Pease Elementary in downtown Austin, Texas, has sat empty since 2020. Formerly the oldest continuously operating school in Texas, Pease was shuttered by the Austin Independent School District to save money. On a steamy day this summer, the hulking structure provided an appropriate backdrop for the political campaign of Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic state representative who is challenging incumbent GOP Governor Greg Abbott.
A district plan to close the school in 2012, while Hinojosa’s son was a student there, inspired her political career, sending her first to the school board and then, four years later, to the Statehouse just a few blocks away. But Pease is also symbolic of Texas’s surprisingly fierce attachment to public education. The school dates back to 1876, the same year that the current state constitution enshrined “a system of public free schools”—a factoid that Texas advocates drop with regularity. That Pease is no longer a school matters, too. Since late 2023, at least 135 Texas public schools either have closed or are slated to close due to budget crises brought on by state funding shortfalls.
Hinojosa believes her message that Texas public schools won’t survive another four years of Abbott can galvanize voters across the political spectrum. “For Texans, public schools are crucial to our identity,” Hinojosa told me. “They’re in our state constitution, they’re the largest employers in our rural communities, they represent ‘Friday night lights.’ That they are in crisis is a big deal.”
Her decision to make public schools so central to the campaign may seem like a risky gambit. Education, after all, rarely cracks the top five when it comes to issues Texans claim to care about, far overshadowed by the economy and immigration. And according to polling, just one in five Texas voters has school-age children. The “Pissed Off Texas Mom” T-shirts are a staple of rallies for the candidate whom supporters call simply “Gina,” but in reality, the demographic may be too small to make a difference.
Hinojosa’s critique goes far beyond budget cuts and declining test scores. Schools are the centerpiece of what she argues has been an organized effort by Abbott and the GOP to rig the system against the state’s kids, especially those in working-class families like those she grew up with in Brownsville. Call it “mom populism”—an appeal that centers a full-throated rejection of school privatization and presents the GOP’s increasingly aggressive interventions into local school districts as “corruption schemes” intended to benefit big donors, especially the right-wing oilmen who hold such sway here. By systematically weakening public schools, Hinojosa argues, Abbott and his cronies are undermining the American Dream.
Beating a three-term GOP incumbent in a state like Texas remains a tall order, but there are signs that Hinojosa’s argument may just be breaking through. While Abbott, who is running for an unprecedented fourth term, comes to this fight with a massive war chest, Republicans in Texas are restive, and education is part of their discontent. The $1 billion school voucher program that Abbott muscled through the state legislature last year, after he orchestrated primary runs against rural Republicans who opposed it, remains deeply controversial among many conservatives, who view vouchers less as “education freedom” than as a state takeover of private and home schools.
Michael Ryan is one of Abbott’s defectors. A retired educator, Ryan served on the school board in Fort Worth until the state took over the district last year, installing handpicked leaders. “I’m as red a Republican as they come, but I have to do something different,” said Ryan, a three-time Trump voter. Hinojosa’s pledge to fire Abbott’s top education official on day one won him over, along with her sharp critique of school vouchers and the big money that flooded into the state on their behalf. Ryan was particularly rankled by the $10 million Abbott received from Pennsylvania billionaire investor Jeff Yass. “In the old days, a bribe meant $100 on the floor of the Capitol,” said Ryan.
Recent elections indicate that defectors like Ryan are part of a trend. This January, Democrat Taylor Rehmet, a veteran and union machinist, handily defeated a conservative activist in a special election for a state Senate seat in Tarrant County, a seat Democrats last held in 1991. Despite being far outspent by his opponent, Rehmet won by a decisive 14-point margin in a district Donald Trump carried by 17 points in 2024, alarming Republicans, not just in Texas, but across the country. “[A] swing of this magnitude is not something that can be dismissed,” chimed in Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on X. Rehmet used his background as a union leader at Lockheed Martin to win over working-class voters, but he also made public education central to his campaign, sounding many of the same themes that Hinojosa is running on now.
Affordability was the top issue for voters, but their economic concerns were often entwined with worries over the state of the local schools, said Rehmet, who grew up in a Republican household in Garland, the son of an aircraft mechanic and a beautician. “People are feeling the affordability crunch in the schools. Funding is down, the cost of living is up. You’ve got teachers paying for supplies out of their own salaries.” In a part of the state that has been ground zero for conservative school board takeovers and book bans, Rehmet also tapped into a deepening voter backlash against GOP culture-warring candidates, who have racked up a lengthening string of losses in Tarrant County.
A recent analysis of this spring’s GOP primary turnout in Texas warned that the party’s historically reliable voters were dangerously disengaged, “either sitting out this cycle or, in some cases, shifting their partisan affiliation entirely.” The phenomenon was most pronounced in suburban districts, the pollsters concluded.
That finding comes as no surprise to Hinojosa. “People know who has been in charge,” she told me, “and they want change.”
Mom Populism
Texas isn’t the only state where education has emerged as a potent issue for Democrats. As of March 2026, in the 30 state legislative races where Democrats have flipped seats since Trump returned to office, public education was often a central issue. It’s not hard to see why. As the GOP has shifted sharply in favor of private school vouchers, Democrats are increasingly running against candidates who no longer believe in public education at all, even as constituents in both parties still have kids in the local schools. Ascendant populist Democrats are also tapping into anti-billionaire fury as they campaign against vouchers. And with affordability top of mind in nearly every election these days, Democrats are effectively linking issues like school budget cuts and teacher pay to voters’ broader economic concerns.
“Republicans have no answer to affordability except for eliminating the property tax, which would devastate public schools,” said Eric Gisler, who flipped a Statehouse seat in Georgia in 2025. “That makes education a real wedge issue.”
That Democrats are running—and winning—at least in part on education may seem surprising, given the dire reporting on the state of the nation’s schools. In recent years, the headlines have been relentlessly bleak—sliding test scores in math and reading, a “learning recession,” high rates of chronic absenteeism.
The cascade of bad news has prompted loud calls from influential centrist Democrats, including possible 2028 presidential contender Rahm Emanuel, to return to the more combative education policies of the past in an effort to reverse sagging student achievement. But these Democrats are also making a political argument about the direction of their party. Bring back the high-stakes testing and tough-on-teachers rhetoric of the Obama era, goes this line of thinking, and the party can win back fickle voters. “We’re adrift, it’s killing us politically, and it’s killing our kids,” former Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan claimed recently.
Yet as I’ve talked to Democrats who flipped seats in districts won by Trump, or who are running surprisingly competitive races in red states, a very different picture has emerged. Candidates like Taylor Rehmet are attracting independents and even former GOP voters by arguing not that the schools are failing, but that kids and communities are being failed by politicians who have abandoned public schools. “We want high standards, but we want them to be fair,” said Rehmet. “If we don’t provide enough funding, isn’t that sabotage?”
And again and again, I heard the strains of an emergent “mom populism,” from male and female candidates alike, that makes an argument for public schools as a vehicle for collective economic uplift. Notably, these Democrats are not claiming that education alone can lift kids out of poverty, or that sending more kids to college is the way to address inequality—an argument that has proved to be a political trap for the party. Instead, candidates often pair their defense of public schools as institutions that benefit working-class kids with populist calls for higher wages and more worker power. When it comes to issues like school vouchers, the influence of teachers’ unions, and college-for-all, these mom populists are departing dramatically from the prescription offered by centrist Democrats, and they’re winning as a result.
Reverse Robin Hood
When Denise Powell emerged as the winner of a hard-fought six-person Democratic primary in Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district last spring, her victory was regarded as an upset. After all, Powell triumphed over much better known candidates, including the descendant of one of the state’s political dynasties. In November, the business and nonprofit consultant will try to flip the seat being vacated by GOP veteran Don Bacon, something Democrats here have tried—and failed—to do for nearly a decade. The contest, regarded as one of the Democrats’ best chances for a pickup, is currently rated as a toss-up, but Powell is convinced that she is uniquely suited to appeal to the independents and former GOP voters she’ll need to win.
Two years ago, when opponents of school vouchers sought to put the issue before Nebraska voters, Powell crisscrossed the state to gather signatures, including in its most rural, deepest red stretches. “At a July Fourth celebration, I had a guy wearing a ‘Fuck Joe Biden’ T-shirt come up to me and ask, ‘Where do I sign?’” she said. While Powell was working on multiple ballot campaigns that summer, including one that would have expanded reproductive rights, it was her experience talking to conservative voters about vouchers that prepared her to run for Congress. “I’d walk up a dirt road to a house flying a Trump flag, but we found common ground, and it was around public education,” said Powell.
Opposition to school vouchers turns out to have been a consistent, and underappreciated, ingredient in recent special elections in which Democrats have flipped Statehouse seats in Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Georgia. In North Texas, Taylor Rehmet made his objection to funding private religious schools with taxpayer money a centerpiece of his campaign. “We shouldn’t be sending public dollars to private schools with no oversight,” said Rehmet, a position that he said resonated with voters across party lines.
In a sign of just how controversial the issue is among conservatives, Rehmet’s opponent, Leigh Wambsganss, chief communications officer at a Christian nationalist cell phone company, was initially a no on Abbott’s signature education policy of vouchers, then changed her position to align with the governor—and the big donors who funded her campaign. Indeed, when the editor of a conservative news outlet asked Wambsganss’s supporters about why they thought she’d lost, they specifically mentioned her flip-flop on vouchers.
That the GOP’s hard pivot against public education has created an opening for Democrats isn’t that surprising. While school vouchers have spread wildly in recent years, particularly in red states, their track record among voters remains dismal. The Nebraska ballot initiative that Denise Powell worked on, which would have created a so-called private school scholarship program, was rejected by nearly 60 percent of voters, even as the state overwhelmingly supported the reelection of Trump. Kentucky voters rejected an attempt to amend their state constitution to allow vouchers by an even more decisive margin. Ignoring a high-profile endorsement from Trump, every single county voted against the measure, with some of the reddest counties the most emphatic in saying no to allowing public dollars to fund private religious education. That MAGA faithful would buck the boss on one of his policy priorities might seem surprising until you consider that voters have been thumbing their noses at vouchers for the past five decades. “Choice proposals have consistently lost in state after state,” concluded a trio of scholars in a postelection analysis, “often by overwhelming margins.”
At a time of populist fervor on the both the left and the right, a policy that is the pet cause of billionaires including Betsy DeVos, Trump’s much-loathed former secretary of education, and Jeff Yass, the wealthiest man in Pennsylvania, seems uniquely calibrated to arouse the ire of voters. So-called universal vouchers, which subsidize the private school tuition of even the wealthiest families, are also a remarkably efficient means of redirecting resources upward. A 2025 analysis of universal or near-universal programs in six states, including Arizona, Indiana, and North Carolina, found that vouchers “were disproportionately used by families in wealthy areas.”
Iowa, which implemented a voucher program in 2023, now spends more than $250 million to pick up the tab for students at private religious schools, the vast majority of whom never attended public schools. Catelin Drey flipped an Iowa state Senate seat with a decisive 2025 special election win, ending the Republican supermajority in that chamber and becoming its only mother of a young child. Drey made vouchers a symbol of the state’s conservative political leaders’ disregard for the struggles of ordinary Iowans, which include watching their public schools shrink and close as resources are increasingly shifted to the wealthy. “We’ve now got a voucher program with no income levels, no guidelines, and an unlimited line item in the budget,” said Drey. “Yet our public schools that serve the vast majority of kids, and do it without question, are doing it with two nickels and a stick of gum.”
The issue is also likely to help determine whether Iowans elect a Democratic governor for the first time in 16 years. On the stump, Democratic candidate Rob Sand rails against vouchers constantly, describing them as “an ideological errand-running program with no accountability paying for the wealthiest families in the state of Iowa to send their kids to the private schools they were going to send them to anyway.” His strategy seems to be paying off. Sand, elected twice as the state auditor, and currently the only Democrat holding statewide elected office in Iowa, has a slight edge over Republican Zach Lahn, previously an operative for the Koch-backed political group Americans for Prosperity. An ardent voucher proponent, Lahn helped start a private school in Wichita, Kansas, with Charles Koch’s son, Chase, before running off with the younger Koch’s wife. Lahn is running as an outsider against what he calls the “uniparty.”
Democrat vs. Democrat
Given the minuscule number of causes that still bring voters together across party lines, opposition to vouchers would seem like a logical rallying cry for Democrats, including those who seek to draw moderates back into the party fold. Instead, the issue is fueling yet another intraparty divide.
Tucked into the budget behemoth known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act was the nation’s very first federal voucher program. Starting next year, individual taxpayers will be able to donate up to $1,700 annually to so-called scholarship-granting organizations and subtract the full amount from what they owe the federal government—a uniquely generous tax credit. The nonprofits that receive the money then bundle it, after taking a cool 10 percent off the top, before redistributing it as scholarships to individual students to pay for private school tuition, tutoring, and a long list of other educational expenses.
The Education Freedom Tax Credit is as controversial as it is convoluted. Thirty U.S. senators, led by Arizona Democrat Mark Kelly, a near-certain 2028 contender, filed a bill last spring that would repeal the program. “School Vouchers Broke Arizona,” read the headline to Kelly’s excoriating op-ed, warning that his home state’s nearly $1 billion-per-year universal voucher program is a fraud-ridden budget buster that is endangering the ability of working-class kids to get a good education. “We should not take Arizona’s failed experiment national,” Kelly concluded.
But the program also has influential Democratic backers. Democrats for Education Reform, or DFER, the two-decade-old advocacy group started by New York City hedge fund managers, is at the helm of an intense lobbying effort to press Democratic governors to opt into the program. Of the 31 governors who have signed on to date, just two are Democrats. Colorado’s outgoing Governor Jared Polis opted in his state as part of a flurry of late-office activity, including commuting the sentence of MAGA election denier Tina Peters for plotting to tamper with voting machines, then firing officials who opposed the move. New York’s Kathy Hochul, meanwhile, offered an unusually blunt justification for signing her state up: She needs Jewish votes. “Tuition relief” for students who attend religious yeshivas ranks nearly as high as support for Israel as a priority for Orthodox Jewish voters, a group that overwhelmingly backed Hochul’s GOP rival in 2022.
DFER’s sales pitch is predominantly about money. Because some portion of the funds raised can be used to benefit students who attend public schools, opting in is a “no-brainer,” as the group’s CEO, former Providence, Rhode Island, Mayor Jorge Elorza, and Arne Duncan, now a DFER senior fellow, co-wrote for The Washington Post. There’s also an attempt to present the tax credit program, which is projected to cost the U.S. Treasury nearly $26 billion in its first decade, as a vehicle for anti-Trump activism. Deprive Trump of tax dollars, goes the thinking, and he’ll have a harder time carrying out his nefarious schemes. “I would rather help kids struggling in my home state to catch up and have a chance to be successful in life, instead of sending another dollar to D.C. to fund ICE to come attack us,” argued Duncan, who is tasked with shaping the Democrats’ education policy, in a recent interview.
The key proponents of the program, including the American Federation for Children, the deep-pocketed lobby group started by Betsy DeVos, spin it rather differently. Moving the nation’s youngsters out of public schools and into private religious institutions that operate free of the “red tape” of civil rights protections has been a conservative movement priority for the last half-century. The program’s generous income guidelines mean that 90 percent of American students will be eligible for a voucher. Meanwhile, Treasury, which will oversee the program, has made it clear that governors will have no ability to impose requirements on where the money goes. Schools that discriminate against LGBTQ kids or teach PragerU content can now be funded by, well, you.
The Union Tussle
The Dem-on-Dem tussle over school vouchers is the latest installment of a much longer skirmish over the role of teachers’ unions within the party. DFER, after all, was founded to serve as an organized and well-funded counterweight to the unions’ influence. While the shine is off the causes the group championed during the Obama era—charter schools, merit pay, and tougher teacher evaluations yoked to student standardized test scores—the argument that Democrats need to take it to the unions has found new purchase in these days of “abundance” and combative centrism. As pundit Josh Barro put it: “Some of ‘the Groups’ are unions, and Democrats need to be better at saying no to them, too.”
It is an article of faith among centrist Democrats that voters’ low regard for the party can be explained at least in part by the Biden administration’s caving to the unions, backing away from test-based accountability and standards. Duncan has even made the case that Kamala Harris might have won in 2024 had the Democrats stuck with the education policies of his boss. The argument that Democrats prosper politically when they embrace positions that rankle teachers and their unions is also central to Rahm Emanuel’s presidential test run. “Clinton did public school choice. Obama did Race to the Top, accountability, and Common Core,” Emanuel told me, referring to the uniform math and English standards that inspired a bipartisan revolt.
Emanuel’s model for reform these days is Mississippi, whose oft-touted miracle has seen impressive academic gains, especially from elementary school students, in the country’s poorest state. “Mississippi shows the combination to the lock,” Emanuel said, describing the emphasis on phonics and strict accountability for teachers and students that has made the state an outlier in a sea of sliding test scores. But that combination also includes teachers’ unions that are relatively powerless, a product of right-to-work laws adopted in the 1950s in an effort to keep wages low and workers, especially Black workers, weak.
For Emanuel, Exhibit A of the Biden Democrats’ capitulation to teachers’ unions was pandemic school closures, what he refers to as the “original sin” of allowing politics to triumph over science. “Voters trust Democrats less than they did six years ago,” said Emanuel. Another leading centrist voice, Massachusetts Representative Jake Auchincloss, insists that Democrats need to apologize to the American people for their role in shuttering schools during Covid. “Any conversation about education needs to start with the catastrophe of the school closures,” Auchincloss told me. “We were wrong, and we won’t do it again.”
But to whom Democrats should apologize is unclear. While research has found that school districts with powerful unions stayed closed for longer, that does not seem to have translated into voter backlash. Late last year, the centrist publication The Argument set out to document the lingering damage done to the Democratic Party from its response to Covid-19. “The only problem is that our poll provided absolutely nothing to back this up,” conceded pollster Lakshya Jain. “If anything, it suggested the opposite.” The data on public opinion regarding school closures, widely understood to be Democrats’ biggest failure, Jain noted, was particularly striking. Republicans and Trump got worse marks from respondents than Biden and the Democrats. And five years after the pandemic, an outright majority of 54 percent Americans believe the shutdowns were “largely necessary” in order to prevent infections, with just 35 percent saying they were “largely unnecessary.”
This gap between rhetoric and public opinion is indicative of a larger problem underlying the centrist project of taking on teachers’ unions in hopes of luring back disaffected voters. In a review of survey data old and new, political scientist Michael Hartney finds that, in the Trump era, Democratic voters have become wildly more supportive of teachers’ unions, which they’ve come to view as “progressive bulwarks” against Trump and the GOP. The more that the unions present themselves as key actors in the progressive coalition, the more Democratic voters like them—which poses a major challenge to the case being made by Emanuel and others.
“Unions are always made out to be these big, bureaucratic institutions, but they don’t exist without members. It’s the teacher in your kid’s classroom,” said Brian Nathan, a union electrician and veteran who shocked Florida’s political establishment last spring when he flipped a state Senate seat in a reliably red part of Tampa. Nathan, whose campaign motto was “steel-toed integrity,” made teacher pay a central focus of the race, continually reminding voters that Florida now ranks dead last in how much teachers earn, and that their own kids are paying the price. “My eldest daughter had a permanent sub for an entire year,” said Nathan. “That’s the result of people fleeing the profession.”
The College Conundrum
In the waning days of a crowded Democratic primary race to represent Pennsylvania’s 7th congressional district, which includes Allentown, Ryan Crosswell, a former prosecutor for the Justice Department, suggested that his opponent, retired firefighter Bob Brooks, was a “flawed candidate” because he hadn’t gone to college. Brooks pounced. “Sorry I wasn’t lucky enough to go to college,” he pronounced on X, accusing Crosswell of “contempt” for working-class voters. Brooks would go on to win the four-person race by nearly 20 points, setting himself up for what is likely to be a fierce midterm contest against Republican Ryan Mackenzie. Should voters in the former coal and steel towns of the Lehigh Valley give him the nod, Brooks will join a select few in Congress: representatives without college degrees.
“It’s important that we run candidates who have lived real lives—it’s not just about going to college,” Brooks told me when I interviewed him after his win. Brooks’s working-class identity, beginning with his first job as a paper boy at age 10, was central to his campaign. But the flip side of his “I’m just like you” appeal to voters in a district where college-degree holders are a minority was the argument that his better-educated opponent wasn’t like them. “Going from Harvard to Harrisburg to D.C. doesn’t mean you understand what people are dealing with,” said Brooks. “And people voted that way.”
Brooks is one of a growing number of blue-collar Democrats running for office on populist platforms, ranks that include union leaders like Brian Nathan in Florida, Taylor Rehmet in Texas, and Rebecca Cooke, a waitress who grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and is set to challenge incumbent Derrick Van Orden. While at least some of these candidates attended college, they’re united in their belief that college should not be the only path to economic security. The appeal of this argument isn’t hard to understand when you consider that more than 60 percent of American adults don’t have a four-year college degree.
But it also presents Democrats with a conundrum.
For decades now, Democrats have sold education, and specifically college, as the pathway to economic mobility; “what you earn depends on what you can learn,” in the parlance of Bill Clinton. By 2009, Barack Obama was warning the nation that recovering from the financial crisis would require more than just pluck. “[E]very American will need to get more than a high school diploma,” he proclaimed in his first joint address to Congress. By 2016, the percentage of young Americans with a two-year degree or higher had risen to 51 percent, a historic high. Yet even as the administration celebrated rising college-going rates, the political backlash to an economic policy that seemed to blame workers themselves for their financial difficulties was getting harder to ignore. A 2013 Pew poll found that Obama’s support among working-class whites without college degrees had evaporated. Today, the country’s deepest divide is between those who attended college and those who didn’t.
In 2021, Dustin Guastella co-founded the Center for Working-Class Politics with the aim of making the case for more working-class candidates in politics, something he said no other progressive think tank was doing at the time. Guastella, the director of operations for a Teamsters local in Philadelphia that represents warehouse workers, said the Democrats’ deep faith in college as the vehicle for economic mobility has hampered the party’s ability to communicate with working-class voters. It has also distorted the party’s view of what constitutes a desirable candidate. “Democrats used to have this tradition of looking for candidates in union halls,” argued Guastella. “Now they want big fundraisers. If you went to an Ivy League school, you know someone who works on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley. That’s not true for blue-collar candidates.”
Among the center’s first major research projects was a survey called “Trump’s Kryptonite,” in which it tested the success of various kinds of candidates in running on economically populist messages. The candidates who fared best at attracting working-class voters held blue-collar jobs or worked in professions like nursing, in which they were “bossed,” said co-founder Jared Abbott. The hypothetical candidate who held the most appeal to these voters turned out to be a female middle school teacher. Corporate execs and lawyers fared the worst. “When you consider that just 2 to 3 percent of Congress comes from the working class despite having a majority in the population, there’s clearly a moral and ethical imperative to have more representation,” said Abbott.
But while plenty of Democrats may be coming around to that view, there’s no consensus on how the party should talk about college. After all, despite the flood of headlines regarding recent grads struggling to find jobs, it is still the case that attending college objectively increases your chance of doing better economically. For now, the party’s messaging seems to have landed in a sort of muddled middle, tapping into concerns that college costs too much, while sidestepping the political minefield of college debt forgiveness, all without ceding the foundational premise that “learning is earning.” “College isn’t for everybody, but it has to change so it returns to the idea that it’s a way to punch your meal ticket,” Emanuel argued at an event in which he laid out his plan to make college more affordable and accessible.
Ironically, the solution to the Democrats’ college conundrum may lie with working-class candidates who are deftly managing to balance talk of education-as-aspiration without drifting into condescension. Bob Brooks often tells the story of his son, who graduated from a Penn State satellite school with a degree in chemical engineering, owing $109,000—what Bob spent to buy his house. That college shouldn’t be a requirement for a middle-class life is a staple of Brooks’s stump speech, but it’s his line about the suffocating cost of college that seems to land with voters: “Our government shouldn’t be making money off the backs of our children,” he said. “Let them start their lives.”
Taylor Rehmet and Brian Nathan, the union leaders turned state senators from Texas and Florida, respectively, both told me similar versions of “college isn’t for everybody.” But central to their affordability crusades is the argument that, college or not, wages need to be higher and workers need more power. Nathan said that when he went door-to-door in Tampa last year, he heard the same set of concerns from virtually every voter. “They’re worried about health care and retirement. I’d tell them that the best way to get those is to join a union,” said Nathan.
Schoolbooks vs. Pitchforks
The scenes of soon-to-be-college grads heckling their commencement speakers last spring became a viral sensation. As the likes of Eric Schmidt, a former chief executive of Google, and record company exec Scott Borchetta waxed lyrical about the AI revolution, students erupted in loud boos, at times drowning out the speakers’ tech boosterism. The source of their frustration is obvious. Already facing the toughest job market since the depths of the pandemic, these students are more likely to see AI as a job stealer than the sort of transformative engine that tech execs extol.
But their fury transcends employment concerns.
“They feel like there’s been a real bait and switch,” said Noam Scheiber, author of Mutiny: The Rise and Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class. “This generation did everything they were supposed to do—the AP classes, the college degree, they took on crushing debt—and now the jobs they thought they were preparing for are evaporating.”
The frustrations of a growing college-educated precariat are quickly reshaping Democratic politics, powering a cohort of Democratic Socialists into office. In New York, a trio of left-leaning candidates backed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, two of them members of the Democratic Socialists of America, won primaries. In Washington, D.C., Janeese Lewis George is on track to replace the current mayor, Muriel Bowser. And in Colorado, Melat Kiros thrashed Representative Diane DeGette, who’d been in office for nearly three decades. While the ascendance of left-wing populism reflects deep discontent with establishment Democrats over a long list of issues, including Gaza, education is at the very center of the party’s generational divide. For 40 years, Democrats have made the case that education was the surest route to middle-class affluence. Now that sales pitch has run out of steam.
The debate over how to respond to AI and the looming destruction of white-collar jobs exemplifies the party’s divide over education. If the ascendant left populists are demanding pitchforks, including higher taxes on billionaires and tech industry profits, their more centrist fellows are relying on schoolbooks—the abiding faith that the solution to economic dislocation lies in our schools and in more education for displaced workers. Raise Us, the bipartisan initiative led by former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, with backing from OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, and Microsoft, starts from the premise that the country’s schools are failing to produce enough workers with the skills employers demand and must be overhauled as a result—the same argument bosses have been making since the 1970s. As for the push to let workers share in AI industry profits in a public wealth fund, as Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed, Raimondo isn’t a fan. “It’s frankly the definition of socialism,” she told Politico.
Efforts like Raise Us are intended to defuse a populist revolt, coming from the left and the right, by quickly gearing up a training machine equipped to prepare workers for a future in which they’ll be switching jobs constantly. But at a time when the command to “just school up” manages to alienate workers with and without college degrees, the schoolbook approach seems unlikely to fend off what Raimondo describes as ugly politics.
Spend a few minutes listening to Tucker Carlson, for example, and it’s immediately apparent that he understands the political possibilities of the moment. In an interview last spring, Carlson told The New York Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro that young people are being radicalized by “a very lopsided and unfair economic system.” The kids, he said, “are totally screwed at a more profound level than people acknowledge.” It’s not hard to imagine Carlson, or someone like him, stitching together a coalition of the screwed—working-class voters saddled with credit card debt, downwardly mobile college grads burdened by loans that will never pay off.
“There’s a coalition to knit together that would be pretty expansive,” Noam Scheiber told me. “You’ve got a potential supermajority out there of people who think of themselves as working class and precariat, whether they have degrees or not.”
Whether Democrats succeed in 2028 will depend in large part on whether they are able to speak to the swelling ranks of the economically anxious. And central to that will be the story they tell about education. For decades, Democrats have sold a vision of education-as-economic uplift, one voters are no longer buying. Now they have an opportunity to move on from the false promise of college-for-all, instead embracing the ideal of public education as a public good that benefits all kids. Voters keep signaling that they’re furious over school privatization and the transfer of wealth it represents. Democrats just have to listen.
