Greg Abbott spent years, millions of campaign dollars, and every ounce of his political capital trying to cram a $1 billion private school voucher program down the throats of Texans. He even went full scorched-earth on rural Republicans who correctly pointed out that defunding local public schools to subsidize elite academies wouldn’t exactly play well back home. Well, congratulations to the ousted governor! His master plan worked so brilliantly that it didn’t just piss off rural Texas—it handed the governor’s mansion to Democrat Gina Hinojosa and flipped the State House for the first time in 24 years. Now, Hinojosa is marching into Austin with a sledgehammer, promising to repair the damage of the “Texas voucher scam” and make Abbott’s pet project completely unrecognizable.
It turns out that people in rural and semi-rural Texas—places not so different from our dusty slice of heaven out here in Lubbock—actually like their public schools. Who knew? Apparently not Abbott, whose margin of support in rural counties plummeted by 16 percentage points compared to his last run. He spent an absolute fortune buying shiny new pro-voucher Republicans to replace the sensible ones he primaried, only to watch voters toss at least 13 of his hand-picked lackeys straight into the political dumpster on Tuesday night. It’s almost poetry. The grand irony is that by desperately trying to funnel taxpayer cash to private schools, Abbott successfully funded the greatest Democratic comeback in modern Texas history.
And it gets better. Hinojosa is also pulling the plug on the state’s authoritarian takeovers of local school districts, meaning Texas Education Agency Commissioner Mike Morath is about to have a lot of free time on his hands. The state-appointed board managers in places like Houston and Fort Worth, who were busy overseeing skyrocketing teacher turnover rates, are already packing up their desks. They’re suddenly very eager to ensure a “smooth transition” back to the locally elected trustees they usurped, probably hoping everyone forgets the absolute mess they made while playing pretend-school-board.
If spending a billion dollars to destroy your own political party was an Olympic sport, do you think Abbott would demand a taxpayer-funded voucher to train for it?
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