Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ attempt to take over school boards in Florida fell flat on Tuesday night. Only six of the 23 candidates he endorsed won their races, and another six are headed to runoffs in November, while the DeSantis-linked Moms for Liberty, a far-right organization, saw wins from just seven of the 14 candidates they had backed.
It was a major setback for the culture warriors in Florida who have been working tirelessly to transform the state’s public schools into a haven for their ultra-conservative and extreme ideas.
DeSantis, a Donald Trump acolyte, took office in 2018. After winning by a decisive margin in 2022, the governor supercharged his culture war agenda, signing a flurry of bills designed to target people of color and the LGBTQ+ community. He championed the ”Stop WOKE Act,” which censors what teachers can say in the classroom about race, and the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, a measure that prohibited educators from talking about sexual orientation and gender identity. (He also picked a fight with Disney after the company half-heartedly came out against the measure.)
There was a time when it seemed like the far-right message pushed by DeSantis and Moms for Liberty was poised to completely take over Florida’s school boards.
“They were able to take advantage of the fact that people weren’t paying attention to school board races,” Maya Henson Carey, a research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told HuffPost. “They were able to play on the politics of fear.”
In 2022, DeSantis was considered a top presidential contender; when he endorsed candidates in 25 school board races, nearly all of them won. That fall, he beat Democratic nominee Charlie Crist by 19 points and won his reelection bid for governor.
Moms for Liberty, which was started in Florida in 2021, has praised DeSantis, and the governor spoke at their 2022 and 2023 summits. Last year, DeSantis appointed one of the group’s co-founders to the Florida Commission on Ethics, a committee tasked with investigating Florida officials for any ethical violations. After the 2022 election, the group reported an 80% win rate in Florida.
But then there were some potential signs that constant attacks on people of color or LGBTQ+ people were not winning strategies after all. Most notably, DeSantis, once seen as a formidable challenge to Trump for the top of the Republican ticket, ran on bringing his Florida agenda to the whole country and flamed out very early in the 2024 primaries.
The results of Tuesday’s election indicate that Florida may not even be particularly keen on DeSantis’ Florida agenda.
In Pinellas County, DeSantis and Moms for Liberty’s attempt to flip the school board to a conservative majority came up short. Two incumbents, Laura Hine and Eileen Long, handily defeated the conservative candidates, while the third seat is going to a runoff.
“People want sanity. People want common sense. And people believe we should educate everyone,” Long told The Associated Press about her victory. “The people have spoken.”
In Sarasota County, Karen Rose, who was backed by both DeSantis and Moms for Liberty, lost her race. According to the Tampa Bay Times, Rose is aligned with Bridget Ziegler, a co-founder of Moms for Liberty and Sarasota board member who was caught in a sex scandal with her husband, Christian Ziegler. Despite repeated calls for her to resign, Christian Ziegler remains on the board.
After a grand jury found “widespread wrongdoing” in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, DeSantis removed four school board members in the reliably blue Broward County and replaced them with conservative members. On Tuesday, two of those appointees lost to challengers.
The culture war being waged by DeSantis and far-right groups can be broadly described as extremists fighting against equality and progress. The exact details of the moral panic are ever-changing — Moms for Liberty was founded when conservatives were decrying masking in schools — but the demonization of minority groups stays the same.
In Florida, the attacks manifested as a crusade against books that discuss race, sexual orientation and gender identity. The movement has adopted the term “parental rights,” which essentially translates to advocating against anything disliked by white conservative parents. Culture warriors have railed against teaching race and history, smearing teachers as groomers and indoctrinators. DeSantis emerged as the de facto leader, pushing his “anti-woke” agenda across the state.
But now, after yet another setback, it seems as if this iteration of the culture war is fizzling out.
“Parental rights movements don’t last forever,” Carey said. “It’s splashy at first, but then people wake up to the actual narratives they’re pushing.”