Have Florida's Moms for Liberty Lost The Juice?

In 2022, Moms for Liberty claimed an 80 percent electoral success rate in Florida. This month, oof.

Hey gang! Happy early Labor Day! I’ll be on the road until the middle of next week, so this is the last newsletter for about a week and a half. See you in September!

I’m not a math teacher, but maybe someone in education can tell me: is six out of 23 a good test score?

For two years, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has helped right-wing candidates reshape the state’s public schools, with DeSantis endorsing allies from groups like Moms for Liberty in school board races. In 2022, the first year DeSantis (or any Florida governor, for that matter) endorsed school board candidates, 25 of his 30 picks won their elections. This year, however, DeSantis and MfL appear to have lost their juice. In last week’s elections, only six of Desantis’s 23 endorsements won their races. Those results include incumbent school board members who successfully defeated challenges from MfL candidates, as well as non-MfL candidates who flipped at least one school board that was previously controlled by an MfL majority.

After an embarrassing failed presidential bid by DeSantis, and a sex scandal by an MfL founder, has Florida’s most prominent pro-censorship group lost its juice?

So far, MfL’s best electoral cycles have been its earliest. In 2021 and 2022, the brand-new group launched a national blitz of school board campaigns, rolling out professionalized branding and emotional appeals in often-sleepy local elections. In 2022, the group claimed to have elected approximately half of its 500-plus school board candidates. Florida, where the group was founded and where it maintains its strongest government connections, saw MfL’s best results. According to the group’s self-published data, 80 percent of its Florida candidates won their 2022 elections (their next-most successful state was South Carolina, with a 62 percent win rate).

But subsequent cycles appeared to show MfL slipping. Last November, the group ran fewer candidates, in more hotly contested races against opponents who had specifically campaigned against the divisive right-wing group. Approximately 35 percent of MfL candidates won those races. 

While it’s still difficult to draw clean comparisons across election cycles (MfL strongholds like Florida didn’t have school board elections in 2023, and the full tally of Florida elections won’t be clear until November runoffs), early indicators suggest MfL is in its flop era. And DeSantis’s endorsement—which two years ago was almost tantamount to a coronation in school board politics—appears to have depreciated in value.

MfL might be experiencing some Florida-specific issues. Its founders are Floridians who have remained hyper-visible in the state’s education scene, sometimes for the worse. Founder Bridget Ziegler was accused of hypocrisy when, despite helping found an anti-LGBTQ+ group, she was embroiled in a queer sex scandal. Another MfL founder, Tina Descovich, was appointed by DeSantis to a state ethics board, but had her confirmation denied by the state senate. MfL also became a public face of Florida’s aggressive censorship campaigns, which were enabled by DeSantis’s passage of laws that severely limited students’ access to information on race and gender.

Florida remains MfL’s greatest success story—and possibly its own worst advertising. Most Americans oppose efforts to restrict books in public schools, new polling from the Knight Foundation this month finds. Most Americans also believe school officials are qualified to select appropriate books.

MfL has linked itself to symbols of a politically divisive era—to empty libraries and raucous school board meetings—with which Americans are increasingly fatigued.

That’s not to say MfL is going away. The group is well funded, politically connected, and has established one of the right’s best new ground games, with chapters targeting individual counties. The group still had a prominent place at last month’s Republican National Convention. Their town hall event didn’t draw the biggest names, true, but the group flaunted a close relationship with the Heritage Foundation, the conservative powerhouse behind the Project 2025 plan for a new Republican presidential administration. 

And even as DeSantis faces his own flops (remember when he ran for president? lol) he’s still successfully driving Florida’s education system to the right.

Though only six of his preferred candidates won their races last week, two were in Duval County, handing MfL members a majority on the county’s school board. Even a losing MfL-linked candidate will take office. Daniel Foganholi, who participated in a MfL candidates forum, lost his race for the Broward County school board last week. (Foganholi was previously appointed to the Broward school board by DeSantis, but was not among DeSantis’s 23 endorsed candidates this year.) Three days after Foganholi’s defeat last week, DeSantis appointed him to the Florida Board of Education.

Other changes to Florida’s education system are less dramatic than elections, but no less consequential.

DeSantis’s program of school vouchers has accelerated a drain on rural schools, a new Associated Press report finds. The loss of resources and students means some Florida public schools will close, further eroding the surrounding towns.

“I hate it that it’s closing. This is my heart. This is our community. … This is us,” one fourth grade teacher in a school in Florida’s panhandle told the AP. “Who wants to move into a community that doesn’t have a school that’s close by?”