Republicans pounce on schools as a wedge issue to unite the party
After an unexpectedly strong showing Tuesday night, Republicans are heading into the 2022 midterm elections with what they believe will be a highly effective political strategy capitalizing on the frustrations of suburban parents still reeling from the devastating fallout of pandemic-era schooling.
Seizing on education as a newly potent wedge issue, Republicans have moved to galvanize crucial groups of voters around what the party calls “parental rights” issues in public schools, a hodgepodge of conservative causes ranging from eradicating mask mandates to demanding changes to the way children are taught about racism.
Yet it is the free-floating sense of rage from parents, many of whom felt abandoned by the government during the worst months of the pandemic, that arose from the off-year elections as one of the most powerful drivers for Republican candidates.
Across the country, Democrats lost significant ground in crucial suburban and exurban areas — the kinds of communities that are sought out for their well-funded public schools — that helped give the party control of Congress and the White House. In Virginia, where Republicans made schools central to their pitch, education rocketed to the top of voter concerns in the final weeks of the race, narrowly edging out the economy.
The message worked on two frequencies. Pushing a mantra of greater parental control, Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor in Virginia, stoked the resentment and fear of some white voters, who were alarmed by efforts to teach a more critical history of racism in America. He attacked critical race theory, a graduate school framework that has become a loose shorthand for a contentious debate on how to address race. And he released an ad that was a throwback to the days of banning books, highlighting objections by a white mother and her high-school-age son to “Beloved,” the canonical novel about slavery by Black Nobel laureate Toni Morrison.
But at the same time, Youngkin and other Republicans tapped into broader dissatisfaction among moderate voters about teachers unions, unresponsive school boards, quarantine policies and the instruction parents saw firsthand during months of remote learning. In his stump speeches, Youngkin promised to never again close Virginia schools.
While Terry Mcauliffe, the Democratic nominee, and his party allies eagerly condemned the ugliest attacks by their opponents, they seemed unprepared to counter the wider outpouring of anger over schools.
For weeks before the Virginia election, Republicans pointed to the school strategy as a possible template for the entire party. Youngkin’s victory Tuesday confirmed for Republicans that they had an issue capable of uniting diverse groups of voters. The trend was most evident in Youngkin’s improvement over former President Donald Trump’s performance in the Washington suburbs, which include a mix of communities with large Asian, Hispanic and Black populations.
Rep. Kevin Mccarthy, R-calif., the House minority leader, listed education as a main plank of his party’s plan to reclaim power, with promises to introduce a “Parents’ Bill of Rights.”
“If the Virginia results showed us anything, it is that parents are demanding more control and accountability in the classroom,” he wrote in an election-night letter to his caucus.
While the conservative news media and Republican candidates stirred the stew of anxieties and racial resentments that animate the party’s base — thundering about equity initiatives, books with sexual content and transgender students on sports teams — they largely avoided offering specific plans to tackle thornier issues like budget cuts and deepening educational inequalities.
But the election results suggested that Republicans had spoken about education in ways that resonated with a broader cross-section of voters.
In Virginia, the Youngkin campaign appealed to Asian parents worried about progressive efforts to make admissions processes in gifted programs less restrictive; Black parents upset over the opposition of teachers unions to charter schools; and suburban mothers of all races who were generally on edge about having to juggle so much at home over the last year and a half.
Democrats largely declined to engage deeply with such charged concerns, instead focusing on plans to pump billions into education funding, expand prekindergarten programs and raise teacher pay.
Many of the educational issues are sure to linger. Already, the effects of remote learning on parents have been severe. School closures drove millions of parents out of the workforce, led to an increase in mental health problems among children and worsened existing educational inequalities. Many of those effects were borne most heavily by key parts of the Democratic base, including women and Black and Latino families.
Strategists, activists and officials urged Democrats to prepare for the Republican attacks to be echoed by GOP candidates up and down the ticket.
Geoff Garin, a top Democratic pollster, said the party’s candidates needed to expand their message beyond policy goals like reducing class sizes and expanding pre-k education.
“It’s going to be incumbent on Democrats to have a compelling response,” said Garin. “They also need to be prepared to assert the value of public education in terms of a place where there’s a common curriculum and common set of values that most voters agree are the right ones for public schools.”
Katie Paris, a party activist who runs Red, Wine and Blue, a group that works to mobilize suburban women, said that even as she warned that attacks over critical race theory had been “spreading like wildfire,” her pleas for resources had gone largely unanswered by party donors and officials.
“These outside forces have come for our schools and our communities, and at the highest levels within the Democratic Party, people have just said, ‘Well, don’t talk about it,’” she said. “The unwillingness to engage in this was a big mistake, and it will be in 2022, too.”
Rashad Robinson, president of the racial justice organization Color of Change, expressed a similar concern.
Democrats, he said, “don’t show up when the conversation gets tough.”
“Critical race theory isn’t being taught, but we need to actually tell people what is being taught and why this is a strategy to prevent our kids from learning about all of our history,” said Robinson. “It’s about banning Black history, but it’s also about banning American history.”