Candidates take stance on immigration, unions, LGBTQIA+ and education as GOP bids heat up. 

As we inch closer to election season, every politician with their eyes on the presidency starts identifying the issues they will build their platforms on. The Republican primary candidates have had two debates so far, and education has come up both times. A 2020 Gallup Poll reported that 79 percent of Republican voters think a candidate’s stance on education is very or extremely important for them when it comes to placing their vote — and education has only continued to grow more visible in the public eye since that poll.

Students like us here at South are in the demographic most affected by these candidates’ policies on K-12 education, should any of them get their hands on power in a little over a year. We ought to know what significant primary candidates are saying they will do – and it’s clear from these three that the Republican field is anti-union, anti-trans, and against real education about equity.

Chris Christie

Chris Christie is a former two-term governor of New Jersey. This is his second time running for president, after a six-month failed campaign in the 2016 race. He is the most visibly anti-Trump person in the Republican primary field and has been booed off his own stages multiple times for his anti-Trump statements.

Because of his hostility toward Trump, Christie gets frequent praise from the center-left. Many establishment Democrats hold a credit-where-credit-is-due sentiment toward him, but they can absolve themselves of that burden – Christie is owed no credit. His claim to fame with the American right is the crusade he led against unionized teachers while he held office in New Jersey. 

In the second Republican primary debate on Sept. 27, Christie said, “A president of the United States has to take on the teachers’ union. I did it in New Jersey, and I will do it as president of the United States.”

Ron DeSantis

Ron DeSantis is the governor of Florida, currently serving his second term in the role. DeSantis criminalized most discussion and mention of gender and sexuality in K-12 classrooms; restricted the teaching of Black and queer history; allowed districts to arm teachers; and allowed right-wing think tank PragerU’s propaganda videos to be shown in Florida schools, and more. Classrooms have proven to be a lucrative platform for him, and as he sets his sights on the presidency, he’s only going to go harder with what his conservative base knows and loves him for.

Christie’s concern for students focuses particularly on students “failing” – getting imprisoned or not pursuing higher education – after high school. DeSantis has a different angle, a won’t-somebody-think-of-the-children take on classroom politics that is becoming the right’s new favorite dance. Claiming to fight for kids is a good look to voters, after all. Under all the pearl-clutching is the far more insidious project of erasing any conversation about gender or sexuality that isn’t cishet-normative and censoring America’s colonial history to the point of throughgoing, whitewashed fiction.

Early on in his 2024 campaign, DeSantis made the following statement to Fox News: “In Florida, we say we’re the state where woke goes to die. As president, I’m going to make sure woke ideology ends up in the dustbin of history.”

Nikki Haley

Nikki Haley is the former governor of South Carolina, and the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In her presidential campaign so far, she has partnered with the political organization Moms for Liberty, which has made a name for itself advocating against school curriculum that includes mentions of race and ethnicity, non-cishet genders and sexualities, and the existence of discrimination. Moms for Liberty has been laser-focused on attacking trans kids in more recent years.

Haley herself has previously identified trans people participating in athletics as “the womens’ issue of our time.”

On education, Haley primarily focuses on transparency with parents – she frequently says that schools should only teach “the basics, and nothing more than that,” echoing DeSantis’ support of the elimination of queer theory and anything mentioning race from classrooms.

“We don’t want to give custody of our kids to teachers unions,” she said during an appearance on “Fox News” in September. 

During that same “Fox News” segment, Haley was asked about her alliance with Moms for Liberty. 

“This is a group that many have said are extreme,” she said. “If this is extreme, count me in, because this is about parents getting control of their children again.”

It’s worth noting that, while these candidates sum up the main angles from which the Republican presidential primary is tackling education, they are not mutually exclusive positions. They take up different focuses to get visibility, but all generally agree.

During the first Republican primary debate, DeSantis, Gov. Doug Burgum (ND), Vivek Ramaswamy, and former Vice President Mike Pence collectively declared that, if elected, they would abolish the federal Department of Education. Ramaswamy and Sen. Tim Scott (SC) joined Christie in threatening teachers’ unions, Sen. Scott saying, “the only way to change education in this nation is to break the backs of teachers’ unions.”

In the end, Trump is still the reigning frontrunner by more than 50 points in some polls, and it isn’t looking likely yet that any of the other candidates have a chance at nomination. But for those of them who are cozying up to Trump, they have a chance at getting positions in his cabinet should he win, and one of those positions is Secretary of Education.

Article by Nellie Schmitke-Rosiek