She helped build ‘large, imperfect’ coalitions to defeat KY’s voucher abortion amendments

Nearly everyone involved in the movement to reject Amendment 2 thought it would fail.

Kentuckians love their public schools, and it was clear that changing the Constitution so that public school funding would go to private schools would hurt local schools, and by extension, their local communities.

But looking at the maps on election night, when one by one the counties said no, was quite a revelation. It lost by a whopping 30 percentage points, 65-35, failing by double digits in every county except McCreary.

“I certainly didn’t think it would win all 120 provinces,” said Kelsey Coots, the organizer behind the opposition.

It was a huge loss for the Republican Party’s legislative supermajority prize in a state where Donald Trump also won by 30 points. It was very similar to another Amendment 2, which attempted a constitutional ban on abortion that failed by almost 5 points in 2022a loss that, not entirely coincidentally, was aided by Coots.

In both cases, Coots said, “You build a coalition that matters, and make sure you have the right message and the right messengers, and leave it at that.”

Education and politics

Coots grew up in Owensboro, attending public schools there and then attending the University of Kentucky to major in political science. She always thought she would work in politics, but soon after graduating she joined Teach for America and spent two years in Houston, Texas, teaching eighth grade.

In 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 also worked on the successful Yes for Parks campaign in Lexington this election.)

In the summer of 2022, she had just found out she was pregnant with her second child when she got the call from Protect Kentucky Access to take action against Amendment 2, which would specify an abortion ban in the state constitution.

Coots was hired on the same day as Rachel Sweet, the woman who won a similar victory in Kansas and went on to lead the successful campaign. overturn 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 the women were really enthusiastic,” Coots said. “When you explained exactly what the amendment would do, when you talked about the heart of the matter, people understood.”

Two years later, the Council for Better Education — which has led much of the legal battle on behalf of public education — looked for a way to fight the next Amendment 2, the pricing legislation that emerged from the 2024 session, to finally bring school choice to Kentucky.

“We started looking into how to deal with voting issues 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 is very passionate about public schools and she has helped build the message around it,” he said.

‘Large, imperfect’ 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 harm their local schools. Because Kentucky was so late to the school choice movement, there was ample evidence from other states that whatever plan the General Assembly came up with on school choice would lose resources.

She looked to parents, teachers, students and community leaders as messengers of a message that people were quite open to. The Protect Our Schools coalition also ensured that reporting was impartial and emphasized that public schools are something that rises above politics.

“The spectrum of people needed to vote on this is very wide and we need to meet people where we are,” she said. “You have to say ‘great, not perfect’ when it comes to organizing – in both cases we managed to build a very broad coalition.”

Protect Our Schools conducted internal polling showing that the more people learned about Amendment 2, the less they enjoyed 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, such as Jeff Yass.

Voting totals from the Secretary of State showed that 1,336,227 Kentuckians voted for Trump, and 1,298,967 voted against 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 I saw a news article where a regular parent talked about school choice until the end.”

The coalition was extremely broad, from union workers to the Kentucky Student Voice Team, the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky and the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy, which analyzed how much each school district would lose if Kentucky were to adopt a Florida policy. -style voucher plan. That analysis was downloaded nearly 100,000 times, the group said.

“She is very down-to-earth, practical and pragmatic, and she won’t let ideology get in her way,” said former Congressman Ben Chandler, head of the Foundation for a Healthy Kentucky.

“The reporting was such that it was not seen as a democratic issue. It is very important to know who the messenger is, and under Kelsey’s leadership they have gone to great lengths to determine who would be a good messenger.

What’s next?

Another very important point is that the coalition recognized many obvious problems in the public schools.

“We didn’t mean to say schools are perfect, but we did say that any problem you have would be exacerbated by it,” Coots said. “I think we now have a bipartisan coalition that will be harder to ignore — we have the attention of a lot of people who will think twice before messing with public schools.”

Whether the General Assembly listens and tries to help with more funding for teachers or smaller class sizes remains to be seen. But it is clear that Kentucky voters have shown that they are independent and vote their conscience.

And there will certainly be a demand for Blue Dot Consulting to understand voters, perhaps a little better than many politicians.

It’s clear that Coots is a Democrat committed to Democratic causes, and she’s a long way from giving up on the red state of Kentucky.

“If we can communicate with voters at scale, they will vote with us,” she said. “But that requires a lot of investments and a local strategy all year round. You have to do the basic building work.

“I just think we need to meet a lot more voters where they are.”