The Youngkin-Sears playbook for 2024

“I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach,” Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe infamously said at the second debate in September 2021. His comments opened an opportunity for Republican upstarts Glenn Youngkin and Winsome Earle-Sears, running for governor and lieutenant governor, respectively, to seize control of the educational debate.

“In our poll, we were showing that we were hitting, like, a 45” percent polling average before McAuliffe’s debate comments,” Sears admitted to me in an interview. But McAuliffe’s comments (and the campaign materials printed about them) opened the spigot, and the votes for Youngkin came pouring out. Virginia had turned against McAuliffe, and Sears and Youngkin broke 50 percent in polling for the first time. In November 2021, Youngkin won the gubernatorial race with 50.58 percent of the vote.

Youngkin and Sears were both good candidates, but don’t mistake their win for flashes in the pan. They won riding on issues that will continue to permeate the political discourse for years to come — and represent a valuable opportunity for 2024 Republicans to seize control of a traditionally Democratic issue: education.

In the run-up to the Virginia election, every community had different concerns, but each concern reflected a particular facet of the educational mediocrity into which America has descended. Many Asian voters were concerned about the end of merit-based education at the top public school in the region, Thomas Jefferson High School, in Arlington County. Many socially conservative parents (of all races) were shocked by the revelations of sexual-assault allegations and the resulting cover-up by Loudoun County, primarily because it involved a gender-fluid student. And many black and Hispanic parents seethed at the fact that Democratic administrations had been rolling back school choice in Virginia, leaving them with fewer alternatives for their children.  

And then there were those who increasingly distrusted establishment superintendents for talking big, gaining power and building their own educational empires rather than helping students. Youngkin campaign strategists Jeff Roe and Kristin Davison said at an event in Palm Beach: “The days of the superintendent of your local county being the most powerful politician of your county are over, and it’s about damn time.”

Along with addressing the education-sponsored racial division, Youngkin and Sears were able to effectively market a message that they were better than the Democrats at improving school standards. “I’m the former vice president of the state board of education, and I saw the scores, and they’re horrific,” Sears said. The third- to eighth-grade math standardized test pass rates in Virginia had hovered around 50 percent for black students for eight years between 2010 and 2020, before plummeting to 30 percent in 2021 from the pandemic erasure of learning. In truth, issues with Virginia’s education system had long preceded Covid.  Along with stagnant scores, the state had witnessed an increase in discipline violations, with disorderly conduct complaints about school-age kids spiking 45 percent between 2011 and 2016 alone.

Some strategists might point out that Youngkin’s gubernatorial win was the product of a unique set of circumstances unlikely to be repeatable across the nation. I beg to differ. Education issues will only grow in importance over the next few political cycles — and enterprising Republicans should capitalize on that now.

The reason is twofold: one, voters are finally starting to wake up to school curricula materials that teach race and queer theory instead of math and reading; and two, voters are willing to blame Democrats.

An October 2021 USA Today/Suffolk University poll found that when it came down to the matter of whether parents or school boards should have more influence over their children’s education, “79 percent of Republicans and 57 percent of independents said parents — but just 16 percent of Democrats did.”  Youngkin was able to win the election with the help of those independents, a majority of whom supported his side, especially in the fight against CRT and LGBT activism in schools.

It looks like the average voter is also starting to favor Republicans in education: a 2022 Impact Research poll found that 43 percent of likely voters nationwide trust Democrats on education compared to 47 percent for Republicans — a far cry from the Obama coalition’s 50-percent-plus majority on education issues.

Republicans need to seize the opportunity to remind voters that it was Democrats — Democrat-controlled school boards, bureaucracies and politicians — who led our country down the road to educational peril. The through lines to educational failures in Virginia, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York City are Democratic policies and unions. Were Republicans complicit? Sure. But the American memory still sees the Democratic Party as owning the machinery of education. That means it owns its outcomes.

The election of Youngkin and Sears in 2021 signaled to the country that a new, broader social agenda could truly win the minds and hearts of voters, including independents and Democrats. 2024 GOP candidates would be wise to learn from their success.

This is adapted from an excerpt of School of Woke: How Critical Race Theory Infiltrated American Schools and How to Reclaim Them, by Kenny Xu, out August 1.