She helped build ‘big, not perfect’ coalitions to defeat KY’s voucher, abortion amendments | Opinion
Pretty much everyone involved with the movement to defeat Amendment 2 thought it would fail.
Kentuckians love their public schools, and it was obvious that changing the constitution to allow public school funding to go to private schools would hurt local schools, and by extension, their local communities.
But watching the maps on election night, as one by one counties said no, was quite a revelation. It lost by a whopping 30 percentage points, 65-35, and failed by double digits in every county but McCreary.
“I certainly didn’t think it would win all 120 counties,” said Kelsey Coots, the organizer behind the opposition.
It was a huge loss for the GOP legislative supermajority’s prize issue in a state where Donald Trump also won by 30 points. It looked a lot like another Amendment 2, which tried to create a constitutional ban on abortion that failed by almost 5 points in 2022, a loss that was, not coincidentally, helped along by Coots.
In both cases, Coots said, “It’s building a coalition that matters, and ensuring you have the right message and the right messengers, and leaving it at that.”
Teaching and politics
Coots grew up in Owensboro, attended public schools there and then headed to the University of Kentucky to be a political science major. She always thought she would work around politics, but right after graduation, she joined Teach for America, and spent two years in Houston, Texas, teaching eighth grade.
By 2013, she was back in Kentucky working for the House Democratic Caucus in Frankfort. But she had “unfinished business” with teaching and got a job at Moore Middle School in Jefferson County. Her last year as a teacher was 2019; that same year she ran for state auditor but lost in the primary.
Along the way, she married another political consultant, Taylor Coots, and founded a company called Blue Dot Consulting in Louisville. (Taylor Coots, incidentally, was hired to run the successful Yes for Parks campaign in Lexington this election.)
In summer 2022, she had just found out she was pregnant with her second child, when she got the call from Protect Kentucky Access to do the field organizing against Amendment 2, which would specify an abortion ban in the state constitution.
Coots was hired the same day as Rachel Sweet, the woman who had engineered a similar victory in Kansas, and subsequently ran the successful campaign reverse Missouri’s draconian abortion ban last Tuesday.
“It was a challenge to recruit people to talk about abortion on the doorsteps of people they don’t know, but women were really fired up,” Coots said. “When you explained exactly what the amendment would do, when you talked about the bottom line, people understood.”
Two years later, the Council for Better Education — which has led many of the legal fights on behalf of public education — was looking for a way to fight the next Amendment 2, the prize legislation that came out of the 2024 session, to finally bring school choice to Kentucky.
“We started researching how do you deal with a ballot issue, because all we’ve ever done is sue people,” said Tom Shelton, the council’s executive director. “Kelsey is a product of Kentucky public schools, she’s very passionate about public schools, and she helped build the message around them,” he said.
‘Big, not perfect’ coalitions
That message had to be simple, Coots decided.
It’s not that Kentuckians are against school choice, they’re just against anything that would hurt their local schools. Because Kentucky was so late to the school choice movement, there was plenty of evidence from other states that whatever plan the General Assembly came up with on school choice, resources would be lost.
She looked to parents, teachers, students and community leaders to be the messengers of a message that folks were pretty open to hearing. The Protect Our Schools coalition also ensured the messaging was non-partisan, emphasizing that public schools are something that rise above politics.
“The spectrum of people needed to vote on this is very large and we have to meet people where we are,” she said. “You have to say, ‘big, not perfect’ when it comes to organizing — in both cases we were able to build a very broad coalition.”
Protect Our Schools did internal polling that showed the more people learned about Amendment 2, the less they liked it, Coots said. That was helped by the fact that much of the advocacy for the amendment was paid for by out of state billionaires, like Jeff Yass.
Vote totals from the Secretary of State showed that 1,336,227 Kentuckians voted for Trump, and 1,298,967 voted no on Amendment 2. That’s a lot of overlap.
“We knew we had the right plan, the right message and the right messengers,” Coots said. “The other side had Rand Paul and Jim Waters and Gary Houchens — I don’t think until the very end I saw one news article with a regular parent in it talking about school choice.”
The coalition was extremely broad, from the teacher unions like KEA to the Kentucky Student Voice Team to the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky, to the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, which did an analysis of how much each school district stood to lose if Kentucky adopted a Florida-style voucher plan. That analysis was downloaded nearly 100,000 times, the group said.
“She’s very level headed, practical and pragmatic, and she’s not going to let ideology get in the way,” said former Congressman Ben Chandler, who heads the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky.
“The messaging was such that it wasn’t seen as a Democratic issue. It’s very important to be cognizant of who the messenger is, and under Kelsey’s leadership they went to great lengths to determine who would be a good messenger.”
What’s next?
Another really important point is that the coalition acknowledged many obvious problems in the public schools.
“We didn’t set out to say schools are perfect, but we said every problem you have would be exacerbated by this,” Coots said. “I think now we have a bipartisan coalition that will be harder to ignore — we’ve got the attention of a lot of people who will think twice before they mess with public schools.”
Whether the General Assembly listens and tries to help with more teachers funding or smaller class sizes remains to be seen. But clearly, Kentucky voters have shown they are independent and vote their conscience.
And surely Blue Dot Consulting will be in demand for understanding voters maybe a little better than many politicians do.
Obviously, Coots is a Democrat who works on Democratic causes, and she’s far from giving up on red state Kentucky.
“When we can communicate with voters at scale, they vote with us,” she said. “But that takes a lot of investment and year round local strategy. You have to do the base-building work.
“I just think we have to do a lot more meeting voters where they are.”
This story was originally published November 14, 2024 at 4:45 AM.
