Democrats flipped five governorships last night, in Georgia, Iowa, Nevada, Ohio and Texas, broke Republican trifectas in four states and will control both chambers of Congress in January. My colleagues Anna Edwards and Ben Wallerstein, who have worked together across five presidential administrations, wrote up what it means for education this morning. We’ll have more as the remaining races are called. The first question is how much the new officeholders can change, and how quickly.

Start with who runs the schools. Georgia elected Lydia Powell, its first Democratic state superintendent since the 1990s, over incumbent Richard Woods. In California, San Diego Unified board president Richard Barrera leads Sonja Shaw by roughly 950,000 votes. In Arizona, Democrat Teresa Leyba Ruiz leads Kimberly Yee and says her first moves would be shutting down Tom Horne’s Empower Hotline and ordering a third-party audit of the ESA program. Republican incumbents held on in South Carolina, Idaho and North Dakota, including Ellen Weaver. New governors in Texas, Ohio and Iowa will appoint chiefs of their own.

Texas is the biggest of those. Gina Hinojosa, the first Democrat elected governor there since Ann Richards, campaigned on ending the state’s new voucher program, replacing Education Commissioner Mike Morath, ending state takeovers of districts and scrapping STAAR. The Dallas Morning News notes more than 100,000 students are already using the accounts, and Anna and Ben make the point that programs with families enrolled are hard to unwind. That makes funding, eligibility and oversight the more likely battlegrounds. Democrats also won the comptroller’s office, which runs the program.

The president’s agenda had a better night on the ballot than his party did at the top of it. Education Week’s Mark Walsh reports that measures restricting transgender girls’ participation in girls’ sports passed or were on track to pass in Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska and Washington, with Washington’s version requiring a provider’s statement for every girl in K-12 sports. Wisconsin approved an anti-DEI measure; Arizona rejected one. Alabama voted to require the Pledge of Allegiance and the national anthem in schools.

In Washington, oversight will be the immediate test. Alyson Klein lays out what educators can expect: Bernie Sanders returns to the HELP gavel, Bobby Scott, Suzanne Bonamici and Jahana Hayes are in the mix to lead the House education committee, and an early target is the interagency agreements that moved Title I and CTE to Labor and special education to HHS. A standalone bill faces a veto; a spending-bill rider offers a possible lever. Rick Hess called it “oversight, with a vengeance.” One possible bipartisan lane, per Klein: Bonamici’s AI bill barring student data from being used to train models.

On higher education, Noah Sudow posted his take on LinkedIn. The last time Ohio had a Democratic governor, he was an assistant vice chancellor at the state’s higher ed department and stayed through the handoff to a Republican one. His point: governors change the tone of higher ed policy faster than anyone expects, through budgets, agency leadership and board appointments, even if change on campus takes years. At the federal level, he doesn’t expect last year’s loan caps or the Grad PLUS phaseout to be repealed, and notes that the new accreditation rules still take effect July 1, 2027. He sees the projected Pell shortfall as the first fight.

For the rest of the week, Whiteboard Advisors is opening its state-by-state election analysis to everyone.

One last number, from Maria Flynn in Forbes: 80 percent of voters want policymakers to prioritize affordable education and training. Yet employment and jobs were the focus of just 5 percent of ads supporting Democratic candidates, and didn’t register at all on the Republican side. There’s an opening for the people who won last night.

— Thomas

The election analysis is normally part of W/A Research, which includes our live K-12 policy tracker, issue reports and analyst support. To keep access after the end of the week, email the team.

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