Voter concerns over children’s access to their parents were a major issue.
While Republicans did not receive the landslide victory they had hoped for nationally, conservatives did see a surge of victories in school board races all around the country.
Two parental rights organizations who sponsored several of the successful candidates say that conservatives have won control of at least nine school boards in at least six states this week. These states include Michigan, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, New Jersey, and Florida.
The victories show that parents’ rights played a big role in Tuesday’s election.
According to the 1776 Project PAC, a parents’ rights organization in Michigan, four candidates for the Brandywine School Board who had been sponsored by the organization were victorious in their respective elections, therefore changing the board’s ideological composition from liberal to conservative.
They claimed that in Carroll County, Maryland, three of their candidates for the school board were successful, giving the board a conservative majority for the first time in its history.
Since November of last year, the 1776 Project PAC has been campaigning to change the composition of 100 school boards. Both the Oklahoma and Ohio elections went to the group’s candidates.
Moms For Liberty, another parents’ rights organization, claimed to have won clusters of elections in at least four states, according to The Daily Wire. At least seven school boards were overturned by the gang.
The organization claimed that in North Carolina, conservatives won seats on the school boards of New Hanover County and Iredell County.
Moms For Liberty said that in South Carolina, conservatives gained seats on the school boards in all three jurisdictions: Berkeley, Charleston, and York.
In New Jersey, three conservative candidates were successful in their election bids, the organization said, effectively changing the ideological makeup of the county’s school board.
According to the organization, two conservative candidates ran and won in Florida’s Pinellas County.
Not only that but all six of Governor Ron DeSantis’ backed candidates for school boards in Florida advanced to the statewide general election. There have been 30 local education candidates sponsored by DeSantis this year, and 24 of them have won their campaigns thus far.
Five counties, including some historically blue places like Miami-Dade and Sarasota, swung to conservative majorities on their school boards this summer thanks to victories by conservative school board candidates, some of whom were sponsored by DeSantis.
In some ways, Florida has become ground zero in the ongoing cultural battle in the classroom in recent months. DeSantis signed the measure of a parental right in March that makes it illegal to teach about sexual orientation or gender identity to students in grades kindergarten through third.
Parents are becoming an active voting group, as seen by the Republican victories last week and earlier this year on local school boards. The results might be indicative of a bigger trend toward a conservative victory in the education debate on a national scale.
Last fall’s election of Glenn Youngkin as governor of Virginia was an early indicator of parents taking their anger to the polls. It was Youngkin’s advocacy for parental rights that ultimately earned him the governorship. It was unclear at the moment if parental excitement would remain high.
Whether or if this level of enthusiasm from parents will last until the 2024 elections is an open question.
Aside from the tide of victories on local school boards, conservatives also secured majorities on the state education boards in Texas and Kansas. There will be a 10–5 Republican majority on the Texas State Board of Education. This election season, every one of those places was up for grabs. After the recent election results in Kansas, conservatives will hold a 7-3 majority on the State Board of Education.
Parents have voiced concerns about a wide range of issues in public education over the past two years, including widespread learning loss, pornographic and Critical Race Theory content in classroom materials, the teaching of sexual orientation and gender identity to young students, and a lack of school security.