Op-ed: how the right consistently loses with young voters

The selection of Tim Walz as the Democratic Vice Presidential candidate brought into sharp focus many contrasts between positions Democrats and Republicans hold this election cycle. One of those positions involves Democrats wanting to feed hungry school children with free lunches, while schools without free lunch programs, such as Mehlville School District near St. Louis, see children accrue lunch debt for meals they want but cannot pay for. Republicans, for better or worse, have been leading the charge to destroy public schools where and when they can.

Last year, Republican governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders of Arkansas signed a school voucher bill into law. Voucher systems, such as those experimented with in New Hampshire, tend to go over budget, provide funding with little accountability, and send tax money to parents who were already paying for their children to go into private schools anyway.

A similar program in Arizona, advocated by the conservative Goldwater Group in 2022, ended up creating a “budget meltdown.” The state faced a $1.4 billion shortfall this year. Voucher spending began with an estimated $65 million, then rose to $333 million, and now is expected to climb up $429 million.

Rather than canceling the voucher program, Arizona legislators have instead decided to cancel highway repairs, water infrastructure projects, improvements to prisons, and a $54 million cut to the state’s community colleges. 

Cuts to state funding for those colleges will mean students there will be faced a much higher tuition bill. They will either have to find a way to pay more, or they will have to drop out of college, or find another institution of higher learning to attend. Enrollment in Arizona’s state colleges could easily go down.

This is something I experienced personally while going to college in Pennsylvania. Democratic governor Ed Rendell, who was known for speeding down highways and making a fool of himself, had at least funded the state’s publicly funded colleges. Republican governor Tom Corbett was elected while I was enrolled in one of the state’s institutions of higher learning. One of his first actions was to draw back funding for colleges by around $700 million. I was faced with the same choice students in Arizona are faced with this year, and students in Arkansas could be faced with as well (if their voucher program goes over budget as others have).

Several noticeable pain points exist along the way of my educational journey, which was tame in comparison to what students today have to go through. Some of the more significant negative memories I have come from living in a state that tended to elect Republicans such as Rick Santorum, who served as a Senator while I grew up there. 

As a young person, I had no conception of what politics really was. For me, it was just a bunch of guys playing dress-up, going on television, talking about things I didn’t really understand. It was the evening news at 6:30 where people always seemed to be bickering. It was Bill Clinton getting into sex scandals and playing the saxophone. Politics didn’t really bother me until it started affecting me personally.

It cannot be a mistake that the children in Tim Walz’s photo where he signs a bill giving them free lunch look ecstatic and happy, hugging him from all sides while children in the photo of Sanders signing her state’s voucher bill into law look miserable and depressed, as if they’d rather be anywhere else.

Children who are denied the opportunity to eat, and learn Republican politicians are behind their daily hunger and misery, aren’t going to think favorably of Republicans. The last time I interviewed a high school principal in Manchester, NH, in 2019, he said the school operated its own food bank for students who didn’t have enough to eat.

Students trying to get into college, particularly those attending a state college, find themselves in a difficult situation when their tuition goes up. When they learn a Republican is behind their sticker shock, they are less likely to think favorably of Republicans in general.

This is in addition to attacks on sexual orientation, gender identity, books in libraries, gun safety legislation, under-funding school districts- all of which affect school children. Those children eventually grow up to be adults. If they remember their formative years as I have, the right has lost them forever. Taking care of children is the easiest way to win over future voters. Instead, Republicans make decisions to appeal to their base, their donors, and their fellow politicians. Each decision, each pain point for a child, leads to a cumulative effect where children no longer trust the people leading their government. Those students may not vote Democrat, but they certainly aren’t going to vote Republican- not with so many bad memories lingering around about what Republican governance meant for them.