In 2018 Arizona voters overwhelmingly rejected school vouchers. That year, there was a measure on the ballot that would have allowed all parents — even the wealthiest — to receive taxpayer money to send their children to private, usually religious, schools.
Arizonans voted no, and it was a close call. Even in the right-wing state, where the initiative is supported by influential Republican leaders, the vote against was 65% to 35%.
Heading into the election this week, Donald Trump and Republicans hoped to reverse such popular opposition to “school choice” with new voucher voting measures in several states.
But despite Trump’s landslide victory in the presidential race, vouchers were once again overwhelmingly rejected by the vast majority of Americans. In KentuckyA ballot initiative that would have allowed public money to go toward private education was defeated by about 65% to 35% — the same margin as Arizona in 2018 and reverse the margin by which Trump won in Kentucky. In the state of Nebraskanearly all 93 counties voted to end the existing voucher program; even the reddest district, where 95% of voters supported Trump, said no to vouchers. I in Coloradovoters defeated an attempt to add “school choice” to the state constitution, language that would have allowed parents to send their children to private schools on the public dime.
Expanding school vouchers despite outside support wealthy conservativesnever won when put to voters. Instead, they lost by a margin not often seen in such a polarized country.
Candidates from both parties would be wise to “make strong public education a big part of their policy agenda because vouchers are just not popular,” said Tim Royers, president of the Nebraska State Education Association, a teachers union. Royers noted the emergence of a coalition in his state and others, including both progressive Democrats and rural Republicans, opposing these broad “school choice” efforts. (Small-town Trump voters oppose such measures because their local public school is often an important community institution, and also because there aren’t many private schools around.)
However, voucher efforts were more successful when they were not put to a public vote. In recent years, nearly a dozen states introduced or expanded major voucher or “education savings account” programs that provide taxpayer money even wealthy families who could already afford a private school.
This includes Arizona where in 2022 the conservative Goldwater Institute teamed up with Republican Gov. Doug Ducey and the GOP majority in the Legislature to pass the same “universal” education savings account an initiative that was so decisively rejected by voters a few years ago.
Another way Republican governors and interest groups have circumvented the popular will on this issue is by identifying members of their party who oppose vouchers and supporting pro-voucher candidates who challenge those members in the primary. That way, they can build a legislative majority to pass voucher laws regardless of what conservative voters want.
In Iowaseveral Republicans stood in the way of a major new voucher program through 2022. Gov. Kim Reynolds helped oust them from office — despite holding office in her own party — in order to secure a majority for the measure.
A similar dynamic took place in Tennessee and dramatically in Texas, main prize for voucher advocates. Pro-voucher candidates for the state legislature won enough seats Tuesday to pass the voucher program during the legislative session that begins in January, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said.
The day after the election, Abbott, who has made vouchers his top legislative priority, described the result as a loud signal that Texans now had a “tidal wave of support” for pro-voucher lawmakers. But in reality, the issue has been conspicuously absent from the campaigns of many of the new Republicans he helped win, amid polling data showing Texans have complicated views on school choice. (University of Houston survey conducted this summer showed that two-thirds of Texans support the voucher legislation, but an equal number also believe that vouchers divert money from “public schools that are already struggling.”)
In the half-dozen competitive legislative races in Texas targeted this election by Abbott and the pro-voucher American Federation for Children, supported by former Secretary of Education Betsy DeVosRepublican candidates have not made vouchers a central part of their programs. Most have left the issue to their company websites, instead listing positions such as “Standing with public schools” and “Increased funding for local schools.”
Corpus Christi Republican Denise Villalobos pledged on her website that if elected, she would “fight for increased funding for our teachers and local schools”; she didn’t emphasize her pro-voucher views. At least one advertising is paid for The American Federation for Children-affiliated PAC attacked its opponent, Democrat Solomon Ortiz Jr., not for his opposition to vouchers, but for what it said were his “progressive open borders policies that are flooding our communities with violent crime and fentanyl.” (Villalobos beat Ortiz by 10 points.)
Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University, said the strategy reflects the belief of voucher advocates that, compared to borders and the culture wars, vouchers aren’t really a “slam dunk issue.”
Following Tuesday’s presidential election results, NBC News Chief Political Analyst Chuck Todd said that Democrats have overlooked school choice as a policy that might be popular with working-class people, including Latinos, in places like Texas. But the specific results of ballot initiatives across the country show that Trump, DeVos and other voucher advocates are actually out of step with the American people on this particular issue.
However, they continue to favor vouchers for several reasons: a sense that public schools are places where children develop liberal values, an ideological belief that the free market and private institutions can do things better and more efficiently than public ones, and a long -the immediate goal of greater religious education in this country.
And they know that popular sentiment can be and has been trumped by the efforts of powerful governors and moneyed interest groups, said Josh Cowen, senior fellow at the Education Law Center, who recently published history billionaire-led voucher efforts across the country.
The Supreme Court could also help the voucher movement in the coming years, he said.
“They’re not going to stop,” Cowen said, “just because the voters rejected it.”
