In the midst of the ‘he said, he said’ back and forth on education policy between Gov. Nathan Deal and Democratic gubernatorial candidate Jason Carter, the relevant question seems still unasked: Who is benefitting from all the shouting?
The answer is Deal. The incumbent governor is like the heavyweight champion boxer: To beat him, it’s not enough to stand toe-to-toe and trade body shots. To win, you’ve got to knock him out cold. And as shown by Thursday’s poll from InsiderAdvantage/Fox5/Morris News, Carter’s drawing of battle lines on education policy has barely made Deal even flinch. In fact Carter seems to have slipped in the public’s estimation since the release of his TV and Internet ad campaign that fashions himself as an education reformer. Deal leads Carter 47 percent to 40 percent in our poll, after the two were virtually tied in some previous polls.
The reason for this lack of traction on education politics is twofold. First, Carter’s essential claim has boomeranged on him. He accuses Deal of playing election-year politics by only this past year having bolstered education funding; that, following several years of underfunding K-12 schools. But Carter has played an arguably similar game himself. As a state senator, he voted for those budgets that he now criticizes as having been inadequate. And he voted against this year’s state budget, even though it finally included a significant boost in education spending. He would seem as much a political opportunist as the governor.
What’s key isn’t whether Deal or Carter makes the valid point. What’s critical can be articulated by extending our boxers’ analogy. Over the past week, Deal and Cater have been clinched together in a sweaty embrace, shoving more than punching. And that’s to Deal’s advantage, as our poll indicates.
The second reason the education squabble is hurting Carter is more fundamental. We at InsiderAdvantage have been preaching it since our doors opened nearly a decade-and-a-half ago: Education issues rarely win statewide or national elections.
We hear the howls of protest. We’re aware that in public surveys of the importance of various major issues that at least a plurality of voters will say that education is No. 1. But for whatever reasons, that sentiment seldom motivates voters to choose one candidate over the other. (It likely has something to do with the fact that public education is largely a local endeavor. Yes, more than half of the state’s budget is targeted for schools, but local taxpayers still do the heaviest lifting, and local school boards and administrators make most of the key decisions in their local schools, and local teachers and parents have the crucial contact with the students themselves. Put another way, appropriation of money is a pre-requisite to student achievement, not an end in itself.)
Take Common Core, the voluntary national education standards causing such a political ruckus in many states. Last winter InsiderAdvantage polled Common Core and found that only about 15 percent of voters even know what it is (or at least think they know.) While mostly right-wing ideologues condemn Common Core, and mostly teachers and other educators defend it, the whole debate mostly floats right past most Georgians. They’re more in tuned to pocketbook issues – their own pocketbooks.)
The only benefit the Jason Carter campaign is likely getting from opening this battlefront on education spending is that it keeps the gubernatorial campaign – at least for a brief spell – from becoming largely a referendum on President Obama and the national Democrats; that eventuality would be a death knell for Carter and other Georgia Democrats this fall.
So far, on education and health care (Medicaid), Carter is coming across as a typical liberal who proposes solving any and all public policy problems by the predictable expedient of spending more taxpayer money. By itself, this campaign strategy is almost certain to fail.
If the Democrats want to see Deal on the defensive and struggling to effectively counterattack, they would do well to attack the governor for his alleged mishandling of the aftermath of last winter’s snow-and-ice storm. They could depict him as propping up the alleged incompetent head of state emergency management services, as a way to open up a broader theme of supposed cronyism in the Deal administration.
Maybe that’s still to come. And maybe it won’t be too late.
