Fifty-one percent of Wisconsin registered voters told the Marquette Law School Poll in August that they want the state’s school voucher program continued. Forty-eight percent want it eliminated. Among independents, the split ran 49 to 50, against.
Marquette had never asked the question that way before. For years the poll asked whether voters favored letting all students statewide use publicly funded vouchers, which is an expansion question, and the answers came back strong: 59 percent in favor in February 2022, 58 percent that April. By June 2023 it was 54. By June 2025 it was 52, with 47 opposed. A 22-point margin had narrowed to five. Last month Marquette stopped asking Wisconsin voters whether they wanted more choice and started asking whether they wanted any.
Every other education number in that same survey moved in the direction that should help school choice. Satisfaction with local public schools fell to 53 percent, down from 64 percent in February and from 81 percent when Marquette first asked in 2013. Asked to choose between reducing property taxes and increasing spending on public schools, voters picked tax relief 58 to 42, and they have picked tax relief in every Marquette poll since June 2023 after choosing schools in sixteen straight polls before that. In October, for the first time in the poll’s history, a majority said they would vote against a local school referendum.
So Wisconsin voters are less satisfied with their public schools, less willing to pay more for them, and less willing to fund alternatives. That combination does not happen by accident. It happens for three reasons, and none of them is that the case for choice got weaker.
The first is that there has been no fight. The last genuine statewide battle over vouchers in Wisconsin was the 2015 argument over the enrollment cap. Since 2019, divided government has meant no serious expansion bill, no veto showdown, and no reason for a voter without a child in the program to form an opinion about it. Support peaked in early 2022, which was no coincidence: that was the COVID-closure and curriculum era, when parents were mobilized by circumstance. No organization created that mobilization. A pandemic did. When the mobilizing event ended, the salience went with it. Public schools now register as the most important issue for 3 percent of Wisconsin voters, ninth out of ten issues Marquette tested.
The second is that the money argument won by default. Marquette has asked voters five times since 2022 to choose between increasing state support for students attending private schools and for public schools. Public schools win every time, and they win big: 64 to 28 in October 2022, 71 to 28 in June 2023, 69 to 31 in June 2025. In February 2025, only 57 percent of Republicans chose private schools. That is the frame doing its work. Vouchers as subtraction, dollars leaving a building rather than following a child, a zero-sum transfer from the many to the few. The framing is wrong on the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is knowable. Almost nobody in Wisconsin spends the months between legislative sessions saying so to voters who are not already convinced.
The third reason is the one choice supporters have the most control over. Roughly 46 percent of Wisconsin’s private school students now attend on a voucher. That is tens of thousands of families with direct standing to speak about a program that half the state wants ended, and there is no organization in Wisconsin whose primary job is to turn those families into a constituency legislators can feel. The movement carefully built the policy infrastructure. It built the parent infrastructure thinly, on the reasonable assumption that a program serving that many families would generate its own defenders. Programs do not work that way. Constituencies get organized, or they stay quiet, and quiet constituencies lose votes they should win.
Which brings us to the arithmetic of repeal. A program polling 51 to 48, with independents split against it and 68 percent of Democrats wanting it gone, is not a program with a comfortable floor. Wisconsin elects a governor and a legislature in November. Marquette’s own decision to retire the expansion question and write a repeal question in its place is a reasonable read of where the argument now sits, and pollsters generally write the question that the moment calls for.
The families using vouchers in Wisconsin have until then to become something legislators have to count.
