Voucher vote a double negative for Democrats

But that calculus has started to change. At the state level, Democrats are beginning to stand up to the unions. A vote to expand Florida’s tax credit-funded private school choice program garnered the support of over a third of Democrats, half the black caucus, and the entire Hispanic caucus. It is perhaps not a coincidence that one of the votes for reauthorizing the D.C. Opportunity Scholarships program came from Democratic Senator Nelson of Florida.

There are also signs that the Democratic base has begun to sour on the teachers unions. Davis Guggenheim, director of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and an Obama campaign donor, recently debuted his documentary Waiting for Superman highlighting the virtues of school choice, and faulting the unions for their obstructionism. It won the documentary audience award at the Sundance Film Festival and was promptly picked up by Paramount Pictures.

If national Democrats continue to ignore these tectonic shifts at the state level, and among the cultural vanguard of the Left, they will soon lose a key political asset: the public’s perception that they are the party of education. In the short term, they’re crushing the educational dreams of 1,300 poor kids. In the long term, they will be shooting their party in the heart.

Andrew J. Coulson directs the Cato Institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, and is author of “Market Education: The Unknown History”.