Jonathan Chait

If J.D.

Vance is the – he's not the greatest, so you could still beat him.

But I think Democrats should be aware of the vulnerabilities they'd be taking on by having this record of governance be saddling their candidates.

And also side point of like for all their outrage about like wokeism, Republicans will take the dumbest moves from the woke left and use them for themselves of like, oh, you're a racist because, you know, I'm going to impute some hidden motive behind your remarks that was not in any way present in the text of what you said.

They'll do all that crazy stuff when it suits them.

Right.

So Clinton and Obama were education presidents.

They cared a lot about education as policy and they thought the politics worked well.

That was a core Democratic Party promise is we will make the schools better if we vote for us.

And they did make the schools better.

But some of the things they did in order to make the schools better were upsetting to teachers unions and teachers unions fought back.

They won the war inside the Democratic Party on education reform, and they turned education reform into a kind of dirty word.

And in doing that, they basically abandoned any aspiration to make the schools better.

The only real thing they want to do with schools is just put more money into teacher salaries now.

They don't have any kind of realistic plan to improve schools because any realistic plan to improve them does things that are upsetting to teachers unions.

So the result of that, you can see it in the polls that people used to give Democrats enormous advantages on which party is going to do better for schools.

And that advantage is gone.

So I think people need to recognize that the change that the democratic party has undergone on education, going from Clinton, Obama reform reform,

To the Biden and post Biden era where we just defer to teachers unions and everything has had, in addition to a policy cost that you can see in this in the southern surge and other places, it's got a political cost as well.

It was one of the Democratic Party's best issues.