Vouchers are (still) roiling red state politics

An unpopular policy threatens to disrupt the political status quo

The honor of the tallest water slide in the land, if not the world, belongs to Disney’s Blizzard Beach in Orlando. Alas, the 120 foot tall ‘Summit Plummet’ is not the slip-sliding descent that stars in this post. My slippery slope refers, of course, to the dawning realization among GOP pols in Florida, Texas and Tennessee that the school vouchers that are the party’s pet cause have been going to support Islamic schools. Faster than you can say Islamaphobia, ‘news stories’ with breathless headlines like “Taxpayer-Funded Sharia: Florida’s School Choice Program Is Rapidly Building a Parallel Islamic Power Structure,” began to ricochet around the Internet, amplified by the likes of MAGA influencers like Laura Loomer. Before long, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeir was wondering whether the state’s $5 billion universal voucher system, which incentivizes parents to attend private religious schools on the state’s dime, should be a little less universal.

While our descent down this particular skiddy decline took a bit longer than the 7-8 second 120-foot freefall that is the Summit Plummet, the slipperiness of the slope should come as a surprise to exactly no one. Revisit Oklahoma AG Gentner Drummond’s opposition to to a proposed Catholic charter school in that state, for example, and you’ll find him warning of a ‘floodgate,’ as in ‘once you start funding certain religious schools with public money, all kinds of religious schools will want the cash, including schools that you don’t like.’ As Gentner, a Republican with an eye on the governor’s office, put it, “[T]omorrow we may be forced to fund radical Muslim teachings like Sharia law.”

Roiled anew

When I last visited the topic of red state voucher programs in posts like this one and this one, I was making the case that the short term success of school choice proponents in states including Texas and Tennessee had come at a serious political price. In brief, these are controversial programs, unpopular with voters, including among a broad swath of the right. Which is why the latest flap about vouchers funding so-called sharia schools matters. Plenty of conservative voters were already mad about vouchers, and angry with the politicians who, in their minds, foisted these expensive new entitlement programs on them, doing the bidding of out-of-state billionaires and their “globalist” agenda in the process. Now that anger is intersecting with rising hostility to Muslims on the right.

For a glimpse of what I’m talking about, and why it matters, let’s head to Tennessee, site of a recent, hotly contested GOP primary election to fill the seat left by departing US Congressman Mark Green. Amid a crowded field, the grassroots conservative fave was Jody Barrett, a rural Republican who was among the few GOP legislators to vote against school vouchers last year, a position he continues to tout. (Here’s Barrett on the eve of the election, warning that vouchers,. in addition to “going to schools teaching sharia law,” are subsidizing the wealthy in Tennessee.)

What happened to Barrett is instructive. The same dark money groups that swamped the state in order to get vouchers passed spent millions in an effort to defeat Barrett. Indeed, in the waning days of the contest, President Trump himself was forced to weigh in, endorsing Matt Van Epps, the establishment candidate who would ultimately triumph. Van Epps now faces off against Democratic candidate Aftyn Behn, who is running to “Feed kids. Fix Roads. Fund Hospitals” and just may have a long-shot chance to flip the district.

Meanwhile, the restive energy on the right towards the GOP establishment shows no signs of abating. Consider, for example, the race to replace Tennesee Governor Bill Lee. While Senator Marsha Blackburn considers herself the GOP favorite, self-styled grassroots conservatives clearly haven’t gotten the memo. Monty Fritts, who is running on a platform of ‘less government, more liberty,’ is promising to suspend the state’s voucher program, which he calls both unconstitutional and fiscally irresponsible. The fallout from the voucher program is also reverberating through state-level races. Gary Humble, founder of the influential conservative group Tennessee Stands, who is challenging the Senate Majority Leader, says that he’ll “work to limit and strictly budget voucher programs.”

It’s essential to note that these are right-wing candidates. Humble is pledging to govern from a “biblical world view,” while Fritts doesn’t think that “foreign children” aka undocumented students should be able to attend public schools. What’s key here is that these conservative challengers are taking on what they regard as “the celebrity establishment and the entrenched political class,” for whom school vouchers are a top priority. As huge new programs come on line in states like Texas, look for a similar split within the GOP to disrupt the state’s politics.

Misreading the tea leaves

The arrival of Halloween makes this the perfect time to dig up a dead body, by which I’m referring to the endless autopsying of the Democratic Party and its most recent defeat. This week brought yet another round of postmortems for the embattled Dems. I will dwell upon just one of these, Deciding to Win, whose authors include a former Massachusetts charter school advocate and a young man who graduated from college this year. Among their many recommendations is that Democrats should run on issues that poll well, including expanding school choice, vs. issues that poll poorly, including eliminating tracking in schools and equalizing public school funding nationally, neither of which, to my knowledge, any candidates are actually running on.

That sound you can hear, dear reader, is a resounding chorus, all in agreement that Democrats must ‘moderate’ in order to win back voters, including on K-12 education, returning to the winning combo of choice, accountability, and hostility to teachers that won them the White House in eras Clinton and Obama. Except that 15 minutes spent in the still-roiling red states I’ve been describing should be enough to make one seriously question this take. For one thing, some of the most popular Democrats in the land are red state governors who opposed school vouchers—see, for example, Kentucky’s Andy Beshear, or Roy Cooper, the outgoing governor of North Carolina who is running for Senate.

Then there are the Democratic challengers who are siezing on school vouchers as an example of the corrosive influence of billionaires on state politics. Listen to Senate candidate Nathan Sage in Iowa, for example, as he accuses the GOP of tearing down public schools, “brick by brick, while treating our public school teachers like dirt. They are underfunding our public schools and diverting billions of taxpayer dollars to private schools and the billionaires behind them.” Or James Talarico in Texas, who points to school vouchers as evidence that billionaire mega-donors have bought the state, as he told Joe Rogan. Or Gina Hinajosa, who is challenging Governor Greg Abbott. In her campaign launch video, Hinajosa declared that “Our fight right now is against the billionaires and corporations who are driving up prices, closing our neighborhood schools and cheating Texans out of basic health care.”

There is a reason why these candidates are so focused on billionaires and school vouchers. Not only did mega-donors essentially buy their favored education policy in one red state after another but anger over their outsized influence is both deep and bipartisan in nature. In other words, running on expanding school choice as part of a “Common Sense Renewal of the Democratic Party,” as the Deciding to Win bills their strategy, makes zero sense.

Back in Tennessee, David McIntosh, who heads up the Club for Growth, yet another deep-pocketed pro-voucher group, penned an op-ed, celebrating the triumph of ‘school freedom’ in the special election. In McIntosh’s telling, vouchers were the defining issue in the contest, which is why voters chose a candidate who didn’t run on them. “The Tennessee results prove that the Republican Party is now the party of school freedom,” concludes McIntosh. “You cannot call yourself a conservative and oppose it.”

The influencers, donors and the elites who dominate both parties have concluded that school choice is the only choice. Whether voters agree will be a defining question in 2026 and beyond.