Chamber Of Commerce Common Core Ads Fail To Persuade Republican Base

Pro-Common Core business entities have been putting up money to try and sell the CCSS to the public for a while now, with many aiming to change the way people on the right feel about the standards.

Libby Nelson at Vox reports the efforts to convince people on the right about the wonders of the Core aren't working:

The big political narrative around the Common Core this summer is that the national education standards pit Republicans against Republicans.

Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and the Chamber of Commerce support the standards. The Tea Party decries them as "Obamacore." Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, a onetime supporter of the standards, has turned against them; Jindal's top education official, a high-profile education reformer, still supports them.

But the Pew Research Center's recent profile of American political views destroys the assumption that these divides mean the Common Core is contentious among Republican voters. Business-friendly conservatives (the establishment base) and cultural conservatives (the tea party base) who know about the standards oppose them at identical levels. 

Supporters might hope otherwise, but the fight in the Republican Party is over and the standards have lost.

Pew divided the anchors of the Republican party into two groups in its new report on Americans' political beliefs. They call those groups steadfast conservatives and business conservatives, but they could just as easily call them tea party Republicans (religious, culturally conservative, angry at the federal government) and country club Republicans (wealthy, pro-Wall Street suburbanites).

The findings on the two groups' beliefs back up much of the establishment-versus-insurgency narrative. They disagree on immigration, on foreign affairs, on homosexuality, and on whether what's good for Wall Street is good for America.

But they agree on Common Core, identically: 61 percent of both groups oppose the standards.

This is a huge failure for the US Chamber of Commerce. The group spent much of the past year making a case for the standards from a business perspective.

The chamber argued that high, uniform expectations in math and language arts will produce better workers and a stronger economy. They made slick videos. They published op-eds. Yet they failed to convince even their core constituency — business conservatives.

This is why CCSS is doomed to failure and will see repeal in state after state - when business entities spend millions on pro-CCSS propaganda and can't even convince their own business-friendly constituencies that the Core is the most wonderful thing ever, it's difficult to see how the negative trajectory of CCSS support can be turned around.