Have Democrats lost their education edge?

Also: Why haven't Black Trump supporters changed their minds?

Fewer black voters moved to Trump in 2024 than Hispanic or Asian voters. But the ones who did are mostly sticking with him. (Photo by Albin Lohr-Jones/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)

For the longest time, it was the Democrats who held a commanding edge on education. Even in the reddest of areas, with no Democratic Party, bench, or liberal culture to speak of, Democrats would pull scores of conservative voters for elections concerning public schools.

If The Argument’s newest survey is any indication, that advantage may have been wiped out. We asked registered voters a series of questions about parenting and schools and discovered that Republicans now hold a slight advantage on education.

When it comes to parenting and parents’ rights, this gap is even wider — Republicans hold a 37% to 32% issue advantage.

Tellingly, much of the Democratic deficit is being driven by the party’s own voters. Just 65% of Harris voters — and just 49% of Black voters — actually believe that the Democratic Party aligns with them on matters of parenting.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the cause for this disconnect, but our survey does offer some clues that point to Democrats’ stance on social issues. For instance, although 78% of liberal Harris voters believe that the party aligns with them on parenting, just 49% of moderate or conservative Democratic voters agree.¹ (The main silver lining for Democrats here is that their voters are refusing to align with Republicans, even when they disagree with the party’s stances.)

We included some issue questions that better illustrate what’s driving this. For example, 36% of Harris voters and majorities of Black and Hispanic voters oppose “allowing students to use the restrooms for the gender they identify with, even when that differs from the gender they were assigned at birth.”

Moreover, 45% of Harris voters — and 53% of moderate or conservative Harris voters — believe parents should be able to opt their kids out of classroom lessons they disagree with (like those regarding race, sex education, and gender). Importantly, these are all policies where Democrats are on the opposite side of public opinion.

This analysis is descriptive, not prescriptive. In any case, Democrats lead the generic ballot on the same exact survey, despite all of this, so it’s clear that the party can win regardless. But it’s also clear that the Democrats have lost the advantage on an issue they used to decisively win on, and the question is whether the party’s base believes it to be worth the cost.

(As a liberal myself, I don’t find the findings from this poll particularly comforting. My personal belief is that children should be allowed to use the restroom of the gender they identify with, and I think that opting your kid out of lessons on sex ed and racism seems like a bad idea. But it seems like I’m in the minority.)

You can see all of our crosstabs on views on parental punishment, when it’s appropriate to call Child Protective Services, and on standardized education below the paywall. We’ll also be publishing more articles on our poll findings in the coming weeks, so make sure to subscribe. But now, for some subgroup analysis.

Why are Democrats lagging with Black voters?

By this point, it is well established that Democrats are doing much better with nonwhite voters in this cycle, relative to 2024. But “nonwhite” is a big category, and averages can sometimes obscure a lot of interesting variation going on under the surface.

In The Argument’s new poll, fielded Dec. 5 to 11, Democrats led the generic ballot by two percentage points among registered voters — a lead that shrinks to one percentage point when undecided voters are pushed,² but grows to five percentage points when looking solely at respondents self-identifying as likely to vote.³

Here’s something interesting in that survey: although Democrats gain a tiny bit of ground with white voters and a lot of ground with Hispanic voters, they don’t gain at all with Black voters. In fact, in the December survey, the party actually loses ground on Kamala Harris’ 2024 margins with this group.

If you’re skeptical, I don’t blame you. This is, after all, a sample of 178 Black voters. While that’s not nothing, it’s also simply not enough data to make sweeping pronouncements about the party’s potential problems. But this isn’t the first time we’ve seen Black voters behave differently from other nonwhite voters in our tracking.

Let’s zoom out and look at the whole picture, aggregated across the five surveys we’ve conducted since August. With a significantly larger sample to analyze (n=7,662), it’s clear that Democrats are gaining the most ground with Asian (n=313) and Hispanic (n=873) voters. Meanwhile, with Black voters (n=908), things are less rosy.

In other words, the shift in voting patterns among Black voters appears very different from the shift seen among Hispanic and Asian voters. Democrats don’t outperform Kamala Harris’ margins at all with Black voters.

Of course, no election ever has 100% turnout. What matters more is how you do among the people who actually show up. And we know that Black voters who didn’t vote in 2024 were far less Democratic than those who did.

I zeroed in on voters who self-identified as likely to vote in 2026 and compared how Democrats were doing with those voters relative to their 2024 margins with each demographic. Here, it becomes clear that the enthusiasm edge Democrats have within the Black voter pool helps. But Black likely voters still lag Hispanic and Asian likely voters (as well as the overall likely voter pool) in their swing toward Democrats.

Why? One major reason is that in 2024, Democrats lost more ground with Hispanic and Asian voters than they did with Black voters. The theme of the 2026 blue wave has been the “reconstruction” of the Democratic coalition, and there is simply a larger pool of ex-Democratic Hispanic and Asian voters to regain.

But that’s not the whole story. While Democrats have gained back much of the ground they lost from 2020 in our polling with Hispanic and Asian voters, they’re far short of that with Black voters.

Unlike Hispanic and Asian Trump 2024 voters, Black Trump supporters just haven’t turned on Trump. Consider this: In our sample, among Black voters, Trump’s two-way approval is virtually identical to his 2024 two-way vote share, and to the Republican 2026 congressional vote share.

With Hispanic and Asian voters, the picture is very different.

In other words, Democrats are going to need to figure out how to peel back the Black voters who have drifted to Trump, because he hasn’t really slipped much with them at all.

This may be harder than it looks. Black voters are substantially more conservative than their Democratic lean indicates. (Just 32% identify as “liberal” or “very liberal”, despite Democrats winning more than 80% of the group.)

And they’re also the only conservative group of voters who Democrats win.

Methodology notes

Our poll was fielded between Nov. 10 and 17, 2025, and surveyed 1,508 registered voters across the nation. The sample was weighted to be representative of the universe of registered voters in the United States by race; age; gender; education; census region; race by gender; age by gender; race by education; modeled presidential partisanship by education, by age, and by gender; and 2024 vote choice. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. The design effect of the survey, which measures the loss of statistical precision due to weighting and design, was 1.12. Accounting for the design effect, the full margin of error was plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.

This survey was designed and weighted by The Argument. Data collection was performed by Verasight, and voter file data and weighting targets were obtained from Catalist. A full methodology statement is available on the last page of the survey PDF. A detailed explanation on how our surveys work is available here.

Thanks to Josh Kalla, Guy Molyneaux, and Carroll Doherty for reviewing this month’s polling language. As part of The Argument’s polling advisory committee, these experts have provided comments to ensure the rigor and objectivity of this polling project. They are not responsible for the ultimate language choices made by The Argument, and all errors are our own.