Facing Four More Years of Trump, Democrats Wonder: How Did They Lose Parents?

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This article is part of The 74’s EDlection 2024 coverage, which takes a look at candidates’ education policies and how they might impact the American education system after the 2024 election.

As they attempt to draw lessons from a devastating presidential defeat, Democratic strategists must grapple with a question that could shape their approach to education policy over the next four years: How can the party of educators win back the support of parents?

According to a detailed voter analysis conducted for Fox News by the research group NORC, caregivers of children under the age of 18 favored Joe Biden over Donald Trump by a margin of three percentage points in 2020. By comparison, Trump won the same group by four points over Kamala Harris — a seven-point swing in four years’ time. The electorate overall only moved six points rightward in the same period, meaning that parents have become warmer toward the former president than the rest of the country. (Data from exit polls was even more stark, indicating a nine-point Trump gain among mothers and a 20-point bounce among fathers.)

In a country where more than one-quarter of all voters are parents of school-aged kids, a shift of that scale moves millions of votes. And unlike some polling surprises over the last decade, it’s one that political observers have long seen coming.

Throughout the Biden administration, statistical evidence on the public’s attitudes toward K–12 schools have carried ominous news for Democrats, who traditionally enjoyed a significant advantage over Republicans on the issue of education. A 2022 survey conducted by Impact Research, a respected Democratic polling firm, was one of the first to find that parents in closely fought congressional districts trusted Republicans more when it came to running schools. 

Matt Hogan, a partner at Impact, said that the results were particularly striking given how well the Democratic brand has held up in other historic areas of strength. 

“Democrats still have significant advantages on health care and abortion and have largely maintained those advantages,” Hogan said. “Whereas education is fairly unique in being an issue that Democrats traditionally won on, but have lost a good deal of ground recently.”

Those developments will leave Democratic leaders wondering not only what hurt their credibility with parents, but also whether the damage can be reversed anytime soon. 

Many among the party’s noisy coalition of professional operatives, interest groups, and activists acknowledge that the legacy of COVID-related school closures left some families furious with local Democratic officials, who tended to be more cautious about reopening during the pandemic. But for those memories to fade, they argued, they must be replaced with a more defined agenda for K–12 policy, which has been largely impressionistic since the end of the Obama administration.

As a party, we've lost the language, the ideas, the policy, and the vision on education, and it needs to be entirely rebuilt.

Jorge Elorza, Democrats for Education Reform

Jorge Elorza is the CEO of the advocacy group Democrats for Education Reform, which commissioned Impact’s survey work. In an interview, he said that while the GOP had responded to the public’s pandemic-era dissatisfaction with public education by launching a forceful drive for school choice, Democrats “haven’t offered anything” to strike a meaningful contrast.

“As a party, we’ve lost the language, the ideas, the policy, and the vision on education, and it needs to be entirely rebuilt,” said Elorza, the former mayor of Providence, Rhode Island. “Most Democrats would be very hard-pressed to answer the simple question of what is our party’s vision on education.”

The legacy of lockdowns

Sarah Sachen, a Chicago mother of four, said she’d been a “lifelong Democrat” before this November. But after the difficulties she faced putting her kids through school during the pandemic, she cast her first ballot for Donald Trump.

Sachen said the seeds of her decision were laid during the 2021–22 school year. Having already struggled with the transition to online learning — her home’s electricity was spotty throughout parts of 2020, making it difficult for her children to use the Chromebooks provided to them by the school district — she was livid when the Chicago Teachers’ Union staged a walkout over safety protocols. Two of her children have Individualized Education Programs, making it nearly impossible for her to consider switching them to a private school, she said.

“It wasn’t fair to me that the Catholic school down my block was allowing kids to come and get their education while my kids, who have to be serviced by the system because they have special needs, were punished,” remembered Sachen, whose involvement with Chicago Public Schools includes service on her local school council.

COVID-era lockdowns presented a special challenge to the Democratic mayors who run most major American cities. Black and Hispanic families, much more so than their white and Asian counterparts, were hesitant to return to in-person schooling during 2020 and 2021; yet the educational and social-emotional disruptions posed by months spent in Zoom classrooms were disproportionately felt by students who were already struggling in school, further widening inequities in educational achievement.  

Sachen was already outraged with the length of the closures, excoriating the union in local media for their resistance to reopening campuses. But she grew more animated last year, when the progressive Democrat and former CTU organizer Brandon Johnson won election as the city’s mayor. By this November, she said, she felt perfectly comfortable voting for Trump, whom she said she “hated” during his previous campaigns in 2016 and 2020.  

Not even Trump’s attacks on Democrats over their support for transgender healthcare access could sway Sachen, who has a transgender son. 

“I wasn’t scared to vote for him this time,” Sachen said. “I think it’ll be better for education and better all-around.” Many of her friends in the neighborhood of Garfield Ridge reached a similar calculation, and Trump lost consistently Democratic Illinois by a smaller margin than any Republican nominee since the 1980s.

Michael Mikus, a Democratic political consultant based in western Pennsylvania, agreed that the challenge of educational leadership during a once-in-a-lifetime public health crisis had harmed his party’s brand. Swing voters in his home state, perennially one of America’s most decisive battlegrounds, too often thought of Democrats as being led by “people who want to control your life.”

“Democrats were often portrayed as not caring about what parents think,” Mikus said, recalling the 2021 Virginia governor’s race, in which Republican Glenn Youngkin adopted parental rights as a closing argument en route to an upset victory. “Rightly or wrongly, there was a segment of the electorate that may have considered voting for Democrats, but that sense just left a bad taste in their mouths.”

Returning to basic skills

Yet it remains unclear how the party might reclaim the initiative — or, indeed, how deep the reputational damage goes. 

Katie Paris is the founder of Red Wine & Blue, a progressive advocacy group that specifically targets suburban women. Herself the mother of school-aged children, Paris said that while Trump’s election was a major disappointment, she was heartened by the failure of Republican-led ballot initiatives to establish school voucher-like programs across multiple states. The victory of Mo Green, the Democratic candidate for state superintendent in North Carolina, offered more cause for optimism.

Green’s Republican opponent in the pivotal swing state, a longtime homeschool teacher who had referred to public schools as “indoctrination centers,” is now seeking a position in the Trump administration, though her future in state-level politics is murky.

Going forward, Paris argued, Democrats should speak directly to parents’ concerns about the academic and psychological deficits absorbed by students during the pandemic. Previous polling has revealed that most Americans say K–12 schools are on the wrong track, and a plurality believe that reading instruction has deteriorated in recent decades.

“I would like for the focus in public education to be on helping our kids recover from learning loss since COVID, which we’re still not talking about,” Paris said, adding that Republicans would prefer to keep the spotlight on hot-button issues like the rights of LGBTQ students. “Unfortunately, the only people we heard talking about [schools] were those who wanted to tear them down and blame the trans community for their downfall.”

Impact’s Hogan agreed that the huge task of academic recovery was under-emphasized in Democrats’ campaign messaging. In focus groups, he said, parents still rated the party highly when it came to providing resources for schools, including free lunch and after-school programs. But on the question of lifting achievement and bolstering student skills, a large number of respondents said that neither party had their support.

“About a fifth of voters overall don’t trust either party to ensure school quality, and both parties are tied on that issue,” he said. “So for me, that’s a huge opportunity for Democrats to make gains.”

Since the end of the Obama administration, amid enervating fights over the Common Core academic standards and the rewriting of the No Child Left Behind Act, the party has mostly avoided staking out ambitious positions on K–12 policy. In the absence of a set federal program, Democrats have gone their own ways, embracing the science of reading in some blue states while eliminating graduation requirements in others. 

Whatever direction they take, Mikus said, Democrats should take care to position themselves as the champions of families’ interests. 

“What we have to say is that the Democratic Party is on the side of parents and children. You can’t eliminate parents and parenting from the equation.”

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