When it comes to handling education issues, voters have consistently placed more confidence in Democrats than Republicans, according to surveys conducted by The Winston Group since 1999. Our latest survey on education issue handling, administered to 1,000 registered voters earlier this month, shows this trend continues. Democrats have a 14-point advantage on education issues: 50 percent of respondents have more confidence in the party on education, compared to just 36 percent who prefer the Republican Party.

In the last 26 years, Republicans have tied or bested Democrats on education issue handling only three times: February 2001 (+5 Republican); January 2002, shortly after No Child Left Behind was signed into law (even); and April 2022, in the wake of widespread Covid-induced school closures (even). Over the last three years, a clear gap favoring Democrats has reemerged.

But recently, other outlets have found that Republicans now have a slight edge on this traditional Democratic stronghold. In a summer 2022 poll of likely voters in congressional battleground districts, Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) found that Republicans (47 percent) came out ahead of Democrats (44 percent) when voters were asked who they trusted more to handle issues related to schools and education. DFER found a similar result the following year in a poll of registered voters in four battleground states: Republicans (36 percent) came out three points ahead of Democrats (33 percent).

More recently, David Shor and the Democratic consulting firm Blue Rose Research have also found Republicans to have a slight advantage in trust on education. As Shor noted in an appearance on the Ezra Klein Show earlier this year:

Another really big shift was that education has gone from being basically one of the best issues for Democrats to being something that’s basically neutral now. We saw that in the Virginia gubernatorial election in 2021. We even saw it be an advantage for Republicans.

So, what’s going on here? Which party really has the advantage on education? When evaluating results like these that seem to contradict each other, there are a few things to keep in mind.

First, the way a survey question is worded can and does have a bearing on the results. At The Winston Group, we ask voters which party they have more confidence in to handle education. But both DFER surveys asked voters who they trust to handle the issue, and their 2023 survey primed voters to focus specifically on matters of academic preparation: “Which party do you trust more to handle issues related to schools and education?” (2022) and “Regardless of how you usually vote, which political party, the Democrats or the Republicans, do you trust to do a better job making sure public schools are preparing students for success after high school by ensuring they are teaching students to read and do math well?” (2023). Blue Rose Research, which has also found a small Republican advantage on education in surveys of registered voters through February 2025, also appears to ask the question in terms of trust.

Voter trust versus voter confidence may seem like a subtle distinction, but when factored with other methodological differences (which we’ll discuss next), it may account in part for the discrepancy.

Second, the ways surveys define their target populations and draw their samples also influence their results. For example, we survey registered voters from across the entire country. The 2022 DFER survey instead looked at “likely voters” (a designation with many different definitions) in 62 congressional battleground districts—or just 14 percent of all congressional districts. The 2023 DFER survey polled registered voters in four states: Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, and Nevada. Based on turnout in the 2024 general election, that survey represented about 10 percent of the electorate, all in states that Trump won. These are clearly different sample populations.

Finally, a closer look at the results of these surveys may reveal that they’re not so different after all. While the margins in our Winston Group surveys still favor Democrats, they have shrunk in recent years. The 14-point advantage Democrats hold in our most recent survey is much smaller than the margins in the 30s they enjoyed in 2008–09. Just before the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election, Democrats had just a three-point advantage.

In that race, Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe’s debate remark that “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach” would prove to be a turning point and a distillation of the frustration that many parents (and others) felt about Democrats’ attitudes toward parental involvement in their children’s education. In the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial exit polls, half of all voters (52 percent) said parents should have “a lot” of say in what their child’s school teaches, a view shared by most Republicans and, perhaps more importantly, independents. Voters who expressed this view broke overwhelmingly for Glenn Youngkin (+55). The Republican candidate succeeded because he was able to connect with voters beyond the Republican base, winning groups like independents (+9), voters with children under 18 (+4), and suburban voters (+7)—all groups that had preferred Biden in 2020. While it is impossible to disentangle education from other issues that may have motivated these constituencies, Youngkin clearly presented a compelling alternative to the status quo that reached beyond his own party.

Returning to present attitudes on political parties and education, the confusion about whether Democrats or Republicans have the advantage on education reflects that voters are not happy with the state of education in this country but haven’t seen either party make the issue a priority. Arguably, improving student outcomes should be the first priority regardless of which party champions it. In fact, both sides should. Among Democrats, Rahm Emanuel has decried “the discussion of locker rooms” and “the discussion of bathrooms,” saying “we better start having a conversation about the classroom.”

His criticism cuts both ways. We should want both parties to compete to come up with a more compelling vision for improving student outcomes, creating a focused direction for where education should go and how it should get there. A competition of ideas should make both sides improve and refine their own, resulting in a better system for everybody—our K–12 students especially. This is how a two-party system should work.

But neither Democrats nor Republicans have yet emerged with a compelling alternative to their own status quo. Such an alternative must appeal beyond their party’s base if either is to have the real advantage in education governance.

Caitlin Peartree is vice president for policy research for The Winston Group, a strategic planning, consulting, and survey research firm based in Washington, DC, where David Winston is president.