From Southlake to Virginia, one clear trend in 2021 elections: Progressivism lost
From Southlake to South Jersey, voters’ messages Tuesday night couldn’t have been clearer: Tap the brakes on progressivism.
It’s hard to find a common thread among such disparate off-year elections. I’m generally opposed to over-interpretation of results on any Election Day.
But the drumbeat is unmistakable: Parents want competent schools that don’t violate their values. A blue state, Virginia, elected a Republican governor who campaigned on the crazy idea that parents should have a say in what their children are taught.
In Southlake, voters made another strong democratic statement along the same lines, electing yet another Carroll school board member who emphasized that schools shouldn’t teach that race is determinative or that America is irredeemably flawed.
In Minneapolis — where the police killing of George Floyd prompted a much-needed re-examination of policing — voters said, no, we won’t defund the police. In Buffalo, New York, voters went to the trouble of writing in the incumbent’s name to defeat an avid socialist. In Seattle, moderates carried the day.
In New Jersey — New Jersey! — voters made the Democratic governor sweat.
In Fort Worth, voters rejected three of the school district’s requested bond proposals, and the passing margin of the other was razor-thin. With almost no organized opposition to what are usually ho-hum proposals, voters said: We want more student achievement. We want accountability.
No one really knows how much elections like this are driven by candidates, campaigns or the national mood. In this cycle, add in pandemic frustrations, economic uncertainty and exhausted parents. And there are outliers: In Austin, for instance, voters strongly rejected a mandate for certain levels of police spending.
But two things are clear.
President Joe Biden campaigned as a moderate, the reasonable alternative to Donald Trump. The 2020 elections were a tossup, with his party narrowly in control, but he misread the moment as a mandate to lurch to the left.
Second, Republicans now have a playbook to run on cultural issues without alienating voters and to deal with Donald Trump without getting sucked into his self-serving vortex.
It’s folly to project the next election from this one. But parents aren’t going to go home and say, yes, please indoctrinate our children.
It’s a new era in education politics, and Texas will see its share of those battles.
Editor’s note: This column originally appeared in our opinion newsletter, Worth Discussion. It’s delivered every Wednesday with a fresh take on the news and a roundup of our best editorials, columns and other opinion content. Sign up here.
