Armageddon (26 page)

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frican Americans, Latinos, single
women, and young people cast 40% of the general election vote. Obama was elected by winning disproportionately within each of these groups. He carried blacks 93%–7%,
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carried single women 67%–33%.
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Under-30 voters backed him 60%–40%,
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and Latinos voted for Obama 71%–29%.
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Obama carried these four groups by a combined margin of almost 3:1. So before anybody outside the Democratic Party base voted, Obama already had locked up between a quarter and a third of the total vote.

In 2016, we must take bold action to shatter the Obama coalition of women, blacks, Latinos, and young people. We can't let the Democrats win in 2016 by harvesting a disproportionately large vote from these groups. We must shatter their base.

Many assume that Hillary Clinton, by virtue of being female, can win much more of the women's vote than a typical male Democratic candidate. That's just not true. In 2012, women voted Democratic by 10 points. Donald Trump's challenge is to better that performance.

Whether or not he can will be the central test of his candidacy. Hillary will use his past put-downs of certain specific women—such as Rosie O'Donnell and Megan Kelly—to try to paint him as a misogynist, generalizing from his often too candid remarks about particular women to paint a false picture of his general attitude.

Donald Trump is no misogynist as the women who have known him well—wives, employees, daughters, friends—can attest. He does strike back when he feels he's been attacked unfairly, but he is a gender-neutral combatant.

But Trump's reputation is out there for all to see. A FoxNews poll in April, 2016 found him losing women by 55%–33% even as he carries men by 51%–40%.

Nobody can win if they lose women by twenty-two points. Romney lost in 2012 when he only lost women by ten.

Trump must close the gap. Those who watch Donald's interaction with his family—particularly with his daughters—do not doubt that he is no misogynist. His history of hiring women executives substantiates his fairness and gender-neutral ability to spot talent.

Trump is likely considering whether to select a woman as his vice presidential running mate. If he did find a qualified woman to run with, it would go a long way toward offering proof of his essential feminism. As he campaigns with her, listens to her opinions, takes her advice, and advances her in public, the ticket will be a public demonstration of his lack of sexism.

Hillary will try to paint Trump as a vicious sexist. Particularly as she seeks to parry his attacks on her lack of integrity, she will try to hide behind her gender and say he is attacking all women. A female
running mate, who echoes his critique of Hillary, will do much to overcome her strategy.

Trump can also select his issues carefully to show his feminist impulses.

Ever since the 1970s, when Roe v. Wade made abortion a key federal issue, a major gender gap has divided America's voters, with men tending to vote Republican while women vote mainly Democrat. More sophisticated analyses have identified single women as the most pro-Democrat group. While married men, married women, and single men vote more or less the same, single women vote substantially more Democratic than the other three groups. With half of all American women unwed, single white women have become more and more the base of the Democratic Party. And as the ranks of the unmarried have grown, so has the gender gap.

But abortion has gradually receded in the public consciousness as a key dividing issue. More and more Americans are reporting their feelings as ambivalent on the issue.

Gallup reported that, while Americans are pro-choice by 50%–44%, only half of those who are pro-choice approve of it in all circumstances while only 37% of the pro-life voters want it banned entirely.
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Despite its polarizing role in so many elections, most voters do not see abortion as a crucial issue. Gallup reported that only 19% say a candidate “must share their views” on the issue to win their votes, 28% say it is not a major issue at all, while 49% say that it is just one of several important issues.
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Education is a much more important issue, particularly to America's women voters.

Donald Trump is the only candidate running for president who believes that parents should have the right to decide where their children should go to school. “Competition is why I'm very much in favor of school choice,” he declared. “Let schools compete for kids,” Trump writes. “For two decades I've been urging politicians to open
the schoolhouse doors and let parents decide which schools are best for their children.”
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While Hillary would chain students and parents to the failing public school system, Donald Trump would open school choice to private or charter schools as well. Even though Hillary and Bill chose a private school for Chelsea, they would deny the same option to poor families.

By a margin of 54% to 45%, voters report that they are dissatisfied with the quality of education in America.
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This dissatisfaction opens a political opportunity for Trump.

The Democratic Party has become increasingly dependent on the teachers' union for campaign money and political support. But more and more, the interests of the union and children diverge—and Democrats stand with the union that donates hundreds of millions a year to their campaigns. Educational quality lags far behind in the party's calculations. Democrats increasingly echo the famous comment of the first teachers' union leader Albert Shanker, who said, “When children start paying union dues then I'll start representing the interests of children.”
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The battle to improve schools used to be a quantitative contest between advocates of more spending and conservatives who insisted on holding it down. But increasingly, voters—particularly mothers—are coming to realize that more money is not the whole answer. It is becoming apparent that freeing schools from the clutches of the teachers' unions and permitting competition and parental choice is at least as important as extra money. Politically, this means forcing Democrats like Hillary to choose between parents and teachers' unions, between children and union campaign donations.

The gap between the political priorities of the Democratic Party and those of America's public school parents is wide enough to drive a truck through. And in 2011 and 2012, that truck was named Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin.

Walker was the first Republican to use the division between the needs of unions and the interests of parents to flip votes from Democrat to Republican. Walker attempted to go where no other governor of a blue state has ever gone before: He backed major education reform, dramatically curbing the power and financial clout of teachers' unions and restoring school governance to local boards.

The unions, threatened as never before, pulled out all stops to defeat him and his proposals. And they lost each time, even though Wisconsin is a decidedly blue state. These election results demonstrated dramatically the power of the education reform issue to flip votes from left to right. After four years of unending controversy, a statewide recall election, and massive teacher demonstrations and sit-ins, Republican Scott Walker was reelected by a margin of 57% to 43% in this state that last went Republican in a presidential election in 1984.

Walker was first elected Wisconsin's governor in 2010 by a 52%–48% margin. Facing a huge budget deficit, he introduced a “budget repair bill” on February 11, 2011. Rather than the usual mix of spending cuts and tax hikes, Walker decided to zero in on the school system and demand major changes. He required additional contributions by state and local government workers to their health care plans and pensions, cutting their take home pay by an average of 8%. More importantly, he proposed to eliminate, for most state workers except police, many collective bargaining rights they had enjoyed for decades. No longer could they bargain over work rules, teacher tenure, class size, and school policy. They could not require the state to contract with the insurance firms controlled by the union (that typically added about 20% to the cost, money that went to the union coffers). Public employee pay could not be raised above the rate of inflation unless the increase was approved by a popular referendum. Public employee unions would have to win yearly votes of their members to continue representing them. Dues could no longer be deducted automatically from paychecks.

The unions went berserk. Led by the teachers, they conducted massive sit-ins at the state capitol building in Madison, effectively locking state officials out of their offices. With Republican majorities in both Houses, the unions had little prospect of blocking the bill, so they induced 14 Democratic state senators to walk out of the Senate chamber to deny the quorum needed to pass the bill. When the sergeant-at-arms was ordered to round them up, the fugitive senators crossed the state line to hide out in Illinois. Eventually the bill passed and the union immediately launched a campaign first to recall the key state senators whose votes had passed it and then to unseat Governor Walker himself.

The recall effort, sponsored by all the state's unions, became a ballot test of the power of the education reform movement. With tens of millions of dollars pouring into Wisconsin from both sides of the political spectrum, it became a key battleground for both sides.

Walker won the tests decisively. On June 12, 2012, he defeated his Democratic rival in the recall election by a 53%–47% margin. And he went on to be reelected governor in 2014 by a 57%–43% margin, an astounding defeat for the teachers' unions.

In the years following the passage of Walker's bill, teachers' union membership in Wisconsin dropped from 187,000 in 2011 to 124,000 in 2014. Taking advantage of the legal requirement that public unions hold elections to continue to represent the teachers, educators in 70 of the 408 school districts voted to throw the union out!
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Even as voters in Wisconsin were registering their discontent with teachers' unions and their negative impact on education, people throughout America felt we were getting shortchanged by the amount we spend on schools. The Rasmussen Reports poll of May 17, 2015, told voters that our school budgets spent an average of $11,000 per year per student and asked if we were getting our money's worth, 63% answered that we were not.
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Teacher tenure and restrictions on merit pay plans do more than anything else to hobble our public schools.

Tenure protects bad teachers and restrictions on merit pay stop us from rewarding good ones. In New York City, for example, 4,000 teachers are so bad that the chancellor of the public school system will not permit them to be in the classroom with students. They have such bad histories of abusing the children that they cannot be trusted. But New York City cannot fire them. They have tenure and are protected, in their union contract, against dismissal. Even if grounds exist to fire them, the costs of years of litigation over each case would be prohibitive. So these tenured teachers show up each morning in what are called “rubber rooms” where they sit and read the paper or books all day while continuing to draw full pay and benefits.

Indeed, when New York had to lay off thousands of teachers in one of its budget crises during the '08–'09 recession, the Board of Education asked the union's permission to lay off the rubber room teachers. The union refused. It insisted that the board hew rigidly to the “last in, first out” policy meaning that thousands of new, young, idealistic teachers, including hundreds from the special Teach for America program, were fired. But the rubber room remained full. Even beyond the rubber room, teacher tenure lets burned out, unqualified, and even partially senile teachers remain on the job, advancing children who have learned very little.

By contrast, merit pay permits local school boards to stray outside salary guidelines to reward exceptional teachers based on their classroom performance and the improvements in student test scores. While the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the union for teachers in the bigger cities, has permitted merit pay under certain conditions, the larger teachers' union, the National Education Association (NEA), is dead set against it. The NEA will brook no deviation from teacher pay based strictly on seniority and advanced degrees. It worries that teachers will “teach to the test” to inflate their students' test scores artificially and that principals and other teacher evaluators will vent their prejudices on those they dislike.
So every teacher is rigidly circumscribed within the pay guidelines based on seniority and advanced degrees.

Partially because they are frustrated at the lack of upward mobility, one-third of all new teachers leave after two years, and one-half check out after five. The unions, which govern in the interests of the older, senior, tenured teachers, do nothing to keep younger talented staff on the job. But if pay and tenure are conditioned and based on student performance on standardized tests, teachers will lean on their unions to allow incentives for better teaching and new ways to stimulate student performance.

But even tenure reform and merit pay will only accomplish so much. Many parents want to escape the work rules and teacher qualification requirements in traditional public schools that keep the quality of education low. Many opt to send their children to charter schools in areas where they are available. Charter schools can be public, private, or parochial, and are sometimes sponsored by private businesses, churches, parent groups, local government, or even teachers' unions. While not all charters are equal in quality, as a whole, they consistently outperform traditional public schools. As a result, there are usually long waiting lists to get in.