Two weeks later, after a hectic Election Day in which McAuliffe was denied his bid for a second gubernatorial term and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy barely survived his own brush with an unheralded Republican challenger, the poll’s findings offer one explanation of what went wrong for Democrats in their first electoral test of the Biden era.

David Paleologos, Suffolk’s chief pollster, noted that Democrats have traditionally been the party entrusted by voters to oversee K-12 schools. Healthcare and education have been “the two issue pillars” for the party in the minds of the public, countering Republicans’ traditional edge on taxes and national security. But in Virginia, at least, one of their supports had given way; while 75 percent of healthcare-focused respondents in Suffolk’s poll approved of Joe Biden’s performance as president, just 38 percent of education-focused respondents did.

“There’s a broader potential problem for Democrats when Republican candidates can even be competitive — forget leading — among those primarily concerned with education,” said Paleolgos. “I think that is something that should give Democrats pause.”

The results of the 2021 election cycle will take more than a few weeks to parse, as county-level returns are dissected by number-crunchers in both parties. And the importance of education must also be weighed against structural challenges that couldn’t have been avoided; dating back to the 1970s, the party holding the White House almost never wins the Virginia governorship, while no Democrat has been reelected as New Jersey’s governor under any circumstances. 

But two things have become clear in light of the Democrats’ dismal results. The first is that losing their advantage on a signature issue can cost them dearly, even in blue-trending states where they have nominated popular candidates. The second is that both sides now have an incentive to make education a major priority in 2022, when control over the U.S. House, the Senate, and 36 governorships will be at stake.

And the public’s discontent with school systems, ranging from their performance during COVID to their handling of controversial subjects like race and gender, shows no sign of abating. Joanne Weiss, an education consultant who served as chief of staff to Education Secretary Arne Duncan in the Obama White House, said that parents’ fear and anger had first been triggered by the disruptions of the pandemic. But the gradual decline in COVID cases and deaths won’t necessarily bring an end to their outrage, she added.

“COVID response required nimbleness and creativity that the education system was incapable of giving,” Weiss said in an email. “So while COVID was the spark that ignited it, that pile of kindling has been sitting there, unattended, for years. Even if COVID were to magically disappear tomorrow, the smoldering would continue.” 

McAulliffe’s political miscue

Virginia Republicans were talking about education throughout their gubernatorial primary and into the general election. But it took a Democrat to bring the issue to national attention.

McAuliffe, a longtime Democratic campaign operative who first served as the state’s governor from 2014 to 2018, infamously said in a September debate that he didn’t believe “parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” The tossed-off remark, made in response to several high-profile cases of Virginia parents objecting to the inclusion of controversial materials in classrooms and school libraries, quickly proved to be the decisive political miscue of 2021.

In a stroke, McAuliffe’s words helped consolidate multiple strands of public disapproval (in a , two senior Youngkin campaign strategists pointed to the moment as “the piece that tied it all together”). Many parents objected to Virginia’s generally deliberate pace of reopening schools to in-person instruction; others — instigated as much by local curricular debates as national messaging campaigns by Fox News and other conservative outlets — sought to ban instruction of race issues that has been grouped under the label of critical race theory. Both were invigorated by the former governor’s apparent dismissal of family concerns. 

Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va., said that while McAuliffe’s campaign eventually attempted to clarify his meaning, the efforts were “too little, too late.” 

“It really became the core of the Youngkin campaign,” Farnsworth said. “The campaign almost entirely morphed into a conversation about parents’ rights in education once McAuliffe made his misstatement.”

Keri Rodrigues, a Massachusetts Democrat and former labor organizer who leads the National Parents Union, said the defeat that followed was proof that Democrats had “taken their legacy as champions of public education for granted.” Though of activists attempting to curb the influence of critical race theory, Rodrigues has also pilloried Democrats for their relationships with teacher’s unions (McAuliffe campaigned with American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten during the race’s final days) and argued that the party had failed to hold educational systems accountable during the pandemic.

“We saw the catastrophic failure of our nation’s public education system happen in our living rooms, and we were left to fend for ourselves,” Rodrigues said in an email. “Since that point, Democrats have outright rejected any criticism of the performance of these systems or recovery efforts — while parents and families have continued to be left struggling with their concerns unheard.”

Democrats running in both state-level and congressional races next year will benefit from the example of McAuliffe’s gaffe, and Farnsworth theorized that they could avoid similar missteps by calling for school governance to be led by a “partnership” between parents and education professionals. Moreover, the party will still have the opportunity to pass a host of family- and school-related initiatives through its Build Back Better legislation, including universal preschool, paid family leave, and a permanent expansion of the Child Tax Credit. Given a year to advertise those achievements and watch COVID’s threat to public health slowly diminish, Democrats could once again seize the initiative on a policy area they have historically dominated.

According to polling data provided by Gallup, Inc., the public has trusted Democrats more on education almost continuously for the last three decades. Election-year polls from 1992, 1996, 2000, 2008, and 2016 all found respondents favoring Democratic presidential candidates to manage schools, usually by double-digit margins. (Then-president George W. Bush took a late lead on the issue in his 2004 contest with John Kerry, and no data could be found for the 2012 presidential election at the time of publication.)

But Paleologos said that Democrats’ failure in Virginia had already consigned next year’s crop of candidates to answering press questions about whether parents should have input in how schools are run. Pointing to past Republican successes with pre-election platforms like 1994’s Contract with America, he predicted the GOP would seek to use education as a wedge to split liberal Democrats from the center.

“Even if you pass some really progressive education legislation, Republican candidates are going to force Democrats to” make some commitment to parental control over K-12 schools, Paleologos said. “Now, a smart Democratic candidate would say, ‘Yeah, I’ll sign a Contract with Parents,’ but then they’re going to be at odds with their progressive base.”

Push for a ‘red wave’

Youngkin’s victory served as a proof of concept for the notion that a deft Republican could win votes by crafting his closing argument around schools. But it also cast doubt on Democrats’ own campaign strategy of tying opponents to Donald Trump at every opportunity.

Paleologos observed that the first-time candidate’s template — one that could be exported next year to battleground states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Maine, where Democratic governors will be running for reelection — was to win back middle-class voters in the suburbs while “one-upping Trump in rural areas, even without having Trump next to him.” It’s unknown how much Trump, who has supercharged Republican turnout in two national races, intends to campaign with GOP hopefuls next year, and that he remains a deeply divisive figure. But Youngkin enjoyed a surge in downstate support even in Trump’s absence, riding the former president’s endorsement to nearly half a million more votes than the Republican gubernatorial nominee received in 2017.

Republicans’ hopes for a red wave will rest on the enthusiasm of their base, which has shown itself to be extremely animated by K-12 issues. A released in August found that 73 percent of American parents were either somewhat or completely satisfied with the quality of their children’s education, roughly in line with previous years. But a detailed breakdown of the results provided by the organization found that 34 percent of Republicans described themselves as “completely dissatisfied” with schools, by far the highest level for that group since 2001. Twenty-five percent of independents said the same, representing a seven-point jump since before the pandemic began.

If the stage is set for a national push, the party seems ready to make one. In the immediate aftermath of last week’s elections, at the same time Democrats took steps to finalize the framework of their Build Back Better legislation, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy that Republicans would soon introduce a “parents’ bill of rights” to promote transparency in curricular content and protect the participation of parents in school governance.

The question is whether such initiatives are the stuff that majorities are made on. The last midterm wave favoring Republicans came in 2010, when right-wing activists incensed over deficits, government spending, and Obamacare coalesced in an amorphous movement known as the Tea Party. A revival of that feat will require coordination and skilled messaging, Farnsworth said, but education could offer a useful conduit for conservative energies that exist already.

“In many ways, the critical race theory debate of 2021 is just the latest version of the death panel conversation from Obamacare, or the Willie Horton story of 1988. The question isn’t whether this is an accurate portrayal of what’s going on, the question is whether this can be weaponized to benefit Republicans. In 2021, as in 2010, as in 1988, the answer is yes.”

So how was it that popular former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, widely seen as the Democrats’ strongest contender when he won the party’s gubernatorial nomination in June, lost his bid for reelection on Tuesday night? And how did his opponent, Republican businessman and political neophyte Glenn Youngkin, harness a wave of public outrage about education issues to become the state’s next leader?

It’s a question that holds national implications for U.S. politics next year. In 2022, 36 governorships and thousands of state legislative seats will be up for grabs in the midterm elections, to say nothing of the countless school board races that will also be contested. If the GOP can replicate Youngkin’s pitch to parents infuriated over the pandemic’s disruptions to student learning — and the perceived incursions of progressive orthodoxy on race, gender, and sexuality — Tuesday’s results may only be a taste of what’s to come.

For insight into the election and its consequences, we spoke with education commentator Andrew Rotherham, a former member of the Virginia state board of education and co-founder of the consultancy Bellwether Partners. 

​​����Ӱ��: How much do you think the Virginia election result had to do with education versus what we could broadly call “fundamentals”: the Delta surge, Biden’s sinking approval, voters ready for a change after picking Democrats all these years? 

Andrew Rotherham: It is a tough environment for Democrats in general, and to some extent this was an election about the fundamentals reasserting themselves with Trump not on the ballot — the return of college-educated men to Republicans in Virginia, for instance. The role that education seems to have played is reinforcing those atmospherics and that frame, that the Democrats are an out-of-touch party of elites that is not responsive to the concerns of parents. 

Granting that K-12 controversies drove this result to some extent, there’s some controversy over whether COVID mitigation or concerns about “critical race theory” was more to blame. Your thoughts?

It’s still early, but looking around the country at CRT vs. masks, all of it didn’t seem to break cleanly one way in school board races. So that gives credence to the idea it was a bundle of things and generalized frustration more than any particular issue. That said, Democrats did not do a good job staking out a clear position. It’s not that hard for a candidate to tell parents, “We’re going to teach an unsparing history curriculum here in this state that is honest about race and racism, but we’re also not going to tell your kindergartener they are complicit in white supremacy or have your second grader doing a privilege walk.” Instead, Democrats set themselves up to own any ridiculous thing that happened in a school anywhere. 

The suggestion you make seems to dovetail with what you recommended in : “Either Biden or Secretary of Education Cardona are well situated to give a speech or two seizing the 70 percent position in this ‘debate.'” But there’s a complication there: Federal and state officials just don’t have much real power in terms of dictating what happens in classrooms, and there’s now a cottage industry devoted to “exposing” teachers and administrators for political bias. I’m not sure how statewide candidates get around that problem, and it seems like the only solution is for education to become less salient as a campaign issue.

Teachers need three things here. First is a better background in history and contentious issues themselves (as you may have heard, we don’t do a fantastic job of teacher preparation now). Second: high-quality curriculum around these issues. And third: good and sustained professional development. Right now there is enormous demand but little quality control in the DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] industry, and teachers are freelancing. That’s a bad mix. This is complicated, and you don’t want teachers using whatever they found on Pintrest last night or just learned at a one-hour workshop. 

It’s interesting that these videos of teachers doing dumb things richocet around social media — you know, the mock slave auction or the teacher who����around her classroom in an inappropriate way. But then, no one stops to think that maybe telling that exact same teaching force to just do whatever they want on complicated questions around race and class might lead to some problems of different kinds. Secretary Cardona said we should��. That’s the wrong frame. It’s not about trust; like everything else in education, it’s about training and support. Even just using the bully pulpit to call for those things — and acknowleding that not every critic wants schools to stop teaching about slavery — would do a lot of good.

How much contingency was there in this race? Do you see McAuliffe’s as a turning point here? It kind of seems like that was the point when a lot of controversial issues around schools — closures, masking, competitive admissions, Loudoun’s equity push over the last few years — seemed to merge into one central argument over what kind of input parents could have. 

He shouldn’t have said it because it’s an easy point to take out of context. But he’s not wrong, you can’t run schools or classrooms as direct democracies where everyone gets a veto. If you really want to control every little thing that happens educationally for your child, you have to make other arrangements, and we should preserve freedom for people to do things like homeschool. 

But the remark added to this frame that Democrats are the party of unaccountable systems, and as we’ve seen a lot the last few years, people don’t like systems they feel are distant from them. You also had proposals to limit advanced course-taking in math in the name of “equity” and change admissions to competitive magnet schools around Virginia. And I suspect that a bigger contingency adding to that frame may have been what looks like covering up a rape that happened on one of its campuses. And then, of course, frustration with school reopening. There was a lot going on this year and last, so this was building. 

COVID’s not exactly going to disappear as an issue, and there are limits to the political lessons Democrats can take going forward about their strategies there. But it seems like the center-left’s discourse on race, particularly with respect to K-12, may now be seen as a political liability. How true do you think that is, and can you see it being addressed between now and the midterms?

A year in politics is an eternity. But if you look around the country, voters clearly don’t want “woke” or “successor ideology” politics. You saw that in election after election last night in all kinds of circumstances. Americans are pragmatic. Just ask Eric Adams, or voters in Tucson who approved a minimum wage increase last night. Democrats would do well to heed that lesson and respond to that pragmatism. If I were a Democrat running for office, I wouldn’t talk about what’s wrong with America without also talking about what’s right with America — and we should talk honestly about both. But people want good schools, safe neighborhoods, and an opportunity for a better life for themselves and those they care about most. Real life is not Twitter or MSNBC. Democrats seem to be forgetting that.

Whether or not it assuages parents’ concerns about indoctrination in schools, is there something that would-be governors of either party — there are 36 seats up for grabs next year — can do to impact how teachers approach “divisive subjects” going forward? The laws passed this year in several states regulating classroom speech are certainly one approach.

We should unflinchingly call out political leaders who shy from teaching an honest view of American history that includes both this country’s signal achievements as well as it’s darker history and ongoing problems. At a time when our very social and political cohesion is under enormous pressure, we simply cannot shy from both dimensions of that, and schools are a venue where the action is going to be. 

In my view, these laws are not helpful. At best, they lead to stupid confusion like we recently saw ; at worst, they make it even harder for teachers to teach. But you don’t wake up in the morning knowing how to effectively teach about contentious contemporary issues. Again, that takes training and support. There are no shortcuts here, and attempts to find one, whether through these laws or poor-quality trainings, are making the problem worse. 

One interesting facet to the nationwide education debate is that, by and large, the explosion in recall attempts against school board members hasn’t succeeded in ousting many — including two more efforts that failed last night. Recall is obviously a mechanism with huge difficulties baked in, but I’m wondering what you make of the fact that Glenn Youngkin can win a blue state in part due to outrage about school governance even as  can’t get rid of a few board members.

This is an important point. It doesn’t seem like there was a unidirectional wave around the country where it all went one way in board races. Parents are frustrated, people disagree, but in general, people don’t gamble with their schools. There is a real chance the Republicans will misread this and overreach. 

Disclosure: Andy Rotherham co-founded Bellwether Education Partners. He sits on ����Ӱ��’s board of directors.

The result did not come as a shock to local political observers, who noted Youngkin’s bid gathering steam in the final months of the campaign as attention shifted to K-12 issues. showed McAuliffe’s advantage dissipating, particularly with parents of school-aged children, at the same time that voters as the most important issue on their minds.

But the defeat of a broadly popular former governor — along with the GOP apparently seizing control of the state’s House of Delegates and prevailing in races for lieutenant governor and attorney general — marks a reversal in Virginia’s long march leftward in recent years. Democrats had won four of the last five gubernatorial elections and finally seized unified control over the state legislature in 2019. Just last year, President Biden carried the formerly deep-red stronghold by more than 10 points, the biggest win for a Democratic presidential candidate in Virginia since the days of Franklin Roosevelt.

But the state’s governor’s race from the party occupying the White House. In fact, since 1977, Virginia voters have elected governors from the party out of power in every race except one: 2013, when McAuliffe won his first term. A host of obstacles, from the lingering ennui of the pandemic to Biden’s sinking approval numbers, stood in the way of McAuliffe’s reelection.

But the last challenge, and perhaps the most significant, was the outrage around issues of K-12 education that steadily built as summer turned to fall. While the Republican primary was still ongoing, Youngkin and his rivals in favor of reopening public schools for in-person instruction. Once Youngkin secured the nomination, to ban the teaching of critical race theory as governor.

His adoption of the issue dovetailed with several high-profile controversies around diversity and equity initiatives in school districts. In both Fairfax and Loudoun Counties, two suburban enclaves outside of Washington, D.C., that have been among the most Democratic-leaning in the state during its blue transformation, angry parents have moved to recall school board members over dissatisfaction with local COVID mitigation strategies and schools’ approaches to teaching controversial subjects of race, gender, and sexuality. 

The dispute gained more airtime as the race headed into its final months, with Youngkin calling on the Loudoun County school board to resign and McAuliffe declaring, at a public debate, that he didn’t believe “parents should be telling schools what to teach.” Ultimately, Fairfax and Loudoun both gave majorities to the Democrat — but they also swung rightward by seven and nine percentage points, respectively, compared with the 2017 governor’s race.

Tom Loveless, an education researcher who formerly led the Brookings Institution’s Brown Center on Education Policy, noted that Democratic candidates like McAuliffe have become increasingly dependent on suburban, college-educated voters during the Trump era. Their positioning on K-12 issues during the pandemic helped cost them the seat, Loveless told ����Ӱ��.

“Schools are important to parents in the suburbs,” he wrote in an email. “McAuliffe put himself on the wrong side of the education issue when he said what he said about parents and schools during the debate. It was a fatal blunder, appearing both tone-deaf and condescending.”

Andrew Rotherham, co-founder of Bellwether Education Partners and a former member of the Virginia state board of education, argued that Democrats around the country “did not do a good job staking out a clear position” on controversial topics in education, allowing their opponents to paint them as hostages to “unaccountable systems.”

“It’s not that hard for a candidate to tell parents, we’re going to teach an unsparing history curriculum here in this state that is honest about race and racism, but we’re also not going to tell your kindergartener they are complicit in white supremacy or have your second grader doing a privilege walk,” Rotherham said. “Instead, Democrats set themselves up to own any ridiculous thing that happened in a school anywhere.”

Over the past month, we’ve published a special series of off-year EDlection previews, spotlighting the names and votes to watch this week. As we prepare for the polls to open, here’s a quick recap of what our newsroom will be watching on Election Day — and of course subscribe to ����Ӱ��’s newsletter to learn more about the victors:��

1 Governor of Virginia

Two of the top-tier elections being contested on Tuesday are the governor’s races in both New Jersey and Virginia. Incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy looks like the surefire winner in the Garden State, where he’s benefitted from of the powerhouse local teacher’s union. In Virginia, however, things look much closer. Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe looked like the favorite after cruising to a Democratic primary win in June, but businessman and first-time candidate Glenn Youngkin has narrowed the race considerably with a combination of lavish spending . Pledging to ban the teaching of critical race theory, the Republican has successfully tapped into public anger with school boards even in blue-trending counties in the northern part of the state. If he succeeds in turning the Democrats out of the governor’s mansion for the first time in eight years, Youngkin will have shown the national GOP how to ride K-12 politics to a midterm triumph.

2 Atlanta School Board

Atlanta voters will choose from 22 candidates for all nine school board seats Tuesday in a race that some say will determine the future of education for Black and Hispanic students in the city’s school district. Pre-pandemic test scores showed that only about a third of Hispanic and a quarter of Black students scored proficient or higher in math and English language arts, compared with over 80 percent of white students. “This election is where we start to say no more,” said Ricardo Miguel Martinez, president of Latino Association for Parents of Public Schools. The election takes place as the city draws in more white, affluent residents and many Black and Hispanic families are fleeing the city for more affordable housing in the suburbs. Candidates for the board represent a wide cross section of the city, from those who prioritize the most marginalized students to others well-connected to the city’s power structure. With voters also choosing the mayor and city council Nov. 2 — elections in which crime and housing have dominated campaigns — school board Chair Jason Esteves says the city is at a “pivot point.” “The issues we have with poverty are manifested in the things we’re seeing related to crime,” he said. “How we tackle those issues directly impacts the school system.” (Linda Jacobson published an extensive profile of the race and its implications in October; read the full preview)

3 Mayor of New York City��

New York City voters will decide their next mayor Tuesday in a contest where Democrat Eric Adams is heavily favored over Republican Curtis Sliwa. The pandemic’s ongoing disruptions have placed K-12 education issues front and center in the race. Three leading ones , student vaccine mandates and disenrollment. Outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced plans to phase out the gifted and talented program, which has long been criticized for deepening segregation in the nation’s largest school system, but is highly prized by many parents. The question will almost certainly fall to Adams, who shares de Blasio’s dislike for testing 4-year-olds, but has said he will keep the program without specifying in what form while also highlighting the needs of�� students with learning disabilities. The city is grappling with a loss of students that totaled 4 percent last year as families fled classrooms during COVID. This year, NYC Department of Education officials say the city suffered only a 1 percent enrollment drop compared to the previous fall, but some school leaders have raised alarms over disastrously low attendance, despite a reported citywide rate just under 90 percent. Also looming are student vaccines with shots for children ages 5 to 11 authorized Friday by the Food and Drug Administration and now awaiting go-ahead from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. De Blasio announced last week he had already ordered 231,000 doses for that age group, but does not favor mandating shots for students. Sliwa adamantly opposes any mandate while Adams supports an immunization requirement and is mulling remote learning for those who resist vaccination, an option the city currently does not offer. (����Ӱ�� published two essays about the race leading up to Election Day, one about the need for city students to have a clearer path to college and career success, and the other about the urgent need for the next mayor to re-engage the families of students of color, English learners and students with disabilities hit hardest by the pandemic)

4 School Board Member Recalls

Two Midwestern races will put a spotlight on one of the most unusual electoral trends this year: an explosion in the number of recall attempts against school board members. Typically employed to settle small-bore controversies at the municipal or county level — think unpopular tax levies or school mergers — efforts to recall board members have more than tripled so far this year. Amy Sudbeck, a board member in the tiny Nemaha Central USD in northern Kansas, is facing a recall for voting in favor of continuing a school mask mandate this spring. Meanwhile, parents in suburban Milwaukee are trying to unseat four board members of the Mequon-Thiensville School District over a , including COVID mitigation measures and payments made to a diversity consultant. The effort has from local conservative donors and nonprofits, with one national group holding the effort up as an example to activists around the country. (Kevin Mahnken published an in-depth look at school board recalls across the country; read the full feature, and scan our searchable database, right here.)

5 Police and School Cops in Minneapolis

After a Minneapolis cop murdered George Floyd, the city’s school district cut ties with the police department and replaced sworn officers with “public safety support specialists” designed to promote positive campus climates, but lack the authority to make arrests. A similar strategy could soon go citywide. If voters approve Ballot Question 2, the Minneapolis Police Department would be replaced by a Department of Public Safety that will center community security around public health. Though sworn officers would likely be included in the approach, the question would amend the city charter to scrap a minimum staffing level and many questions about how the new agency would function remain unresolved. A recent suggests a close contest. (Mark Keierleber recently published an investigation of the city’s school resource officers, revealing several instances where school cops had histories of discipline or civil rights complaints)

—With reporting by Linda Jacobson, Mark Keierleber, Asher Lehrer-Small and Kevin Mahnken��