Fault Lines and Fissures

In the early days of the second Trump administration, the fault lines and fissures are already coming into view. But while the split between nationalist populists and tech oligarchs about immigration policy may be getting more headlines, conflicts over Trump’s education agenda could get just as nasty. That’s because many of the policy punchlines that were reliable applause generators at Trump’s rallies are actually deeply unpopular with the public.

Trump’s plan to eliminate the Department of Education, apparently on hold for now, turns out to be opposed by majorities of voters in both parties — numbers that are likely to grow as the implications of funding cuts, which will fall hardest on Trump’s own red-state base, begin to sink in. And Trump’s threat to withhold federal funding from schools with vaccine mandates is even more of a political loser. According to a recent survey, just 15 percent of adults identified this as a top priority, while nearly half said that the cuts “should not be done.”

Even the calls for mass deportations, which so thrilled many of his supporters, run afoul of public opinion when it comes to schools. Just 18 percent of voters support arresting undocumented students at schools.

Swirling around these unpopular policy specifics is an education “vision” that is more contradictory than any administration’s in recent memory. Does Making America Great Again entail a massive investment in STEM education à la the US response to the Soviets launching the Sputnik satellite? Or is the relentless focus on STEM actually the product of a hundred-year-old progressive conspiracy to boot God from the schools and turn the kids into corporate drones, as both Heritage Foundation head Kevin Roberts and Defense chief nominee Pete Hegseth have argued? Do we need a kind of affirmative action so that right-thinking youngsters gain a foothold in the nation’s elite universities? Or is the goal to radically reduce the number of youngsters with bachelor’s degrees, as Rufo himself recently argued?

Such tensions promise more than just online fireworks. Deep divisions within the GOP base over education policy also represent an opening for Democrats. Will they recognize the opportunity? The signs so far are not auspicious.

School Choice Showdown

There may be no issue that divides the GOP base from the party’s leaders and major donors like school vouchers. In recent years, the powerful and deep-pocketed “school choice” lobby has succeeded in making the issue a “litmus test” for Republican candidates, akin to abortion. “Self-proclaimed conservatives who oppose school choice are nothing short of political whores, and we will find and support challengers to these RINOs [‘Republican in Name Only’],” David McIntosh, head of the conservative advocacy group Club for Growth, declared in 2022.

Since then, expansive school choice policies that pick up the tab for private religious school tuition for even the wealthiest parents have been passed in nearly a dozen states, including Florida, Iowa, and North Carolina. That list is likely to grow in the next year. ALEC, the influential right-wing legislative advocacy group, has set an ambitious goal of having twenty-five states adopt “education freedom” by the end of 2025. Meanwhile, a federal school voucher bill is steadily advancing and is widely expected to be tucked into the Trump tax cut package.

But elite policy consensus and grassroots support are not the same thing, something that lopsided defeats at the polls for voucher measures demonstrated in November.

In Kentucky, voters from every single county rejected a change to the Constitution that would have allowed public dollars to fund private religious education, despite a marquee endorsement from Trump. “Kentuckians agree with Donald Trump,” proclaimed one ad, featuring Trump broadcasting his support for school choice. “If you do too, vote yes on [Amendment] 2.”

The appeal landed with a thud. The same rural counties that supported Trump most emphatically also rejected the voucher amendment by outsize margins. Voters in Monroe County, which borders Tennessee, supported Trump by nearly 90 percent while rejecting the voucher amendment by 70.5 percent. And in the state’s tiniest county, eight out of ten voters went for Trump, nearly the same margin by which they opposed Amendment 2. In Nebraska, vouchers were defeated by an equally lopsided margin.

Oligarchs for Kids

“If the ox has got to get gored, it’s got to come out of the wealthy. It’s got to come out of the billionaire class,” Steve Bannon menaced recently.

While the specter of tech billionaires, worth an estimated $1.3 trillion in combined net worth, swarming Trump’s inauguration would seem to undercut the administration’s populist appeal, the issue of school vouchers is similarly nettlesome. After all, a passion for privatizing the nation’s schools unites the very wealthiest among us like few other causes besides not paying taxes. Betsy DeVos, Jeff Yass, Richard Uihlein, and the remaining brother Koch are all devoted to “funding students, not systems,” as the current sales pitch for vouchers puts it.

Increasingly, these oligarchs are devoting their fortunes to remaking state legislatures in order to till the land for voucher expansion. Yass, the richest man in Pennsylvania, was the single largest contributor to candidates in the last election cycle, with donations including $10 million to Texas governor Greg Abbott — the single largest donation ever to a Texas politician — and $5 million toward the failed voucher effort in Kentucky. The school choice organization founded and funded by DeVos has, according to one recent investigation, spent more than a quarter billion dollars to advance the cause of school privatization.

In recent years, that largesse has been devoted to knocking out the so-called RINOs, mostly rural Republicans representing areas where the argument for dismantling local schools falls flat. But that big-money push to buy up legislators is also hard to square with the sort of anti-billionaire rhetoric that is increasingly common in the MAGA sphere.

“Vouchers aren’t MAGA. Not even close,” says Brett Guillory. A welding teacher in Houston, Guillory was so convinced that the 2020 election was stolen that he contemplated a run for Congress. These days, he is a vocal opponent of the effort to bring vouchers to Texas. “To me, MAGA is building up the middle class. When you talk about a wealth transfer, it’s going from the hard-working class to the wealthy,” Guillory told me when I interviewed him for a podcast about rising resistance to school privatization on the Right.

Guillory is referring to a growing body of data showing that the “universal voucher programs” that have been enacted in red states mostly benefit parents who already sent their kids to private schools. “ If you look at all the numbers, all the statistics, they all say the same thing, that over three-quarters of people who use vouchers are the wealthy.” Concludes Guillory: “Vouchers are essentially welfare for the rich.”

The money gushing into states like Texas and Tennessee, the current targets of the school choice billionaires, is spurring a populist revolt on the Right. These days, the loudest voices opposing school vouchers are conservative, bemoaning that their elected officials have been bought and that vouchers are part of a “billionaire globalist agenda.”

An Opening for Democrats?

If Democrats are aware of this potential vulnerability within the MAGA coalition, there are few signs so far. Tim Walz initially came out swinging against “robber barons like Donald Trump and J. D. Vance,” accusing them of wanting to privatize rural schools. “Where in the heck are you going to find a private school in a town of four hundred?” Walz asked in a viral interview this summer. But his prairie populist case for public education quickly fell by the wayside, another casualty of the Kamala Harris campaign’s broader shift away from economic populism and back toward the familiar “opportunity economy” rhetoric that has been the party’s mainstay since the Bill Clinton era

Yet Walz was clearly onto something. In Nebraska’s Boyd County, where Walz attended high school, six of ten voters rejected private school vouchers even as they cast nearly 90 percent of their votes for Trump.

Democrats have given little indication that they will exploit the GOP’s weakness here. In the seemingly endless election postmortems, none have mentioned Republican resistance to school vouchers as an opportunity. Meanwhile, in the internecine struggle to control the party’s future direction, the old Democratic Leadership Council get-tough-on-teachers-and-their-unions crowd appears ascendant, even as their cause has grown steadily less popular.

Rahm Emanuel urged his fellow Democrats to lean into education as an issue by reminding voters that schools are failing and students are falling short. Jorge Elorza, head of the once-influential Democrats for Education Reform, pointed to a surefire way for the party to reconnect with its working-class base: by embracing school choice. Inveterate centrist pundit Jonathan Chait who, bemoaning that Democrats no longer run on education, counseled them to rally around the issue of closing down under-enrolled urban schools — a cause so unpopular that it drove Emanuel’s reelection prospects as mayor of Chicago into the ground.

In the coming months, the Trump administration will be rolling out one unpopular and divisive plan for the nation’s schools after another, including a federal voucher plan just like the one Trump’s own supporters voted against in November. Democrats have a golden opportunity here to expose the faux populism at the heart of the MAGA movement. They should seize it.