Parents desiring more school choice in Texas and Georgia, two of the fastest growing states, scored major electoral victories in recent days and weeks, wins that could facilitate the passage of legislation in 2025 that expands education options for millions of kids. On Tuesday, May 28 three incumbent Republican Texas House members who did not support Governor Greg Abbott’s (R-Texas) education savings account (ESA) proposal during last year’s legislative session lost their primary runoff elections to pro-school choice challengers. The runoff losses for those GOP opponents of school choice follow the defeat of six anti-school choice House Republicans in the Lone Star State’s initial March primary.
Heading into the Texas primary elections this spring, school choice supporters needed to pick up 13 seats in the Texas House in order to have the votes to pass Governor Abbott’s ESA bill next year. With the primaries and runoffs now decided, at least 14 Republicans in the Texas House who opposed ESA legislation will be replaced by pro-school choice nominees heading into the general elections. Six anti-school choice Texas House incumbents lost their primary in March, three anti-ESA incumbents lost in this week’s runoff elections, and another five pro-ESA candidates won primaries for seats left open by retiring incumbents who had voted against ESAs.
“Barring Dem pickups, Governor Greg Abbott has the votes to pass some version of school vouchers next year,” the Texas Tribune’s politics reporter, Jasper Scherer, tweeted shortly after midnight on May 29, after most runoff results had come in.
“The Texas legislature now has enough votes to pass School Choice,” declared Governor Greg Abbott in response to the runoff results, which came only a week after a handful of pro-school choice Georgia state legislators faced anti-school choice primary challengers. In all of those primary contests in Georgia, the pro-choice incumbent prevailed. Their counterparts in neighboring Tennessee are now working to achieve a similar outcome in the Volunteer State’s August primaries.
A number of state legislators from across Tennessee, all of whom backed Governor Bill Lee’s (R-Tenn.) proposal to make the state’s ESA program available to all parents and children, are now facing challengers in the upcoming August 1 primary. Tennessee lawmakers with primary challengers this August include Representatives Chris Todd (R), Scott Cepicky (R), and Rusty Grills (R), along with Senators Jon Lundberg (R) and Ferrell Haile (R). All of those incumbents boast legislative records filled with numerous votes for lower taxes, more school choice, regulatory reform that reduces costs for consumers and employers, and budgets that have kept the growth in state spending below the rate of inflation and population growth. Yet those accolades have not fended off primary challengers, many of whom oppose making access to Tennessee’s ESA program universal.
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While a number of Tennessee legislators who support school choice have primary challengers, their colleagues who worked to defeat the universal ESA bill this year are not, in large part because they thwarted the bill after the candidate filing deadline had passed. Some see the post-filing deadline timing of the move to kill the universal ESA bill in Tennessee this year as an implicit admission that those who worked to defeat the proposal knew what they were doing would not be well received by voters, parents in particular.
Explaining his reservations to reporters last December about universal eligibility for ESAs, Representative Jeremy Faison (R), chairman of the Tennessee House Republican caucus, said he was pressing Governor Lee for “empirical data showing that the overall achievement scores have risen.” Faison said he was “really interested in that.”
The answer to Representative Faison’s question, as it would happened, can be found The Parent Revolution, a new book published on May 14. That new release — authored by Corey DeAngelis with the American Federation for Children, a non-profit organization that supports school choice-expanding reforms — summarizes the research that has been conducted to examine the impact that school choice has on student performance.
“Out of seventeen random-assignment studies on the effects of school-choice policies on the academic performance of participating students, eleven find statistically significant positive effects while only three found negative effects,” DeAngelis notes in his book. “Two of the negative findings were from Louisiana,” DeAngelis points out, “which implemented a highly regulated voucher program that was very far from Friedman’s free market ideal.”
Some of the primary challengers in Tennessee are more vocal than others in their objections to Governor Lee’s proposal to expand the state’s ESA program. Bubba Cobb, for example, is touting his opposition to ESAs and education vouchers in his primary campaign against Representative Rusty Grills, who champions the expansion of school choice.
Cobb’s campaign website declares that school vouchers are bad because, as Cobb puts it in his platform, they “utilize public taxpayer dollars to fund private, for-profit corporations.” Asked by this author whether he would like to see federal food assistance programs discontinued, since they also direct tax dollars to for-profit corporations, or whether he would like to see military contracts that do the same also come to an end, Mr. Cobb and his campaign have thus far not responded.
Mr. Cobb’s campaign website asserts that ESAs and school vouchers “aren't financially responsible.” This author asked Mr. Cobb why he does not have any objections when kids from upper-income households attend the government school they’re assigned to, at which they are subsidized by Tennessee taxpayers to the tune of approximately $10,000 per year on average, but does object to the prospect of those same kids being subsidized at at lower cost to taxpayers (roughly $7,000 annually) through a universal ESA program. Mr. Cobb has yet to respond.
Cobb and his campaign are going to spend the coming weeks trying to convince voters that it’s financially irresponsible for the state to offer a $7,000 voucher to help a cover tuition costs for a Tennessee kid attending the private school of their choosing, and that the more financially prudent decision for taxpayers is to instead spend $10,000 on that same kid’s education at the government school closest to their house. While it’s likely the most prominent point of disagreement between Grills and Cobb, school choice isn’t the only issue on which the two differ. Representative Grills, for example, has made a written commitment to his constituents that he will vote against any legislation that would result in a net tax hike. Cobb, meanwhile, has thus declined to make that same commitment to voters.
Primary Challengers Take On Legislators With Long List Of Accomplishments
In addition to bringing down tax rates and regulatory costs, Todd, Cepicky, Grills, Haile, and Lundberg, with the help of leadership from Governor Lee, have also budgeted responsibly, something that cannot be said of their Republican counterparts in other state capitals and in Washington, D.C. The new budget approved this year in Tennessee, for example, ensures that state spending does not grow faster than the combined rate of population growth plus inflation. Senator Lundberg attributes this fiscal restraint to what he describes as “an incredibly conservative and forward thinking approach to budgeting.”
In addition to helping establish a tax and regulatory environment to which officials in many other states aspire, Tennessee lawmakers have also taken action where federal lawmakers have failed. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill, for example, have been seeking to reinstate full federal tax deductibility of businesses’ research and development (R&D) costs. Dysfunction and irreconcilable disagreements in Washington, however, are preventing that from happening. In Tennessee, however, Governor Lee and state lawmakers decided not to wait on Congress and went ahead and passed legislation two years ago that made Tennessee the first state to reinstate full expensing for R&D costs for state tax purposes.
These circ*mstances will put primary challengers in Tennessee in a difficult spot. As they seek to unseat incumbents who have supported school choice and demonstrated national leadership in the advancement of other top conservative reforms, primary challengers in Tennessee will likely need high turnout of low-information voters if they are to prevail in August. That is a very different dynamic from the recent primaries in Texas, in which victorious primary challengers won with the help of boosted turnout from engaged and informed parents who made clear they were sick of being represented in the statehouse by someone who continues to vote against more education options for their children. Early voting in the Tennessee primaries runs from July 12 through 27.
