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THE UNUSUAL WORKING-CLASS MESSAGE THAT TURNED A DEEP-RED DISTRICT
BLUE  
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Monica Potts
February 4, 2026
The New Republic
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_ Union machinist Taylor Rehmet defeated his Republican opponent in
Fort Worth, Texas, with an uncommon policy platform. _

Taylor Rehmet at the International Association of Machinists and
Aerospace Workers building in Fort Worth, Texas, on January 14,
Desiree Rios/The New York Times/Redux

 

The issues that have worked for Democrats around the country this
election season—affordability and working-class stability chief
among them—also worked for Taylor Rehmet, a union president and
machinist who beat his Trump-backed opponent
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for a deep-red state Senate seat in the Fort Worth area of Texas last
weekend. But his platform included something more unusual and a little
retro: a promise to return vocational education to public high
schools.

 
Rehmet, 33, is the son of blue-collar Republicans
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airplane mechanic, and his mother was a hairdresser. He has said he
plans to expand
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vocational education as part of an effort at “rebuilding the
pipeline between schools and good-paying jobs,” and made it part of
his pro–working class pitch
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“No matter what party you’re in, if you work hard and focus on the
issues—such as lowering costs, health care, and really focusing on
working people—that’s how you’ll get people to show up and
vote,” he said on ABC News Live
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after his victory.

The focus comes at a time when Republicans are paying lip service to
American workers while dismantling public education
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the economy, and pro-worker laws. At the same time, more and more
American families are anxious about their economic future and how to
maintain stable careers that will survive the next technological
revolution. Talking about vocational training—now commonly referred
to as career and technical education, or CTE—may hit the sweet spot
for many voters. It’s a message other Democrats could pick up.

“CTE enrollment is up almost 10 percent over the last three years,
which is a big jump in a short period of time,” said Taylor White,
director of postsecondary pathways for youth at New America, a
nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. “[Rehmet] is tapping into
something that is for real happening, not just in his backyard.”

The U.S. education system for at least a generation has focused on
sending high school students to college, owing to the decline in
manufacturing in the last half of the twentieth century and the
expansion of service-sector and knowledge-worker careers that required
college educations. That has meant a lot of changes in practice, one
of them being an under-investment in the kinds of agricultural,
woodworking, shop, home economics, and other career-focused classes
that had been common in high schools until then.

There were some good reasons for the shift. It seemed that college
educations held the key to the best-paying jobs, and it’s still true
that college graduates earn a wage premium. And in the past, some of
the vocational education pathways amounted to tracking some students
into classes that closed off college opportunities and weren’t
always academically rigorous enough to truly prepare them for jobs.
That made parents skeptical of CTE in general.

“It was absolutely terrible for many years,” said Mary Alice
McCarthy, director of New America’s Center on Education and Labor.
“Researchers in the ’70s and ’80s and ’90s found that it was a
space where students of color, Black students in particular, were
tracked into these programs. They were dead-end programs. They were
very low quality. And, you know, they just had a terrible reputation,
and vocational education had a lot of stigma associated with it.”

The reforms since then have been significant, she said. “We don’t
usually have really good stories of reform to tell in the education
space, but career and technical education is one of those stories,”
she said. So much so that the College Board is extending
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Advanced Placement program, which is college-level courses offered in
high schools that can allow students to earn college credit, into some
CTE classes. Students who take CTE can still go to college as well, so
it no longer diverts students away from earning bachelor’s degrees
if they want them.

All of this speaks to the appeal of these classes to students and
their parents, who are seeking AI-proof career paths and rethinking
the sizable investment it takes to go to college. But federal funding
for CTE is still lacking; it received almost $1.5 billion
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in 2025, just 14 percent more than in 2008—not enough to keep pace
with inflation. And President Donald Trump is slowly dismantling the
Department of Education, impacting some of these programs.

“They are trying to move
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parts of the Department of Education which are really necessary for
career and technical education, vocational programs and others, to
different agencies,” said Veronica Goodman, senior director of
workforce development policy at the Center for American Progress.
“And as we’ve seen, that’s already led to a lot of disarray for
programs and workers and the institutions that rely on these funds.
And so I think that’s definitely going to have an impact, a negative
impact, on the preparation that students and workers are getting.”

That will mean even fewer students could have access to those programs
than do today. At the same time, Trump’s dismantling of many of the
programs in the Inflation Reduction Act and other manufacturing
policies passed by President Joe Biden means that the apprenticeships
and entry-level jobs that could provide an alternative pathway into
those careers could disappear too.

While expanding CTE might make sense on its own, Rehmet also framed
his support as a way to bolster his support for public education in
general. He says he wants to increase teacher pay
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and repeal the state’s voucher system, which diverts government
money to private schools. This message apparently resonated in a
district where his opponent, Republican Leigh Wambsganss, had helped
fuel
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an anti–diversity, equity, and inclusion push at local libraries and
on the school board—which had already inspired a backlash. CTE
education is part of Rehmet’s broader message about reinvesting in
public schools and helping the working class find stable jobs in an
economy where they can afford houses, groceries, and more stable
lives. It’s part of an overarching message about rebuilding unions
and the working class.

His message could also resonate in working-class communities beyond
Texas. “This is an area that should rise up in the priorities of
progressives and Democrats,” McCarthy said. “We’ve been so
focused on a college mentality, but students and families are voting
with their feet, and they are picking CTE.”

_Monica Potts is a staff writer at The New Republic. She is the author
of __The Forgotten Girls: A Memoir of Friendship and Lost Promise in
Rural America_ [[link removed]]_._

 

* election
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* texas
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* blue upset
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* Working Class
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* Careers
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