This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 3rd, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

A big upset in Virginia's governor's race as Republican

Glenn Youngkin defeats Terry McAuliffe. As prominent as fights over education were in that race, the Republican doesn't seem to

have actually embraced robust school choice.

Cato's Neil McCluskey describes his takeaways for politics at the

state and federal levels in the next round of elections.

Neil, as far as I can tell, this election in the final month or so really turned on education.

And a lot of people are going to try to prognosticate about what that means nationally.

What does it mean for Virginia most importantly?

Well, it is certainly true that education became the headline issue in the last several

weeks or a month of the Virginia gubernatorial election. It is clear that there were a lot of

parents who were unhappy. What really needs to be drilled down on is what were

they unhappy about?

I think that in Virginia, but it's really,

almost certainly the case across the country.

What really got parents angry and it just built over the last 19 months or so was they were first

angry about public schools that would not reopen to in-person education.

And in particular, I think it wasn't just that they wouldn't reopen,

but that parents felt like nobody was actually listening to them. They might go to school board

meetings and some school board members may sit there and hear what those parents

are saying but felt no need to act on it.

...