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Local Elections, National Tides: The Role of Partisanship in School Board Elections
by Cameron Arnzen, Brown University, Rebecca Jacobsen, Michigan State University
National and state elections dominate media, voter, and research attention.
However, political actors and wealthy donors increasingly turn their gaze toward local elections to supplement their national efforts. This has been true for public education where once nearly invisible elections are attracting widespread attention. Despite this growing interest, it remains unclear how local school board elections are being shaped by tides of nationalization and polarization.
Today, just 9 states allow/require school board candidates’ partisan affiliation to be printed on the ballot, but 14 considered this change in 2023.As of 2022, there were 90,837 substate governments, 15% (13,318) of which are school boards, according to the U.S. Census. Our ongoing research provides insights to these numerous, yet understudied, elections. Here we focus on how candidate party affiliation does or doesn’t shape voter decision making in an era of nationalization and partisan polarization. Most SB elections have been nonpartisan for over a century and their status as single purpose governments buffered local education from the tides of national partisan battles. That buffer is eroding. The boundaries between national, state, and local education politics are becoming increasingly porous and now local education is also experiencing partisan polarization.
Today, just 9 states allow/require school board candidates’ partisan affiliation to be printed on the ballot, but 14 considered this change in 2023. As education debates become drawn into national political battles, school board elections serve as a vital window into the intersection of local governance and national political forces. Knowing a candidate’s party affiliation can serve as a heuristic for voters—especially in low-information elections. Alternatively, growing partisanship in education may lead to red education for some, blue education for others, and divided communities where opinions are mixed.
To explore how different institutional arrangements shape voter decision making, we worked with students at Brown University and Michigan State University to conduct an exit poll of school board elections. We staffed student workers in sampled school districts in Michigan (on-cycle, nonpartisan) and Rhode Island (on-cycle, partisan). Voters at selected precincts in each school district—all of which had contested school board elections—were asked to complete a survey about their K-12 policy priorities, political identities, vote selections, and what shaped their vote choice.
Our polling results remind us of the diverse and localized priorities of voters in school board elections.
Respondents ranked education issues ranging from “back to basics” curricula to policies on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), with notable partisan variation. In both states, most respondents expressed supporting students’ health, well-being, safety, and academic performance. These findings underscore a long-standing dimension of local education: it appears to be a policy arena with more agreement than disagreement. This remains despite the heated rhetoric of national leaders who would lead us to believe otherwise.
Across both states, issues related to diversity and equity surfaced repeatedly. This is a good example of a nationalized issue where national leaders (e.g. Christoper Rufo) used social media to spread a narrative rapidly through local networks (e.g. Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education, etc.) such that local debates took on the same content and tone as national debates. This influence was visible in our survey results. Some respondents prioritized initiatives to expand DEI policies, others expressed opposition, reflecting a national, partisan divide on this issue. The tension between local concerns and national influence is emblematic of today’s education dynamics. For political scientists, this dynamic opens lines of inquiry about when and how local politics become swept into national debates.
Respondents ranked education issues ranging from “back to basics” curricula to policies on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), with notable partisan variation. In both states, most respondents expressed supporting students’ health, well-being, safety, and academic performanceOur data also point to important insights about the ongoing nationalization of down ballot elections. In Rhode Island, where school board candidates run with a party affiliation, 83% of respondents voted for the school board candidates that aligned with their presidential selection. In Michigan, school board elections are officially nonpartisan. Nonetheless, voters often relied on implicit signals—such as endorsements from unions, county political parties, or advocacy groups—to infer candidates’ political leanings. Not surprising, awareness of partisan affiliations was higher in Rhode Island where party labels appear next to school board candidate names (62%), but even in nonpartisan Michigan elections, 36% of respondents expressed awareness of candidate party affiliation. While historical data are sparse, future tracking can help us understand the extent to which partisanship is seeping into nonpartisan local elections and whether there are antecedents to the infusion of partisanship.
Despite their reported awareness of candidate party identification, at least in Rhode Island where we can observe alignment in vote choice, our data suggest deep ambivalence about the role partisanship ought to play. Few respondents in both states (35% MI, 30% RI) expressed that endorsements from political parties were important for their selection for school board. Further, a majority in both states expressed a desire for school board elections to be nonpartisan (57% MI, 65% RI). However simply keeping or making these elections nonpartisan doesn’t necessarily address the information void of local elections, nor may it keep partisanship out.
Our findings from Michigan and Rhode Island provide a glimpse into the dynamics of local elections when they become animated by national, partisan issues, an area of research in need of further development. Substantial data issues plague the study of local politics, but now is the time for the field to invest in collaborative efforts so we can think critically about the role of local elections in fostering—or fracturing—informed democratic engagement.
Cameron Arnzen (Ph.D., Teachers College, Columbia University) is a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University, affiliated with the Annenberg Institute and the Watson School of International and Public Affairs. Arnzen’s work explores the politics of education, focusing on the relationship between education and democracy. His work explores themes of governance shifts in education, the educational roots of political engagement, and the politicization of democratic education.
Rebecca Jacobsen (Ph.D., Teachers College, Columbia University) is a professor of education politics and policy in the College of Education at Michigan State University. Jacobsen’s work focuses on ways to strengthen public commitment to public education. She has written extensively about local school politics, school board elections, and whether and how schools prepare the next generation of citizens. Her book, Outside Money in Local School Board Elections: The Nationalization of Local Education Politics, (co-authored with Jeff Henig and Sarah Reckhow) won the Denis Judd Best Book Award for 2020 from the American Political Science Association, Urban and Local Politics Section.