Democratic gains in state government are bad news for proponents of school choice.
Liberal victories often spell trouble for the nation’s most vulnerable groups. And with last Tuesday’s election, liberals had a very good night.
News coverage since the midterms has centered on the Democratic Party flipping the House. Will Nancy Pelosi and other Democratic leaders seek to work with the White House, or will the wing of their caucus more interested in investigating than legislating win the day? Will the president respond by brawling or cutting deals?
We’ll know the answers soon enough, but most policies that effect our daily lives are generated at the state and local level, not in Washington. Nowhere is this more evident than education, where Republicans governors and state legislatures have advanced all manner of school-choice options over the past decade, to the benefit of low-income families. More than three million children now attend charter schools, and private-school choice, including voucher programs, has spread to 20 states and the District of Columbia. Education reformers are concerned that Democratic state-level gains in the midterms could now jeopardize decades of real progress.
During the Obama era, Democrats lost a net total of 13 governorships and 816 state legislative seats, according to the National Conference of State Legislators. At the start of this year, the GOP held two-thirds of the nation’s governors’ mansions and about the same share of state legislative chambers. Last week, however, Democrats finally stopped the bleeding. They picked up at least seven governorships—in two states the governor’s races have yet to be decided—and flipped more than 300 state legislative seats nationwide. Democrats are especially proud of their gubernatorial wins in the three states that Donald Trump carried in 2016—Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania—because they could signal that Midwestern voters are swinging back to the left. Either way, this was a “blue wave” in the states.
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal