I wanted to understand the popular uprising against Betsy DeVos so I called the person I am fast recognizing is the expert in these things in my family: my sister Melissa.
Melissa lives in Horsham, Pennsylvania with my four nieces and my brother-in-law. Horsham voted for Hillary Clinton very narrowly - 7,258 votes to 6,151 - which is to say that her neighbors were just as likely to have a Trump sign in their yard as they were to be voting for Hillary.
Melissa wasn’t indifferent to politics before this past fall – she voted in past years and has generally leaned Democratic. But I wouldn’t describe her as a partisan, in fact she made quite an eloquent case to me in September for why she was supporting her GOP state house representative because of his attentiveness to a local water issue.
As the mother of four kids, her time is limited and if I had urged her to get more involved in politics before November 9, 2016, she would have rightly given me a dry look that said volumes about running around after toddlers and coordinating after school activities while holding down a day job.
Since the election of Donald Trump, though, Melissa has become a genuine, dyed-in-the-wool political activist. While I nursed my broken political heart post-election, she joined Facebook groups and organized women to attend the March last month and called me up with her daily “action items” – phone calls she makes virtually every day to Senators and Members of Congress about issues coming out of the Trump administration, complete with talking points taken from the many online activist groups she’s a part of.
A lot of official Washington seems taken by surprise by the ferocious grassroots opposition to Trump’s nomination of Betsy DeVos for Education Secretary. No one expected the confirmation process for Trump’s spectacularly unpopular cabinet to be easy or without vocal opposition, but the fact that it was DeVos who literally shut down congressional phone lines and had some angry constituents resorting to pizza deliveries to get their message to Senators seems to have genuinely stunned many political thought leaders.
I had a theory about why DeVos was the nominee that broke through the bubble, but I needed it confirmed by my non-bubble living sister. So I put the question to her plainly over the phone: what was it about Betsy DeVos?
“Well it was parents, particularly Moms, and really more than anyone parents of children with disabilities,” Melissa said straight off. “People were even posting about it on my kids’ school’s Facebook page and that isn’t even a place where we discuss politics. I mean look… you don’t mess with people’s kids.”
Melissa went on to talk about the ongoing discussion happening on mom blogs and Facebook groups and how they had been whipping opposition to DeVos for well over a month.
I posed the same question to other friends with kids who normally exist outside the political discussion. Their answers were all the same as my sister’s.
There was a particular emphasis by everyone on the outspokenness of parents they know who have children with disabilities and who were horrified by DeVos’ demonstrated lack of knowledge in her committee hearing of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) and her suggestion that states should be able to decide whether to enforce IDEA.
Parents of children with special needs go to great lengths to make sure that school districts look after their children - often involving time, money and lengthy court battles. As one friend put it, these parents are fierce because they have to be and so the fight against DeVos came naturally to them.
Some have suggested that the focus on DeVos on the part of Democrats was misguided strategy – that there were other nominees that are more dangerous or better targets for Democrats looking to send a message.
All of that, however, overlooks the fact that the opposition to the DeVos nomination is a real example of a grassroots uprising – frankly Democrats could not have manufactured that level of activism even if we had poured time and money into trying.
It’s also a dangerous and misguided idea that, after the election we just had, politicians, operatives and the media should try and dictate to the electorate what and who to care about – rather than engage in an active attempt to listen and then use our megaphones to channel opposition effectively.
The Senate Democrats, particularly Patty Murray who seems to intuitively understand the pulse of this moment, are listening – posting videos of themselves answering constituent calls and then holding the Senate floor for a full 24 hours in hopes of luring just one more Republican into voting against DeVos.
Good policy and good politics can be one and the same if we know where to look. One of the most fundamental lessons the political class can learn in the age of Trump is that answers are not necessarily going to come from traditional sources. The most effective political opposition is going to grow up in places like the mom blogs my sister frequents and on the message boards of local schools and the conversations happening in our communities that now spread with the power and speed of social media.
The organic political uprising is always going to be more powerful than the manufactured one. In this case, it was parents who saw the DeVos fight as a struggle for their children who crafted an incredibly powerful message: Trump’s Secretary of Education is a direct threat to a quality public education for kids of all stripes and sizes. It’s a message that cuts across socio-economic class and the traditional blue and red divide.
I don’t need a poll or a pundit to tell me that message resonates long after any particular vote.