Holding the Republican Party hostage for school vouchers
State political lines aren't drawn so much along conservative vs. liberal faults as along rural vs. urban faults
State Sen. Ken Yager (R-Kingston) has said several times over the years that political battle lines at the state level aren’t drawn along conservative vs. liberal faults so much as along urban vs. rural faults.
Nowhere has that proven truer than with the contentious school vouchers fight that is currently playing out in Nashville.
The vouchers battle has pitted Gov. Bill Lee and the state’s suburban Republicans squarely against GOP lawmakers who represent rural districts. On this issue, at least, rural Republicans and urban Democrats have become unlikely allies. They aren’t working together, but by opposing vouchers for different reasons, the two groups represent a voting bloc too big for voting advocates to overcome — though just barely.
This battle has cast rural Republicans into an unenviable position. By standing against the governor and some of their most influential colleagues in Nashville, they’re losing valuable political clout. But voting to support the governor’s voucher plan would risk casting themselves into unsteady headwinds back home.
Public school systems play outsized roles in rural communities. Schools are often among those communities’ most vital employers, and schools serve as the very identity of the communities they represent. School administrators and school boards across the state have stood universally opposed to vouchers, with few exceptions.
School choice Republicans should have learned five years ago, during the first voucher push, that this isn’t an issue rural Tennesseans want forced on them. The initial voucher program — which applied only in Davidson and Shelby (and, later, Hamilton) counties — passed by a narrow margin only after some rural Republicans who voted for it were given assurances that vouchers would never apply to their districts. Other rural Republicans, like Yager, voted against it despite those assurances.
Five years later, here we are again. Lee and the Republican-dominated General Assembly have hardly ignored public education. They’ve appropriated money to increase teachers’ salaries, among other initiatives, and the renewed voucher push might have resulted in an overhaul to the testing accountability strategy that most school teachers detest, if some lawmakers had gotten their way.
But those concessions weren’t enough to quell fears that vouchers would ultimately hurt public schools in rural areas. School board members and school system directors across the state remained steadfastly opposed to the voucher program. The opposition wasn’t lost on rural Republicans in the legislature. And so the current impasse was reached.
When pressed by News Channel 5 on Monday, Gov. Lee indicated that he might be willing to work against anti-voucher Republicans in the upcoming election. And voucher advocates cheered that statement.
Tori Venable, state director of the Koch brothers-funded Americans for Prosperity, arguably the governor’s biggest ally in the voucher fight, tweeted a rather absurd statement in response to Lee’s comments.
“This is part of the Republican platform and if you don’t support parents making edu decisions for their own kids then run as a Democrat,” she said.
Republican platform? Of Tennessee’s 131 state legislators, 101 are Republicans and only 30 are Democrats. Yet there weren’t enough votes to push the voucher plan through. The only reason school vouchers are part of the Republican platform is because special interest groups funded by deep-pocketed advocates have made it so. In the real world, in small towns like Oneida and Erwin and Hohenwald, where most folks don’t know who the Koch brothers are, much less feel influenced by their money, the view is much different.
Most of the schoolteachers I know are staunchly conservative. They’re reliable Republican voters when election-time rolls around. But they care about their jobs, they care about the students they teach, and those things matter a lot more to them than voting for someone just because they have an “R” or a “D” after their name.
Most of those folks are fed up with what they perceive as a lack of support for public education from Gov. Lee and the voucher advocates. More than a few of them who voted for Lee in 2018 voted against him in 2022. That didn’t matter, of course; it was never going to matter. But most floods don’t begin with the first raindrops that fall.
Tennessee is a deeply conservative state — as red as any in the nation. But it wasn’t always that way. Less than a generation ago, Tennessee was a reliably blue state … and had been blue for a long time — not so much in presidential elections (though Tennesseans did vote for Bill Clinton in 1992 and again in 1996) as at the state level, where Democrats had more or less controlled the legislature since Reconstruction. It wasn’t until 2011 that Republicans gained a trifecta — control of the governor’s mansion, the Senate and the House — for the first time.
Sometimes you can’t help but look at how out-of-touch Nashville is with small, conservative towns across the state and wonder if it’ll always be the way it is now.
Gov. Lee was elected as a political outsider and, in more ways than one, he’s governed as something of a political outsider. He was unable to harness Tennessee’s GOP supermajority to push through safety measures in the aftermath of last year’s Covenant school shooting, and he’s been unable to harness the supermajority to push through school choice, which he has staked his entire governorship on. He drew considerable flack for inviting an outsider — Hillsdale College’s controversial president Larry Arnn — to stand on stage next to him in Tennessee and trash the intelligence of Tennessee teachers. Now comes a well-heeled special interest group — also from outside Tennessee — that has cozied up to the governor and condescendingly suggests that you can’t be a Tennessee Republican if you don’t support using taxpayer money to subsidize private schools at the potential cost of public schools.
The voters who flipped from red to blue in the 2022 gubernatorial election may have been a mere sprinkle. But if outside special interest groups start targeting reliable, conservative lawmakers with strong track records solely based on the way they vote on a single issue, that storm might start to build.
Ben Garrett is editor of the Independent Herald in Oneida, Tenn.