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This text is a part of The 74’s EDlection 2024 protection, which takes a take a look at candidates’ schooling insurance policies and the way they may influence the American schooling system after the 2024 election.
With only a matter of days left till Election Day, the principle political fundraising arm of the Nationwide Schooling Affiliation, the NEA Advocacy Fund, has raised almost $27 million, in line with the newest information from OpenSecrets – nearly all of it in a bid to elect Vice President Kamala Harris and get extra Democrats into the Home and Senate.
The nation’s largest union, boasting greater than 3 million members, is historically one of many greatest supporters of Democrats, lending each the ability of its numerous political motion committees’ purses for promoting and mailings, and its power in numbers for boots-on-the-ground get-out-the-vote operations.
“Throughout the nation, most of us need the identical factor – robust public faculties the place each pupil, irrespective of their race, place, or background can develop into their full brilliance,” stated NEA President Becky Pringle in a press release to The 74. “Educators know that Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are tireless champions for college students and educators, who will work to help robust public faculties, increase school-based psychological well being companies, guarantee no pupil is hungry, and decrease prices for middle-class households.”
“As a few of the most trusted folks in each group, NEA members are knocking on doorways, making cellphone calls, and speaking to their communities about voting for Harris and Walz, together with pro-public schooling candidates up and down the poll,” she stated. “They’re utilizing their educator voices as a result of they know that the way forward for our public faculties and our college students will likely be formed by what occurs on this election.”
Among the many high 20 PACs primarily based on contributions to Democratic candidates, complete fundraising, complete spent, and complete spent in impartial expenditures and communication prices, the NEA’s PACs place eleventh, in line with OpenSecrets, the non-partisan group that tracks cash in politics. It donated $3 million on to the Harris marketing campaign.
The overwhelming majority of the union tremendous PAC’s expenditures – $6.9 million complete this election cycle – went to different tremendous PACs supporting Democrats. As of Oct. 8, the NEA Advocacy Fund had given $2.5 million to Future Ahead USA Motion, the pro-Harris tremendous PAC and the most important in American politics. It additionally doled out $1.5 million every to the Home Majority PAC and the Senate Majority PAC in an effort to take care of Democrats’ razor-thin majority within the Senate and choose up seats to realize a majority within the Home.
To this point, NEA’s tremendous PAC has spent $430,000 on media, together with issues like on-line, TV and radio adverts, and mailings, and one other $100,000 on marketing campaign bills.
It’s additionally spent roughly $630,000 on focused federal election candidates, together with $150,000 on Rep. John Mannion, a Democrat from New York, $130,000 on Raquel Teran, a Democrat working in Arizona’s third congressional district, and $35,000 on incumbent Sen. John Tester, a Democrat from Montana who’s in a tricky reelection bid.
In Ohio, the place Democratic incumbent Sen. Sherrod Brown is in a useless warmth in opposition to Republican Bernie Moreno, a separate NEA tremendous PAC, Educators for Ohio, has raised $1.7 million.
Earlier this month, the NEA teamed up with the American Federation of Academics, the Service Workers Worldwide Union and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Workers – the nation’s largest public service unions – in a coordinated, multi-state voter outreach initiative throughout battleground states.
“This joint motion represents a big escalation of labor’s political engagement, with the unions pooling assets and mobilizing their mixed membership of a number of million employees and contains folks of all backgrounds working throughout the general public service – as nurses, baby care suppliers, sanitation employees, first responders, academics, schooling help professionals and better schooling employees, amongst others,” the announcement of the trouble reads.
Notably, labor unions play an outsized position in lots of the election’s most vital swing states: 21% of votes solid in Michigan within the 2020 presidential election had been from union households, representing roughly one-fifth of the citizens, in line with the union. The identical is true for Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, the place union households accounted for 18% and 13% of votes solid, respectively.
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