The issues that have worked for Democrats around the country this election season—affordability and working-class stability chief among them—also worked for Taylor Rehmet, a union president and machinist who beat his Trump-backed opponent for a deep-red state Senate seat in the Fort Worth area of Texas last weekend. But his platform included something more unusual and a little retro: a promise to return vocational education to public high schools.
Rehmet, 33, is the son of blue-collar Republicans: His father was an airplane mechanic and his mother was a hairdresser. He has said he plans to expand vocational education as part of an effort at “rebuilding the pipeline between schools and good-paying jobs,” and made it part of his pro–working class pitch. “No matter what party you’re in, if you work hard and focus on the issues—such as lowering costs, health care, and really focusing on working people—that’s how you’ll get people to show up and vote,” he said on ABC News Live after his victory.
The focus comes at a time when Republicans are paying lip-service to American workers while dismantling public education, the economy, and pro-worker laws. At the same time, more and more American families are anxious about their economic future and how to maintain stable careers that will survive the next technological revolution. Talking about vocational training—now commonly referred to as career and technical education, or CTE—may hit the sweet spot for many voters. It’s a message other Democrats could pick up.
“CTE enrollment is up almost 10 percent over the last three years, which is a big jump in a short period of time,” said Taylor White, director of the postsecondary pathways for youth at New America, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. “[Rehmet] is tapping into something that is for real happening, not just in his backyard.”
The U.S. education system for at least a generation has focused on sending high school students to college, owing to the decline in manufacturing in the last half of the twentieth century and the expansion of service-sector and knowledge-worker careers that required college educations. That has meant a lot of changes in practice, one of them being an under-investment in the kinds of agricultural, woodworking, shop, home economics, and other career-focused classes that had been common in high schools until then.
There were some good reasons for the shift. It seemed that college educations held the key to the best-paying jobs, and it’s still true college graduates earn a wage premium. And in the past, some of the vocational education pathways amounted to tracking some students into classes that closed off college opportunities and weren’t always academically rigorous enough to truly prepare them for jobs. That made parents skeptical of CTE in general.
“It was absolutely terrible for many years,” said Mary Alice McCarthy, director of New America’s Center on Education and Labor. “Researchers in the ‘70s and ‘80s and ‘90s found that it was a space where students of color, Black students in particular, were tracked into these programs. They were dead-end programs. They were very low quality. And, you know, they just had a terrible reputation, and vocational education had a lot of stigma associated with it.”
The reforms since then have been significant, she said. “We don’t usually have really good stories of reform to tell in the education space, but career and technical education is one of those stories,” she said. So much so that the College Board is extending its Advanced Placement program, which are college-level courses offered in high schools that can allow students to earn college credit, into some CTE classes. Students who take CTE can still go to college as well, so they no longer divert students away from earning bachelor’s degrees if they want them.
All of this speaks to the appeal of these classes to students and their parents, who are seeking AI-proof career paths and rethinking the sizable investment it takes to go to college. But federal funding for CTE is still lacking; it received almost $1.5 billion in 2025, just 14 percent more than in 2008—not enough to keep pace with inflation. And President Donald Trump is slowly dismantling the Department of Education, impacting some of these programs.
“They are trying to move parts of the Department of Education which are really necessary for career and technical education, vocational programs and others, to different agencies,” said Veronica Goodman, senior director of workforce development policy at the Center for American Progress. “And as we’ve seen, that’s already led to a lot of disarray for programs and workers and the institutions that rely on these funds. And so I think that’s definitely going to have an impact, a negative impact, on the preparation that students and workers are getting.”
That will mean even fewer students could have access to those programs than they do today. At the same time, Trump’s dismantling of many of the programs in the Inflation Reduction Act and other manufacturing policies passed by President Joe Biden mean that the apprenticeships and entry-level jobs that could provide an alternative pathway into those careers could disappear, too.
While expanding CTE might make sense on its own, Rehmet also framed his support as a way to bolster his support for public education in general. He says he wants to increase teacher pay and repeal the state’s voucher system, which diverts government money to private schools. This message apparently resonated in a district where his opponent, Republican Leigh Wambsganss, had helped fuel an anti-DEI push at local libraries and on the school board—which had already inspired a backlash. CTE education is part of Rehmet’s broader message about reinvesting in public schools and helping the working class find stable jobs in an economy where they can afford houses, groceries, and more stable lives. It’s part of an overarching message about rebuilding unions and the working class.
His message could also resonate in working-class communities beyond Texas. “This is an area that should rise up in the priorities of progressives and Democrats,” McCarthy said. “We’ve been so focused on a college mentality, but students and families are voting with their feet, and they are picking CTE.”
