Inside progressives’ biggest win of 2024

Community organizing outdid billionaires in Kentucky

Welcome to a Tuesday night edition of Progress Report.

It’s been a few days since the last edition of this newsletter, though not for lack of effort; I spent much of the weekend and the early part of this week dealing with some kind of minor virus, which made it almost impossible to sit down and write for more than a few minutes at a time. But I’m feeling better now (at least enough to write) and am excited about the piece I have for you tonight.

Spoiler alert: it’s a positive feature about a progressive election success, with important takeaways for other campaigns. There aren’t many opportunities for that right now, to say the least.

There will also be plenty to discuss in the deep news sweep that will go out to paid subscribers tomorrow.

Note: This is going to be a long four years — and perhaps much longer, if Donald Trump and his newly empowered Republican Party accomplish their goals.

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Inside progressives’ biggest win of 2024

Even the most optimistic statistics teacher would probably be baffled by what happened on Election Day in Kentucky.

They were outspent by a who’s who of conservative billionaires, competed logistically against several powerful political machines, and had to contend with turnout goosed by Donald Trump, who won the state with 64.6% of the vote. Yet Protect Our Schools didn't just defeat the Kentucky GOP’s school privatization amendment, it did so by winning 65% of the vote, surpassing Trump’s own margin.

It was a stunning result, one that defied the national political climate generally and outpaced the positive returns for similar elections elsewhere — Nebraska and Colorado also rejected school privatization, but by smaller margins in more competitive environments. Voters in Kentucky chose to reject Amendment 2, which would have allowed public money to be used for private school tuition, by double digit margins in 119 out of the state’s 120 counties. It was equally unpopular in rural and urban counties, further defying national political trends.  

The success was the result of a deep understanding of individual communities and a campaign that often seemed more civic-minded than political. Kesley Coots, who managed the campaign, walked me through the key decisions, messages, and campaign tactics that led to such a blowout win for public schools. 

The launch as statement of values

The Vote No campaign launched with an event that had almost nothing to do with education. They rallied in the small town of Hazard, a rural coal-mining community nestled more than two hours southeast of Frankfort. Devastating floods ripped across the region in summer 2022, causing dozens of deaths and billions of dollars in damage. Some schools in Hazard suffered extensive damage, but others served as relief command centers and key hubs for community members caught up in the storm.

“We said that our public schools are the heartbeat of our communities, and when the floods happened, everybody showed up at these schools, and they served as the Red Cross, they housed you and they clothed you,” Coots said. “We talked about how when our communities have a need, our schools step up and meet that need. And we talked about the connections that we make on Friday nights at football games, leaning into that cultural piece of how our schools connect us.”

In focusing on culture as much as policy and statistics, the Protect Our Schools campaign turned public schools into essential parts of the community, critical infrastructure that couldn’t be replaced.

Step One: Define the Issue. Step Two: Repeat.

The Kentucky constitution specifies that taxpayer dollars can only be used to fund “common” schools, an antiquated term that has long been interpreted to mean public schools. After years of debate, the Republican legislature decided to test consensus in 2021, when it passed a complicated tax credit and school voucher program over the veto of Gov. Andy Beshear. 

The gambit was rejected by the state Supreme Court a year later, which prompted legislators to introduce a constitutional amendment that would have explicitly cleared public funds for private schools. All of this meant that Amendment 2 was the product of years of debate, contentious legislation, and lobbying for years before the actual ballot campaign began. 

Both sides knew how they wanted to frame the amendment, and for Protect Our Schools, it was a matter of overcoming conservative language on the ballot itself and shifting how it was being portrayed by the media. They resolved to never use the term “school choice” and instead referred to it as the “voucher amendment” in all of their comms. With enough repetition, it put Republican lawmakers on the defensive. 

“They tried to reframe it, saying ‘this isn't a voucher amendment, this just lets us have a conversation,’” Coots said. “But they’d already had the ‘conversation’ and passed a school voucher law, which is why we were there. People would go, ‘well, we're not stupid.’”

A quick scan of the news articles about the election indicates that the media still leaned on “school choice,” presumably because the amendment enabled voucher programs, but did not enact one. But the sheer size of the coalition that backed Protect Our Schools and the discipline they practiced in their messaging, helped to shape public opinion anyway. 

The coalition grew to over 140 endorsing organizations, with stakeholders from across the spectrum. There were regular comms and organizing meetings to keep all of them focused on the top line issue. Going deeper, Coots feared, would potentially turn off important allies. For example, a committed atheist might have a very different reason to oppose public money going to religious schools than a devout Christian, and they needed both to remain with the coalition.

“We were able to say ‘this the voucher amendment, vouchers take money from public schools, period.’ And largely we said we should invest in better ideas that work, and then named some of those things. And we really just stuck to that.”

Who speaks for you? Think local…

On the other hand, the pro-privatization side was less a cohesive coalition of organizations than a hodgepodge of dark money PACs funded by some of the most prominent conservative activists and Republican politicians in the country. 

Sen. Rand Paul handled many of the TV and digital ads through his Protect Freedom PAC, making sure that he and his wife were front and center. A group called Kentucky Students First handled much of the direct mail campaign, which became increasingly partisan and filled with lies. Betsy DeVos’s group, Empower Kentucky Parents, focused on digital ads that were extremely partisan and tried to tie the amendment to the presidential election. Americans for Prosperity, the Koch mothership, was in charge of paid canvassing. 

“It wasn’t a true coalition, which is why they could never nail their message,” Coots said. “I think if they would have led with a status quo message and put some normal parents on camera, it would have been a lot closer. In Kentucky, we don't trust politicians, and they never could give an answer for really what they were going to do.”

Protect Our Schools was very deliberate about centering normal people instead of politicians. Coots, a veteran Democratic campaign manager, oversaw the operation but stayed as out of the spotlight as possible. 

“We prioritized local messengers everywhere,” she said. If we got asked for a comment, [we’d send] local messengers: teachers, parents, students, community members. Whereas on the other side, the only messengers they ever had were politicians and policy people coming into communities that were not theirs to tell them what they needed.”

The coalition allowed Protect Our Schools to burrow into local communities far away from Lexington, Frankfort, and Louisville, where the distrust of politicians is especially high. The Kentucky Center for Economics, a nonpartisan but left-leaning think tank, produced reports detailing how school vouchers would impact all 120 counties. That customized information made people pay attention, even more so when it came from a trusted messenger.

“We would have the school superintendents do a press event, and they would educate on the impacts,” Coots explained. “They couldn't tell you how to vote, but they could tell you everything that made people go, ‘Oh, wow, this sucks.’” 

Conservatives offered up their own data, largely delivered by the head of a libertarian think tank called the Bluegrass Institute — not exactly a trusted local name.

Respect the voters

There were pleasant surprises, like the time a steelworker from a rural district stood up in a meeting and recited statistics from the impact reports. Those reports were downloaded over 100,000 times, Coots said, indicating that they were frequently shared among neighbors and community members. 

The reports also served as a sign of respect for voters, trusting them with the data that they needed to make an informed decision. On the other hand, conservatives tried to convince rural voters, who rarely have private school alternatives in the first place, that school choice would benefit them. 

They also made verifiably false claims like the amendment would increase school funding and teacher pay, two things that Kentucky conservatives have not been known to embrace. Paradoxically, another part of the conservative game plan was appealing to urban voters who were upset with their underachieving schools.

“We found that in our focus groups and our polling, in every region, people believed teachers were not paid enough and we were underfunding our schools,” Coots said. “We had a clear message: if we have all this money, we shouldn’t be investing in vouchers or some plan that nobody knows about. We said that we should invest in better ideas that work, and then named some of those things.”

There is no guarantee that those alternatives will come to fruition, given the huge majorities that Republicans hold in both houses of the Kentucky legislature. But the defeat was so thorough that GOP lawmakers conceded that there was no path to private school vouchers in the state for a long time to come, and conservatives who are looking for an advantage in a primary would be smart to take on the cause of public schools. And if nothing else, this is a roadmap to people power, no matter where the election is happening.

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