Earlier this year, it looked like the Republican presidential primary would be driven by conservative cultural battles, especially battles over education that had animated the party’s base since the pandemic.
Governor Ron DeSantis seemed poised to lead the charge, thanks to an “anti-woke” agenda he enacted in Florida, which included restricting the way schools teach America’s racial history, banning gender identity classes and giving parents the option was given to have books removed from libraries and classrooms.
Even Donald J. Trump seemed to be trying to outflank Mr. DeSantis on education policy, promising to weed out “Marxists” in the Department of Education.
But anti-wakeness has so far not played as much of a role as expected in the Republican race. During his campaign, Mr. DeSantis refocused his speech on the economy and border security while focusing less on culture war issues. Former Vice President Mike Pence in a speech this month called for redistributing federal education spending among the states — a traditionally Republican goal that predates the anti-woke crusades.
In the first primary debate last week, the word “woke” was uttered exactly once. Instead, the conversation on stage in Milwaukee, when the topic was education, sounded more like a product of the Reagan era than the Trump era.
There were calls to eliminate the Ministry of Education.
To expand the ‘choice of school’.
To kill the teachers’ unions.
The focus on a range of education issues seems to indicate that Republicans want to frame the 2024 campaign around issues beyond their opposition to “wakefulness”—widely understood as liberal views of race and gender—while trying to appeal to a wider audience. speak than conservative activists. On education, the candidates turned to a general election message, albeit with familiar echoes.
“The old Reagan agenda took center stage, and the post-Trump agenda didn’t get much attention,” said Rick Hess, director of educational policy studies at the center-right American Enterprise Institute. He noted that some post-pandemic school closures showed a reversal in voters’ longstanding preference for Democrats on education issues. “I think you see Republican candidates trying to find a way to turn that support into something sustainable,” he said.
On Monday, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott presented a plan that aims to unify older and more recent Republican talking points about education. Scott called his proposal the “Empower Parents Plan” and said he wanted to “enforce nationwide school choice” while also “breaking down the false notions of ‘equality’ and leftist attacks on honors classes.”
A cooling of the cultural battle for education in the political conversation could reflect recent electoral history showing that speaking out against “awakened” ideology works well with social conservatives, but also that most parents feel more worrying about children’s learning loss during the pandemic and about a lack of mental health services in schools.
The only time the word “woke” was spoken last week during the two-hour debate was when former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley seemed to dismiss cultural issues at the school as a distraction from students’ learning. “A lot of crazy, wacky things happen in schools, but we need to get these kids reading,” Ms Haley said, touching on both traditional and current issues for Conservatives.
For his part, Mr. DeSantis nodded at the ban on critical race theory and what he called “gender ideology” that he was introducing in Florida schools (although there is no evidence that critical race theory was taught in the state’s elementary schools). On the sidewalk in front of the Republican public, the governor continues to spin an alphabet soup of anti-woke targets like CRT, for critical race theory, and ESG, for corporate environmental, social, and governance investment policies.
But Mr. DeSantis has also changed the way he presents these issues, putting more effort into explaining why they matter.
DeSantis campaign aides say that since the governor successfully introduced himself to voters as an anti-woke warrior, he is now ramping up his messaging about other policies.
When asked the day after the Iowa debate why he had not emphasized an anti-woke message during the much-watched television broadcast, Mr. DeSantis said there were few questions that prompted this topic. (Education was the fourth most discussed issue during the debate, following abortion, Donald Trump and their credentials, according to an analysis by the Times.)
“I mean, for example, they asked a question about UFOs,” Mr. DeSantis said. “They didn’t ask about things like DEI in universities and companies.”
It is not uncommon for candidates to use different rhetoric during their campaign or fundraising appeals to activists than during primary voter debates. And in many situations, Mr. DeSantis still raises “waking” issues to agitate his base.
In a fundraising text sent to supporters last week, Mr. DeSantis wrote: “Across the country I am witnessing radical ideology, brimming with hatred and guilt, being pushed down children’s throats from their first days of school.”
One possible motive for candidates to de-emphasize education in terms of culture war is the lesson to be learned from the 2022 midterm elections at the local level. According to Ballotpedia, a site that tracks the U.S. election, conservative candidates who opposed discussions of race or gender in the classroom during the pandemic, or mask mandates during the pandemic, lost 70 percent of their races in nearly 1,800 school board races nationwide. . A Republican National Committee memo last September warned candidates that “focusing on CRT and masks excites the Republican base, but that parental rights and quality education encourage independents.”
“These culture war arguments are falling apart,” said Karen M. White, deputy director of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union. “Banning books and talking about gender identity is not the approach parents, teachers and students want.”
Traditionally, Republicans have tried to shift control of education to the local level and minimize federal involvement. Under President George W. Bush, the party briefly changed course with the No Child Left Behind Act, which created a rigorous federal program to force schools to increase student achievement.
But sentiment shifted again when Republicans rejected the Obama administration’s promotion of Common Core learning standards a decade ago. Now some candidates, notably Mr. DeSantis, have suggested that the federal government step in more forcefully with policies such as banning critical race theories in national schools, and cutting funding from diversity, equality, and inclusion offices in higher education, as he has done in Florida public opinion. colleges and universities.
“We are going to do similar things in the United States,” Mr. DeSantis said Friday in Rock Rapids, Iowa, during a campaign roundup.
At the same time, he also supports the abolition of the Ministry of Education. Killing the department was first proposed by Ronald Reagan during the 1980 presidential campaign and has been a Republican talking point ever since.
In last week’s debate, Mr. Pence, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, and Vivek Ramaswamy, the entrepreneur who bills himself as the millennial epitome of Trumpism, all said the department should go. Mr Ramaswamy called it ‘the head of the serpent’.
But no Republican administration or Republican Party-led Congress has seriously attempted to shut down the Department of Education. The main programs are very popular. These include Pell grants for low-income college students, so-called Title 1 grants for schools in low-income communities, and funds to ensure that students with disabilities receive an equal education.
“Given that Republicans don’t even want to cut Medicare and Social Security, it’s incredibly difficult to see a credible path forward in cutting funding for the Department of Education’s most important programs,” said Mr. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute.
“There is no way that even half of the Republican faction in the House of Representatives should be releasing money for children with special needs,” he added. “Nobody wants to put Title 1 to zero. And no one wants to put Pell grants at zero.”
Anne Klein contributed reporting from Dyersville, Iowa.