NC Republicans versus public education

Great stuff from Thomas Mills:

The Republican legislature has launched its spring offensive against public schools in North Carolina. Last week, the legislature expanded their voucher scheme, taking $500 million from public schools to subsidize wealthy families who send their children to private schools. They also made a frontal assault against teachers with a bill that would require them to post lesson plans online along with their names. These measures will deprive public school students of resources while demoralizing teachers.

Republicans have been dishonest about their plans for public education for years. Before they took power, they complained that Democrats’ warnings that the GOP would cut funding to public schools was little more than scare tactics. Once they took power, though, they took a hatchet to the education budget, leaving North Carolina with one of the lowest per pupil spending rates in the country. The state also has among the lowest teacher pay rates in the nation.

When Republicans first launched their voucher scheme, they insisted the program was designed to help poor students escape failing public schools. They vehemently denied that the vouchers would become tax cuts for millionaires, yet here we are. Republicans lifted the cap on Opportunity Scholarships, making the name a misnomer. Instead, they are tax cuts for rich people that are coming out of the education budget. They lied again about the purpose of the so-called scholarships.

Ever since they’ve taken power, Republicans have seen teachers as the enemy. In their telling of public education, teachers are devious, indoctrinating students in radical ideologies and turning them against the culture. They need heavy-handed regulation from their masters in the state legislature. The proposed bill is meant to either expose the radical agenda of teachers who want to turn society into a Marxist hellscape or prevent them from implementing their agenda in the first place. It’s a signal to parents that teachers are not to be trusted…

The 2024 legislative session marks the thirteenth year of the GOP offensive against public schools. They have demeaned the teaching profession and cut funding for schools while claiming that our schools are broken. They are now paying families to abandoned the public schools for private ones with no accountability.

If public schools are broken, then Republicans broke them. They’ve had thirteen years to fix the problems they claimed the schools had and their solution is to empty them of the most privileged students, leaving them for kids of underprivileged families. Republicans don’t believe that those who have benefited most from our society and government have any obligation to those who have been left behind. They are trying to turn public schools into second-rate institutions reserved for the poorest members of society by making teaching an unattractive proposition and encouraging privileged families to leave. It’s a radical notion.

Democrats need to launch a vigorous counter offensive. They need to regain the trust of parents by laying out an agenda that pushes back against the Radical Republicans and stands up for public schools. They need to educate the public about transferring tax dollars from public schools to wealthy families supporting private ones with no accountability. They need to let the public know that tax dollars are going to support religious institutions who are, in fact, indoctrinating children. The assault on our public schools cannot go unanswered.

About those crazy liberal young voters (or not)

We know all about how the youth are extremely liberal and driven primarily by issues of climate and Gaza… right?  Perhaps the ultimate case of twitter (and college protests) are not real life is the recent data showing this is decidedly not the case.  First, Yglesias, “Young voters care about the same stuff as everyone else: Inflation and health care, not climate and student loans”

The youngest cohort of Americans is less white, less religious, and better-educated than the national average, so naturally it’s more Democratic-leaning and less conservative than older cohorts.

But young people also pay less attention to politics, know less about politics, are less rooted in their communities, and are less likely to vote than older people. So across multiple cycles now, Democrats have understandably tried to “mobilize” young people — i.e., get them to actually vote. Younger Democratic Party primary voters (a group that is distinct from young people writ large) also famously did not love Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden in their respective primary campaigns, preferring the more left-wing Bernie Sanders. As a result, progressive advocacy groups often argue that the key to youth mobilization is adopting strident progressive stances on the groups’ issues.

Note, though, that this is largely a fallacy.

Here are two true propositions:

1. Young people are less engaged than older people

2. The young people who are engaged love Bernie Sanders

Logically, nothing about (1) and (2) implies that if more Democratic candidates were more like Bernie Sanders, more non-engaged young people would engage with politics.

In fact, the median young person self-identifies as moderate, just like the electorate as a whole. And at all ages, less-engaged people are less ideological and more moderate than consistent voters. Your socialist niece who posts obsessively about Genocide Joe is not representative of the typical member of her generation, who is on the bubble as to whether to vote for Joe Biden. You probably don’t hear a lot about the political opinions of politically disengaged young people because they are politically disengaged. Into the void step opportunists who try to convince Democrats that they have the key to the youth vote, even though on the most plausible measurements, the stuff that young people care about is very similar to the stuff that everyone else cares about.

In particular, the idea that there’s some magic trick to mobilize young people via progressive messages on climate change has basically no evidence behind it.

Young voters care about inflation and health care

Despite all my moaning and complaining, I am actually quite a bit more progressive than the average American, so I think it would be great to have a reasonably high carbon tax and split the revenue between a Child Tax Credit and deficit reduction. But as even the most strident climate change advocates in the world agree, a broad-based carbon tax is toxically unpopular. When gasoline prices spiked early in Joe Biden’s presidency, nobody stood and cheered and said “hooray, we are getting closer to our climate goals!”

And that’s the basic paradox of climate politics…

The Harvard Institute of Politics did a good polling exercise in their most recent youth poll where they gave respondents a bunch of pairwise comparisons — they asked them to consider two issues and pick which one is more important. Then they aggregated the winners of the head-to-head matchups to see which issues young voters care about most. Climate does not crack the top 10.

 

Note that two other issues that are frequently said to be politically important to young people — student loans and Israel — ranked even lower than climate change.

The top issue for young people is inflation. [emphases mine]

Inflation, of course, is a tough issue for Biden. So he is lucky that number two is health care, which remains the thing that I think Democrats should talk about more. Unfortunately for Democrats, abortion rights rank higher than climate, but still not that high.

I think this carries a few implications. The main one is that if you’re a Democrat and you need to address a persuadable group of young people, you should probably talk about the same stuff you’d talk about to any audience…

In terms of organizing and mobilizing work, I know that Israel critics like to say they are trying to help Biden by coercing him into shifting his position to one that’s more popular with the Democratic base. But look at these numbers — most people don’t care about this issue. When you stage protests and do other things to try to drive up its salience, you are driving up the salience of a Trump-friendly wedge issue and making it more likely that a candidate who is relentlessly hostile to Palestinian interests will win. If you can’t in good conscience actively work to help Biden get elected, that’s fair enough, but don’t be deluded about what’s happening here. Conversely, if we’d had University of Texas students getting arrested last week staging a pro choice protest at the Texas Capitol, that would have driven up the salience of an issue that is much better for Democrats. Organizing on abortion rights is very valuable precisely because this issue has a tendency to fall out of the headlines…

Note that one reason the student debt issue is not as high a priority for young voters as many Democrats seem to believe is that a majority of young people owe $0 in student debt.

And a recent piece in the NYT, “Gaza Isn’t Root of Biden’s Struggles With Young Voters, Polls Show: Young voters are far more likely than other Americans to support Palestinians. But few cite the conflict as a top source of discontent with the president.”

But these headlines are not reflective of young voters’ top concerns this election year, according to recent polls. Surveys taken in recent months show young voters are more likely to sympathize with Palestinians in the conflict, but few of them rank the Israel-Hamas war among their top issues in the 2024 election. Like other voters, young people often put economic concerns at the top of the list.

And while young voters are cooler to Mr. Biden than they were at the same point in 2020, there is little evidence that American support for the Israeli invasion of Gaza is a critical factor in their relative discontent…

The latest polling from the Pew Research Center finds 18-to-29-year olds three times more likely to sympathize with Palestinians in the conflict than those over 65, and twice as likely as adults as a whole.

“Not necessarily everyone is as fired up about it as we see from those out protesting,” said Laura Silver, the associate director of global research for Pew. “But 18-to-29-year-olds are far and away different from older Americans.”

Recent polls suggest these sympathies have yet to translate into prioritizing the war as a voting issue in 2024.

In the Harvard Institute of Politics’ Youth Poll conducted shortly before the past month’s wave of campus demonstrations and crackdowns, 18-to-29-year-old Americans overwhelmingly faulted Mr. Biden for his handling of the conflict in Gaza, with 76 percent disapproving and 18 percent approving. But only 2 percent of them rated it their top concern in the election, compared with 27 percent who said they were most concerned about economic issues.

In an Economist/YouGov poll taken more recently, in late April, 22 percent of voters aged 18 to 29 listed inflation as their most important issue. Two percent named foreign policy as their top concern. (The poll did not specifically ask about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.)

So, short version, as I saw someone put it on twitter yesterday, young people are basically normie liberals.  And there’s only so much Democrats can do on inflation, so just focus on health care and abortion, damnit (while continuing to make the case that the economy is actually really good, damnit).