This is the Cater Daily Podcast for Monday, October 31st, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When you look at polling data for traditional democratic constituencies and those groups support

for school choice, it's at least a little puzzling

that Democrats as political entities have not jumped on the school choice bandwagon.

Rebecca Bidlack of the American Federation for Children says perhaps that's changing.

We spoke last month.

For a long time school choice educational freedom has been an issue that has been owned by Republicans as a partisan matter and it's weird because and I've never

really understood exactly why that is because traditional constituencies of Democrats, particularly minorities,

are more supportive of school choice than white people. And those are traditional democratic constituencies and I just have never understood why that has been the case.

Yeah, it's really interesting if you look at the last polling released earlier this year.

Almost 70% of Democrats indicated that they support school choice.

Obviously a great number of Republican voters do as well.

I think it's 75 plus. But we have the Democratic Party sticking stronger with the unions than

with their own constituencies and that's become more and more

intenable over the last couple years. So what have been the challenges to that? Because I know there are

like some prominent voices who are minorities who are Democrats and are actively

engaged on trying to get this idea move forward.

Absolutely and throughout the years there has been bipartisan support from you know

the advocacy community and I think especially in the last let's say Obama administration era there was

broader and growing bipartisan support and then the Democrats kind of seemed to go in the

other direction you know some of the people even like Senator Lieberman

...