a sprawling protest movement in their own party.
I’ve spent months chronicling opposition to school vouchers on the right, a movement that the mainstream media has largely missed. The folks I’ve been talking to are anti-voucher for a laundry list of reasons. Rural Republicans fear the impact of privatization on their local schools; grassroots conservatives see the heavy hand of the state coming for private schools and home schools; parent activists smell a United Nations-led takeover of education; and Trump-supporting populists view vouchers as the ultimate betrayal of MAGA populism. (If you want to hear these perspectives, check out this episode of Have You Heard.)
What unites all of these activists is a deep sense that their elected officials no longer represent them and are accountable instead only to party donors, including Jeff Yass, the hedge fund billionaire who flooded Texas with cash, and the homegrown duo of Farris Wilkes and Tim Dunn. Abbott’s big-money gamble is the latest triumph of the donors’ strategy of essentially buying state legislatures in order to enact school vouchers. But as a recent study of public opposition to vouchers concluded, “overcoming legislative roadblocks” may be the easy part. “No similar mechanism exists for overcoming opposition among the mass public.”
And therein lies the problem for Abbott et al. They overcame ‘legislative roadblocks’ by knocking out anti-voucher Republicans but they failed utterly in ‘overcoming opposition among the mass public.’ Indeed, opposition today is both broader and deeper than when Abbott launched his voucher crusade what feels like a decade ago.
If you read this newsletter or my other writings, you’ve heard me mention Houston welding teacher Brett Guillory, a former Trump supporter who has now abandoned the president over the issue of vouchers. As Guillory sees it, there may be no less populist policy than vouchers, which redistribute wealth from the working and middle class to the wealthy. As he puts it, “Vouchers aren’t MAGA. Not even close.” Since I’ve been in touch with him, he’s grown increasingly critical of Trump and is now doing his part to educate his friends and family that Trump is a fraud and that vouchers are the proof.
When we first spoke, Guillory told me that he’s convinced that the political landscape is about to change dramatically:
Corporations and politicians are working together for the elite in order to get around the Constitution. And I think those corporations are so powerful, so money, the super PACs, they own our reps. Our reps do not listen to us. They do whatever these large corporations, these super PACs, and the wealthy elites want them to do, like Tim Dunn and Farris Wilkes out in West Texas. They control the Texas Republican Party. I think the political landscape over the next four years, I believe, is going to change drastically. I really do believe that because I think more and more people are waking up to our enemy is: the billionaires that are controlling everything.
If his language sounds familiar that’s because it’s virtually the same case that Bernie Sanders and AOC have been making to what even the New York Times concedes are ‘monster crowds’ — more than 200,000 total — including in deep red Idaho and Utah. When Sanders talks about building a grassroot movement to take on incumbents of both parties who don’t stand for the working class, he sounds just like Guillory. And when the ‘Fighting Oligarchy’ tour shows up in Texas, the billionaire-bought-and-paid-for voucher program should be at the top of the list of wrongs to be righted.
I mostly avoid cable news these days for reasons of mental health. Do I really need a disaster chryon to tell me that things are bad? But I happened to wander past a talking head the other day who gave me pause. A conservative pundit, he was warning that Trump is setting the stage for a Republican political wipeout, the likes of which we haven’t seen before. The next ‘imperial’ president, he cautioned, could well be AOC. And when the reckoning inevitably comes, all of the gerrymandering and election gimmicks in the world won’t be enough to save the GOP.
Trump himself weighed in during yesterday’s voucher debate, urging GOP legislators to approve the plan and even offering to come to Texas in order to help Gov. Abbott. That won’t be necessary. Abbott finally got his top policy priority. He’ll also have access to a bottomless tranch of campaign cash, courtesy of his pro-voucher donors, should he decide to run for president himself. But this short-term victory comes at a huge political price.
As I’ve been interviewing disaffected Texas conservatives, I’ve heard again and again that ‘the Texas GOP is bought-and-paid-for.’ The loathing of billionaires and their extraordinary influence is widespread and bipartisan, and it’s not going anywhere. Big money and brutal politics may have succeeded in bringing school vouchers to Texas but the fight isn’t over. Indeed it’s just beginning.