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VP contender Josh Shapiro has been a staunch supporter of school vouchers. Voters want good public schools—and a vice president willing to fight for them.

By Akil Vicks, In These Times

Vice President Kamala Harris will likely announce her running mate in the next few days as she prepares to accept the Democratic Party’s nomination for president and face off against Donald Trump. While the polling has tightened significantly since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, Trump still maintains a narrow lead. It’s no surprise that Harris’s suspected shortlist of vice presidential contenders is composed of popular swing state governors and senators who recently won elections against Trump-backed opponents.

Most of the rumored names on Harris’s list are fairly unsurprising, but there’s been some pushback to one particular candidate. While Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s condemnation of pro-Palestinian protests is disqualifying for many on the Left, Harris has signaled that she doesn’t plan to substantially depart from Biden on that issue, apart from a more sympathetic shift in rhetoric and optics. But Shapiro’s stance on taxpayer-funded school vouchers for private schools has prompted many more across the Democratic coalition to call for him to be removed from consideration.

josh shapiro at an outdoor event

Abortion, extremism and threats to democracy dominate the conversation over key issues in the upcoming election, but public education may be the most overlooked vulnerability for Republicans heading into November. For decades, many Democrats cosigned the GOP’s crusade against public education by pushing charter schools and thus agreeing with the premise that privatization could fix the U.S. education system. Recent years have seen Democrats shift greatly on the issue in response to Republicans’ all-out assault on public schools. But most parents across the partisan divide want to fund their kids’ public schools, and aren’t interested in sacrificing their child’s education to culture war politics. The Harris campaign would do well to remember this lesson when choosing her running mate.

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