Former President Donald Trump promoted school choice at his campaign stop in deep-blue Milwaukee last week. This was a smart move.
Milwaukee is home to the longest-standing modern-day private school-choice initiative in the country. About 30,000 students benefit from the program, which allows their taxpayer-funded education dollars to follow them to the public or private school of their family’s choosing.
The initiative has been a success based on demand, and research shows improvements in test scores, college enrollment, and even crime reduction.
Tens of thousands of families across the rest of the state also benefit from various private school-choice options.
The latest Morning Consult polling finds that nearly three-quarters of Wisconsin school parents support private school choice in the form of education savings accounts.
The support for education freedom crosses party lines, and most students benefiting from private school choice in Wisconsin come from low-income households.
School choice is — as Trump declared last week — “the civil-rights issue of our age.”
It can also help Republicans make inroads with voters who have otherwise backed Democrats in the past.
In Florida, for example, “school-choice moms” helped Ron DeSantis narrowly win his 2018 gubernatorial election.
Exit polling showed DeSantis overperformed with black mothers after his Democratic opponent, Andrew Gillum, opposed the state’s private school-choice program that had already helped more than 100,000 students who were disproportionately nonwhite and from low-income households.
Wisconsin is not an outlier. Arizona passed universal school choice in 2022, and now about 80,000 students benefit from its education-savings-account initiative.
So many Grand Canyon State families demanded school choice that the government website crashed when it first opened up applications.
North Carolina passed universal school choice in 2023, and the Legislature had to pass a bill this year to clear a waitlist of about 55,000 students by funding their scholarships.
Even Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro has already figured out school choice is a political winner in his state. He seemed like Kamala Harris’ obvious pick for vice president. He is popular with Pennsylvania voters and hails from a swing state that’s a must-win for Democrats.
But the teachers unions were not going to let that happen. Why not?
Shortly before his election in 2022, Shapiro wisely changed his education platform to include support for private school choice. By embracing educational freedom publicly, he was able to deflect accusations of hypocrisy from his Republican opponent, Doug Mastriano, who highlighted the fact the Democrat went to private school himself.
Not to mention 75% of school parents support school choice in Pennsylvania, and more than 60,000 scholarships are awarded to K-12 students to attend private schools in the state each year.
In fact, Shapiro went on Fox News just last year to reiterate his support for school choice.
Josh Shapiro read the tea leaves. But it’s too late for Kamala Harris to do the same.
She instead went with the teachers union’s preferred candidate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, showing parents she is not on their side.
She is against school choice and an enemy of parental rights in education. Donald Trump understands parents are the primary decisionmakers for their children.
Trump would be wise to expose Harris’ anti-parent policies from now until Election Day.
The latest national polling by America’s most accurate pollster shows the former president beating the vice president on the issue of education by 3 points.
That result is a huge win Republicans shouldn’t ignore, as Democrats have held a double-digit advantage on education for decades.
We all witnessed what happened to former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe when Republican Glenn Youngkin exposed his anti-parent positions.
Kamala Harris’ obedience to the special interests that own the Democratic Party may cost her in November.
Corey DeAngelis is a senior fellow at the American Culture Project and the national bestselling author of “The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools.”
