GOP Reps Could Find President's Plug
for Vouchers Vote as Eventual Liability
Capitol Inside
April 29, 2025
Texas House Republicans will be hoping that President Donald Trump's support isn't a kiss of death a year from now
if it's true that he plans to issue endorsements to those who voted to enact the state's first private school vouchers plan when they seek re-election in 2026.
Governor Greg Abbott plans to sign the education savings accounts measure into law amid substantial fanfare in a ceremony at the Governor's Mansion on Saturday afternoon. The leader of the nation's second largest state appears to envision the victorious fight for school choice as a stepping stone for a potential White House bid in 2028.
Abbott made a surprise visit to the Capitol on Tuesday morning to inform House GOP members that Trump would be dishing plugs to those who backed the vouchers proposal in Senate Bill 2 on the chamber floor this month. Such a promise would apply to all of the 88 Republican representatives in Austin with the exception of two who refused to bow to Abbott pressure tactics while others who'd long opposed public subsidies for private education quit the fight with votes for the school choice measure.
But Trump is following the Texas governor's lead if he's serious about throwing muscle behind lawmakers at the state level based exclusively on positions on a singular issue like Abbott did in the immediate wake of a special session vote for an education savings accounts proposal in late 2023.
Every Republican who backed the vouchers bill at the time received a glowing email that the Abbott team customized for individual representatives with praise for their support in a losing effort. The blanket endorsements had the effect of rendering the state's countless other problems and needs to be irrelevant or unimportant if House members could have Abbott in their corners based on a school choice vote without regard for cumulative bodies of work.
A half-dozen House Republicans who Abbott endorsed based on pro-ESA votes were defeated in the 2024 primary election or subsequent runoff despite nods from the governor. But Abbott led an unprecedented vouchers revenge crusade that culminated in the ousters of a similar number of GOP representatives who defied him on school choice and lost to challengers who he bankrolled in the primary election two years ago.
Abbott apparently decided that a focus on school vouchers could backfire in districts where he was targeting Republicans based solely on votes against ESAs. So the governor accused them of being soft on the border and other issues on which conservatives were united instead of harping on the subject that provoked the first ever campaign by a Texas governor to defeat incumbent legislators from the same party.
Trump pitched his support to SB 2 before the House approved the legislation on April 17. Abbott warned the Republicans who'd fought him on vouchers that he would do everything in his power to blow up their campaigns for new terms in 2026 if they cast votes to kill SB 2. Six Republicans who helped Democrats kill ESAs caved this time around with votes to subsidize private education with tax dollars for the first time in the illustrious history of the Lone Star State.
The vast majority of House Republicans could expect to win primary contests without the need for Trump as a cheerleader. But associations with Trump could be a liability in light of the fact that he's the most unpopular American president in eight decades after the first 100 days based on an array of independent polls that have been released in the past day or two.
Forty-five percent of the voters in a new NPR/Marist Poll said Trump deserves a failing grade for his work in his second term up to now. The poll found that 23 percent of the participants would give Trump an A for his efforts while 17 percent said they'd give him a B.
Trump's approval rating plunged to 41 percent in a CNN/SSRS survey - the worst mark for a president after 100 days since Dwight D. Eisenhower's first term in the White House in the early 1950s. A Fox News poll found Trump with an approval mark of 44 percent while 55 percent of the voters it surveyed frowned on his performance.
Fox News reported that Democrats Barack Obama and Joe Biden had approval ratings of 62 percent and 54 percent respectively after their first 100 days in the Oval Office. Republican George W. Bush was in the same ball park at 63 percent approval after the same span of time in his first term.
An endorsement from Trump was gold for the few Texas lawmakers who scored his support in 2024. But Trump's support and approval marks are in a nosedive and could get worse when the trade war that he's triggered with tariffs that are just kicking in send consumer prices soaring on a wide range of products including cars, computers, cell phones, appliances and clothes in the coming months.
An ABC News/Washington Post poll on Tuesday showed that 80 percent of Americans don't want Trump to serve a third term as president like he says he hopes to do despite a prohibition from doing so in the U.S. Constitution. Eighty-six percent in the survey oppose having the U.S. take over Canada like Trump has proposed. The poll found that 76 percent of American voters don't like the idea of the U.S. seizing control of Greenland as Trump has advocated.
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