Months ago, The Heritage Foundation published a study showing that Democrats have provided determinative votes only rarely in state legislatures on private choice programs. I’ve seen little publicly that would constitute a substantive response.
Privately, I’ve heard multiple missives that fall somewhere on the “random grousing” to “grasping at straws” to “pulling hair out and mumbling whacky sassafras” spectrum.
I suggest that we simply confess the emperor’s nudity: The swing votes in legislative choice battles have strongly tended to be located in the moderate/rural side of the Republican caucus. If you convince them, you tend to win. If you don’t, you tend to lose.
While I could name a large number of heroic counter examples, these constitute exceptions rather than the rule. This most important question is not whether this has been the case, but rather how it should inform action moving forward.
My suggestion: Choice advocates should recognize that legislative Democrats are unlikely sources for swing votes but continue to recruit constituencies for choice across all communities.
Polls show strong bipartisan support for choice, but this has been the case for decades. Unions recruiting primary opponents, knocking on doors, and making campaign contributions can have quite a deterrent effect from translating these polls into legislative action.
We have indeed seen nearly successful, and in fact successful, choice efforts in deep blue states like New York and Illinois, respectively. The movement, however, seems disturbingly incurious about emulating the strategies and tactics of those efforts.
It’s a pity that those nearly successful and successful efforts in deep blue states deserve study and emulation. The New York and Illinois efforts went heavy on coalition building and included a number f constituencies that traditionally align with Democrats.
It isn’t easy to pull off. It is difficult work.
A couple of years ago, exit polls showed that a threat to choice programs in the Florida governor’s race helped tip the outcome. As Bill Mattox, director of the Marshall Center for Educational Options at the James Madison Institute, concluded in a commentary published recently in the Wall Street Journal:
Most of all, Florida’s surprising outcome ought to encourage every American—especially in these hyperpolarized times—to support policies that bring together strange bedfellows to solve serious problems.
