The Backlash Against School Vouchers Is Showing Up at the Polls

A potent issue keeps getting missed by the media

Texas GOP activist and voucher opponent Lynn Davenport.

There may be no other issue that national media is as bad on as school vouchers. OK—maybe there are one or two other issues… Again and again, the story of the rapid-fire spread of vouchers is told as one of parents, still angry over pandemic school closures, rising up to demand education ‘options.’ Programs that give state money to private schools are a “darling of conservatives,” we’re told in stories like this one, while Democrats are urged to get on the voucher bus or risk the wrath of their own voters. And yet a decided trend is emerging in which voters are rewarding voucher critics and punishing their supporters. The reality is that a policy that is a darling of billionaire donors and actively redistributes wealth upwards is a spectacularly poor fit for our “top vs. bottom” political moment. It’s also an organizing opportunity.

Government overreach

Let’s start on the right, shall we? In the latest episode of my podcast, Have You Heard, I talk to grassroots conservative activists in Texas who are furious about the state’s new $1 billion voucher program. Where proponents promise ‘education freedom’ and ‘school choice,’ they see something very different: a government takeover of private and home schools. “What the government funds, the government runs,” is a refrain I heard again and again. I encourage you to listen to the episode because the anger of these conservative activists regarding a policy that is now considered a GOP ‘litmus test’ issue has major political implications. Here’s how Lynn Davenport explained it to me:

Heads will roll those who voted for vouchers and sold out their schools and their communities and flip flopped and did the bidding of the governor. I think that there’s going to be a real backlash and people don’t wanna hear it, but they would rather sit at home and let the Democrat win then go vote for somebody who’s betrayed them in that way.

That’s exactly what happened in that special election back in January, by the way, when Democrat Taylor Rehmet, a loud critic of vouchers, won an upset election, defeating a Republican opponent who’d been opposed to vouchers before changing her tune once it came time to campaign, and more importantly, solicit campaign funds.

In other words, the GOP has managed to alienate one part of its base—the small-government Republicans who are opposed to what they see as handouts and entitlements. But at the same time, the increasing hostility towards public schools—the unhinged rhetoric used to make the case for vouchers—has turned off the moderates that the party still needs to win elections. And that combo could spell big trouble. Hollie Plemons, a long-time GOP precinct chair in north central Texas, told me that her fear is that Republican voters will end up “just walking away from the voting process altogether, which is terrifying.”

Feeling blue

And it’s not just Texas. One of the most surprising election results came from North Carolina, where the Republican head of the state senate is on the cusp of going down to defeat. The race is being characterized in the media as an example of anti-incumbent fever, but this is also a story about anger over school vouchers. Phil Berger, the most powerful legislator in the state, is a darling of the school choice lobby, which showered him with cash to try to keep him in office. His challenger, Sheriff Sam Page, describes vouchers as a hand-out to the wealthy and has called for prohibiting private schools that receive state funds from raising tuition. That was enough to make him a target for the school choice lobby, including this guy, who accused Page of “siding with Randi Weingarten and the radical left teacher unions against President Trump and North Carolina parents.” Republican voters in rural Rockingham county apparently saw things differently…

Meanwhile in Arkansas, voters said ‘no thanks’ to Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ attempt to primary legislators who’d been insufficiently toady-ish on school vouchers and a controversial prison project. Democrats hope that that bodes well for their pick to challenge Sanders, State Senator Fred Love, who is running as opponent of both vouchers and the prison.

Bottom vs. top

While the media, pundits and ‘hot takers’ have struggled to articulate what just happened, my favorite explanation comes from James Talarico, who by this point no longer requires an introduction. “[T]he biggest divide in our politics is not left vs right. It’s bottom vs. top.” Talarico, of course, rose to statewide prominence in Texas with his fiery critiques of school vouchers as a billionaire-bought policy, something that national reporters keep forgetting to mention. Today, the most exciting candidates running under the D label are economic populists. And to a one, they understand the potency of vouchers as a political issue. “Texan’s tax dollars should be used to support and improve our public schools, not to subsidize the private education choices of the wealthy,” was the rallying cry of yet another progressive populist, Junior Ezeonu, who won a surprise victory this week.

But what’s so fascinating is that grassroots conservatives, like the ones I interviewed, talk in strikingly similar terms. They see vouchers as a failure of democracy, with billionaire donors and super PACs replacing ‘we the people.’ They are convinced that their elected officials no longer represent them—they’re “bought,” is a lament I heard again and again. And when they criticize their party’s new ‘litmus test’ issue, they’re told to sit down and shut up.

“Voters reject vouchers—again!” was the title of a study that came out this summer, analyzing the stinging electoral defeats of ballot questions that went before voters in Kentucky and Nebraska in 2024. While the school choice lobby has been wildly successful in knocking out Republican resistance in state after state, the authors noted, “overcoming legislative roadblocks” was probably the easy part. “No similar mechanism exists for overcoming opposition among the mass public.”

We’re starting to get a glimpse of what that means.