The high-stakes, low-profile battles that will define 2024

Part one of our jam-packed preview of a chaotic year to come

Welcome to a Thursday edition of Progress Report.

I hope you’re enjoying a relaxing holiday week, whether you’re off work or doing as little as humanly possible while clocking hours on the timecard.

Since we’ve already reflected on some of the biggest progressive wins of 2023 (Part 1, Part 2), I figured we could get a head start on some of the big stories we’ll be watching and covering in 2024. The constitutional drama around Donald Trump’s right to run president — he just got kicked off the ballot in Maine and retained in California — will continue to dominate headlines for the next six months, but that’s a bit too obvious to include on our list. We’re digging deep for the stories that go ignored by the national media but couldn’t be more critical.

The list contains a mix of local, state, and federal elections, Supreme Court tumult, policy fights, cultural battles, and more. This is the first part of our 2024 preview, packed with storylines from each of those categories.

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Battle of the Books

Will Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s primary power play finally deliver vouchers?

Abbott tried for 18 months coax the GOP-dominated legislature to pass a universal school voucher plan, barnstorming the state and calling multiple special sessions in hopes of exhausting lawmakers into submission. But the opposition, a coalition of House Democrats and 21 rural Republicans, proved indefatigable.

Instead of scaling down the proposed program in order to satisfy the holdouts, Abbott is now channeling his humiliation into backing primary challenges against GOP legislators who killed his voucher plan. He has thus far endorsed the primary opponents of six anti-voucher Republicans, with potentially more to come.

Will Oklahoma’s Catholic public charter school break public education?

In October, Oklahoma’s Statewide Virtual Charter School Board (😔) voted to approve a contract with St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, making it the first religious public school in the nation. Soon after, the state attorney general, a Republican, filed a lawsuit to block the school from opening, citing its clear unconstitutionality; school vouchers are deployed by parents, creating a thin veneer of separation between government and private schools; this would be a religious school directly funded by government.

The board is being represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, the hate group that has been using the extremist US Supreme Court to turn “religious freedom” into a permission slip for bigotry. Now, they want government to sponsor discrimination; St. Isidore plans to reject LGBTQ+ families. Litigation is ongoing. Oklahoma’s overall education system was ranked 49th in the country and 45th in funding in 2023.

Will Arkansans rein in voucher schools and bolster public schools?

Arkansas in March passed a huge education overhaul that created a universal school voucher program. As in many states, the deluge of public money from the program comes with zero strings attached, not even academic standards.

The vouchers have thus far been used by 5,000 students, and a vast majority of them were never in public schools. Unhappy with being scammed, parents and education activists are trying to use the ballot initiative process to place accountability standards on voucher schools and make sure public schools are guaranteed enough funding.

The Educational Rights Amendment of 2024 is now with Arkansas’s secretary of state, who has until Jan. 9th to approve its wording or send it back for reworking. The initiative could set the parameters of policy going forward.

High-Stakes Elections

Instead of being submerged by the anticipated red wave in 2022, down-ballot Democrats shocked the political world by flipping a number of swing state legislatures blue and coming tantalizingly close to some others. In 2024, they’ll look to protect and expand their majorities in several close states and finish the job in others, which would help secure abortion rights, minimum wage increases, education funding, and more.

Below is a guide to the dynamics in some of those states, the crucial upcoming individual races, and the legal dynamics that could have seismic impacts on the election. There will be even more in the second part of our 2024 preview, for paid subscribers only.