Tide Turns

The name Leigh Wambsganss may be unfamiliar (and unpronounceable) to you, but I’m betting that you’re well acquainted with her employer: Patriot Mobile. That would be the right-wing Christian wireless provider that orchestrated takeovers of various Texas school boards, stacking them with Christian nationalists and MAGA faithful. Those efforts proved remarkably successful, that is until local parents got a close-up view of the activists’ book-banning, culture warring agenda. Then came the attempt last year to split the Keller district into two, cleaving the wealthier city of Keller from its larger, lower-class suburban bits. The backroom maneuver, which Wambsganss helped engineer, backfired spectacularly, alienating local parents, along with voters who typically ignore school board politics.

The center-left New Democrat Coalition was founded in 1997, and is now “made up of 115 pragmatic House Democrats who work across the aisle and across the Capitol to advance innovative, inclusive, and forward-looking policies.” These lawmakers come from thirty-one states, plus Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

The coalition has released a Workforce and Education Agenda, which includes investments in public schools, training and credential pathways for students—including non-college paths— and workforce development programs for teachers. 

The strongest piece of this new agenda is its unequivocal support for public education. “American students deserve world-class public education from kindergarten onward,” the coalition writes. And that means every student. School reformers and proponents of privatization often argue that some students should be given the means to leave their zip code for a better charter or private school, but the New Democrat Coalition argues instead to “sustain strong federal support” for public schools. Instead of spending taxpayer dollars to allow a few students to escape a zip code perceived as failing because of historic disinvestment, the lawmakers are proposing that all zip codes should be served by quality public schools so that “every child in every zip code” is provided an excellent education.

According to the 2024 VoteCast survey conducted for AP and Fox News—one of the most accurate voting polls currently available—57 percent of union members voted for Harris compared with 41 percent for Trump, a 16-point margin and an improvement over the 14-point margin Biden achieved among union members, according to 2020 VoteCast data. (see Figure 1) Additionally, the AP-Fox News survey estimates that, while only 9 percent of people who voted were union members in 2020, this increased to 11 percent in 2024, which may suggest union members turned out in greater numbers in 2024. These results are largely consistent with exit polls from the consortium, including NBC and CNN, showing that Harris still won union households in 2024, though by narrower margins compared with union voters alone. (The NBC-CNN exit poll reported data for voters from households with a union member, meaning its results for union households include many voters who are not themselves union members; AP-Fox News results for union households similarly show a narrower margin than for union members.)