DALLAS — There still may not be enough votes for school voucher legislation to pass yet - but the results from Super Tuesday gave the push a huge momentum boost, just as Governor Greg Abbott hoped it would.
“Last night we saw all across the state parental choice winning,” said Representative Jeff Leach, a long time school voucher supporter. “The voters of Texas are smart enough to know that we can do both. We can invest in and strengthen public education and also support school choice, parental choice, and that's what the voters resoundingly told us last night,” Leach said.
School choice was not explicitly on the ballot, but Governor Greg Abbott poured millions into campaigns targeting several of the 21 Republicans who voted against vouchers last year. Since then, we've seen five of those incumbents retire, six others lost their jobs in Tuesday’s races and four more are headed to runoffs per the Texas Tribune.
“You have you have these out-of-state billionaires who for their own very narrow and extreme political interests, poured 10s of millions of dollars into these races,” said Reverend Charlie Johnson of Pastors for Children. “So you have an artificial, artificially inflated results. I'm not sure that it in the general election, some of these pro voucher candidates are vulnerable and they will be replaced by anti voucher candidates.”
Johnson has been organizing against the vouchers.
“Vouchers are subsidies for private schools with no accountability and no transparency, no responsibility to inform the public,” he said.
Tuesday’s wins don’t fill all 21 seats, but they do create a landscape ripe for a renewed push for school choice with less opposition.
We won’t know the full picture until after the general election in November, but the runoff in a few weeks could provide some early intel. Then the real test will be during the next legislative session when school vouchers are once again up for a vote.