North Carolina’s bluest counties are also the most likely to have high rates of participation in the Opportunity Scholarship Program, despite most Democratic lawmakers in these regions being opposed to vouchers, according to a new study in the Journal of School Choice.
On the flipside, NC counties that went the most for Donald Trump in the 2024 election have lower participation rates.
University of North Carolina at Charlotte professors Samantha Schuermann and Jason Giersch authored the study, entitled “Who uses vouchers? Not the communities that support Trump.”
“Using regression models, we find that counties with higher support for Donald Trump in the 2024 election have lower rates of voucher use, particularly among high-income recipients,” the authors concluded. “These patterns persist after accounting for income, population size, and school quality.”
“The findings point out that the communities where school choice may be most popular are the communities where its benefits are least available, perhaps indicating political shifts on the issue in the future,” they added.
The Opportunity Scholarship Program is the state’s voucher designed to enable families to choose a private education for their children. Beginning with the 2024-2025 school year, the program was made available to all families regardless of income, with lower-income households still prioritized. Making the program universal meant that participation has mushroomed — from 32,549 students in 2023-2024 to 104,599 students in 2025-2026.
Dr. Robert Luebke, director of the Center for Effective Education at the John Locke Foundation, noted that the explanation for the political divide is simple.
“Since the majority of Opportunity Scholarship recipients are in urban districts, and most urban districts are blue, it’s not surprising that the majority of recipients are in Democratic districts,” Luebke said.
The top five counties with the most voucher recipients for the current school year are Democrat strongholds: Wake, Mecklenburg, Guilford, Cumberland, and Forsyth.
Luebke added that the popularity of vouchers in blue counties reinforces the notion that Democrat lawmakers should support school choice, including opting NC in to the Federal Tax Credit Scholarship Program.
A Locke report from September found that NC’s growing school-choice environment faced the hurdle of capacity constraints. Of the private schools surveyed by Locke, 21% reported unused capacity, yet 92% anticipated increased demand within three years. Nearly half expressed concern about future space and staffing. Limited infrastructure, restrictive zoning, and burdensome building regulations were cited as impeding growth.
A recent Carolina Journal poll put support for Opportunity Scholarships at nearly two-thirds of voters. The support was bipartisan, with 72% of Republicans backing the vouchers, compared to 59% of Democrats and 62% of independents.
Even though a majority of likely Democratic voters back the vouchers, that popularity doesn’t translate to support from elected Democrats. Only three Democrats in the state House, for example, voted to make the voucher program universal in 2023.