What the Midterm Elections Mean for Higher Ed

Mandel Ngan, AFP, Getty Images

Was it a wave? Maybe not. But for Democrats, it was a win.

They weathered disappointments in some high-profile races that had appeared winnable on Tuesday night, and they lost three U.S. Senate seats in the face of a challenging map. But they seized control of the U.S. House of Representatives, tipping at least 26 seats to emerge with a clear majority. In doing so, they earned the opportunity to step up oversight of the polarizing presidency of Donald J. Trump.

That oversight could extend to higher-education policy through immediate scrutiny of what the Education Department is doing under its secretary, Betsy DeVos.

DeVos has remained a lightning rod since her nomination, in 2016, but her impact on higher education thus far is spotty. She has moved to undo several Obama-era regulations meant to hold colleges accountable for the federal-loan debt of their students, and has begun writing new regulations on how colleges handle cases of sexual misconduct under Title IX, the federal law meant to ensure gender equity on campuses. In January she will start the process of rewriting a host of regulations that deal with accreditation, among other things.

But the regulatory rollbacks have been waylaid in the courts. And the department, understaffed after heavy attrition, has not laid out an aggressive agenda. Now, Democrats in the House could further complicate the agency’s efforts. For example, they could threaten to curtail the department’s actions with budget language intended to eliminate the money for regulatory efforts they oppose.

More likely, the House’s Committee on Education and the Workforce could schedule a number of oversight hearings to press department officials on potential conflicts of interest and defend the Obama-era regulations that DeVos has put in the cross hairs. Rep. Bobby Scott of Virginia, a former civil-rights lawyer, appears in line to become the committee’s chairman. DeVos, meanwhile, has tried — and failed — to trim the budget of the department’s Office for Civil Rights. That could be an early point of contention.

Will the Republicans’ loss of the House alter the state of play in the Senate? Senate Democrats, like Patty Murray of Washington, have issued a torrent of criticism against the secretary, but that effort has been diminished because the minority party does not control the agenda of the Senate’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

Murray will now have allies with agenda-setting power in the House, where Democrats have released a broad blueprint for a new higher-education law (and could very likely pass a favorable bill on the floor, since they will need only a bare majority to approve legislation).

But the prospect that the new Congress will consider a bill to reauthorize the Higher Education Act remains remote. The Senate HELP committee would first have to craft and pass its own bill. In the past, the committee’s chairman, Sen. Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, has managed to bring bipartisan legislation through that process. But tensions between Alexander and Murray have, so far, prevented any sort of progress.

Besides, Democrats may not want DeVos’s department in charge of writing any new regulations required under a reauthorized Higher Education Act. They may feel that their odds of retaking the Senate and the White House in 2020 would put them in a better place to control the process. Expect things to stay stuck in the mud.

Weighing the impact of — and threats to — the student vote.

Every election year, it seems, the refrain is the same: This could all come down to young voters, including college students.

If students played a decisive role during the previous midterm elections, in 2014, they did so by not showing up at the polls: Youth voting and registration fell to a historic low, with turnout among all 18- to 29-year-olds at 19.9 percent.

This year hopes for a rebound were high. The enthusiasm reflected not just a charged political environment, but also years’ worth of work targeting younger voters on college campuses, experts say.

Before Tuesday’s elections, 40 percent of young Americans told Harvard researchers they would “definitely vote,” with likely voters favoring a Democratic Congress by 34 percentage points. According to early exit polls taken on Tuesday, young voters opted for Democrats by 37 percentage points, far wider than the 21-point margin for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Full numbers won’t emerge for some time, but in early voting and returns, student voters appear to have turned out. If they didn’t create a wave, that’s because virtually everyone else turned out too.

New campus polling places, organizing strategies, and anti-Trump energy helped drive vote totals in college towns and counties with large student populations.

In Florida, the site of hotly contested races for governor and Congress, tens of thousands voted early on college campuses after students successfully sued the state this year to drop its ban on campus early voting.

So proud of those who made UF the #1 early voting site in the State University System! Tomorrow is election day, so Go Gators and Vote https://t.co/gHNu3DSivB

— W. Kent Fuchs (@PresidentFuchs) November 5, 2018

Turnout in Alachua County, home of the University of Florida, jumped from half of registered voters in 2014 to 63.6 percent in 2018, according to unofficial results — an increase of more than 35,000 voters.

Monroe County, home of Indiana University at Bloomington, ran out of preprinted ballots and had to rush more to the polls after an “unprecedented” turnout. Heading into Election Day, the county had tripled the almost 7,400 absentee votes cast in 2014.

More than 79,000 people — 64 percent of registered voters — turned out in Champaign County, Ill., home of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, according to unofficial results. That topped the turnout rate for the county’s 2014 midterms by 15 percentage points.

And about 7,000 more voters in Charlottesville, Va., home of the University of Virginia, cast ballots in that state’s U.S. Senate race in 2018 compared with 2014, according to data gathered by the Associated Press.

Election Day brought notable scenes on and around campuses: Shuttles bused students to their local polling places. Walkouts across the country brought droves of registered voters to their county centers.

Perhaps most strikingly, sign-wielding students at Prairie View A&M University chanted “Go vote!” and “My choice!” as they walked out of class and to the polls. In a high-profile federal lawsuit last month, students at the historically black institution accused the university’s majority-white home county — Waller County, Tex. — of violating their civil rights by not operating early-voting locations that were easily accessible to the campus.

Meanwhile, precincts for two historically black colleges in Georgia were opened for extended hours after complaints were filed about students missing from the voter rolls. Archer Hall at Morehouse College — also near Spelman College — was ordered to stay open until 10 p.m., along with another precinct at a nearby high school, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. Multiple voting-rights watchdog groups, including the Georgia chapter of the NAACP, had raised concerns.

A civil-rights lawyer told the news outlet that students who had registered to vote weren’t found on the rolls. At other precincts, the newspaper reported, voters faced long lines, too few machines, and a shortage of provisional ballots.

The problems at the historically black colleges came in the context of a gubernatorial campaign marred by complaints pf voter disenfranchisement. The Republican candidate, Secretary of State Brian Kemp, was accused of suppressing black voters in advance of this year’s election. Earlier in November, the Associated Press reported that more than 50,000 voter registrations had been placed on hold by Kemp’s office because the names didn’t precisely align with information on file with other state and federal departments. Most of the potential voters on that list are black, according to the news outlet’s analysis.

With 99 percent of precincts reporting, Kemp was leading by 2.5 percentage points in the race against his Democratic challenger, Stacey Abrams, a Spelman graduate. Abrams did not concede, saying every vote in the state should first be counted.

Mixed results in gubernatorial races.

Over all, Democrats gained governorships, but they may rue some close defeats. One such loss: In Ohio, Richard Cordray was defeated by the Republican, Mike DeWine. Cordray ran on his record as former chief of the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which left a mark during the Obama administration as a higher-ed watchdog, highlighting abusive student-loan companies, suing for-profit colleges, and questioning colleges’ deals with banks for student debit cards.

In Illinois, meanwhile, Bruce V. Rauner is out. The Republican governor saw his approval tank amid a lengthy budget standoff with state lawmakers that resulted in painful cuts for public colleges. His Democratic opponent, J.B. Pritzker, assailed Rauner for contributing to a mass exodus of students from the state. Pritzker won handily.

And in Wisconsin, Scott Walker, the Republican incumbent, lost to his Democratic challenger, Tony Evers. The two cut remarkably different profiles on higher ed: Walker, who left college before graduating, questioned the value of four-year degrees and applied austerity measures to the state’s public universities. Evers, holder of a Ph.D., serves on the governing boards of both the university and technical-college systems. Still, Walker attempted to rebrand himself as the “pro-education governor” during the campaign.

Academics in and out of the House.

Four years ago, the race for Virginia’s Seventh Congressional District captivated Randolph-Macon College, and with good reason: Both candidates were professors there. David A. Brat, a professor of economics and business, won the conservative-leaning district. But now he might be headed back to the campus. His Democratic challenger, Abigail Spanberger, eked out a narrow victory over the incumbent. (Brat might face opposition if he returns to life as a scholar, too: The Washington Post recently reported that one of his academic papers “borrowed heavily” from one co-written by Ben Bernanke, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve.)

As president of the University of Miami (and before that, chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison), Donna E. Shalala, the former Clinton administration official, earned a reputation for meeting critics head-on. Still, she was viewed by some pundits as a weak candidate in Florida’s 27th Congressional District. But the Democrat comfortably turned that district from red to blue with a victory on Tuesday.

One byproduct of resurgent Democratic enthusiasm was more closely contested races in traditionally Republican strongholds. In many districts, scholars played the role of insurgents; but most weren’t able to make it over red walls. Paul Walker, an associate professor of English at Murray State University, was the loser in one of the first House races to be called on Tuesday night, Kentucky’s First Congressional District. Tracy Mitrano, the longtime director of information-technology policy at Cornell University, mounted an unexpectedly strong campaign in New York’s 23rd, but was beaten by the Republican incumbent, Tom Reed. Lisa J. Brown, former chancellor of Washington State University at Spokane, lost to the Republican incumbent, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, in the contest for Washington’s Fifth Congressional District.

In Nebraska’s First Congressional District, the Republican incumbent, Jeff Fortenberry, sailed to an easy victory. Last week Fortenberry’s campaign drew attention after his chief of staff placed a call to Ari Kohen, a professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln who had liked a photo on Facebook. The photo captured a defaced Fortenberry campaign banner in which the candidate’s last name was altered to “Fartenberry.” The chief of staff accused Kohen of supporting “political violence” and “vandalism”; Kohen said he found the call “threatening.”

Ballot measures of consequence.

In Florida, a sprawling constitutional amendment that touched on death benefits for the families of first responders and veterans, student fees, and governing boards of state colleges won the 60-percent support it needed to become law. In Massachusetts, voters rejected an opportunity to repeal discrimination protections for transgender people in public places, including university and college locker rooms and bathrooms. In Montana, voters again agreed to continue taxing real estate and personal property to support the state university system for another 10 years, as they have done every decade since 1948.