While the midterm elections will likely leave Congress in political gridlock, candidates from both major political parties supporting school choice policies won impressive victories. On the Republican side, with the exception of Arizona, every state in which the GOP held a trifecta—governor and both legislative chambers—going into the election and had “enacted large, new school-choice programs or significantly expanded existing ones in the past two years kept that trifecta,” noted The Heritage Foundation’s Jason Bedrick and Lindsey Burke.
The midterms helped illustrate school choice can be a winning policy issue for candidates. Voters in Florida’s Miami-Dade County, where about 75% of students are enrolled in school choice programs, issued a strong rebuke to Charlie Crist, a former Republican governor running as a Democrat, and his anti-school choice running mate Karla Hernandez-Mats, president of United Teachers of Dade. While President Joe Biden won Miami-Dade by seven points in 2020, Gov. Ron DeSantis trounced Crist with an 11-point victory in the county.