Moms for Ls
Far-right candidates saw a dip in their win rates during Tuesday's elections.
In 2022, per their self-published numbers, the far-right group Moms for Liberty endorsed more than 500 candidates for school board, and saw 275 elected, at a national success rate of approximately 50 percent.
Ahead of Tuesday’s election, Moms for Liberty listed 134 school board endorsements on its website. Of those, fewer than 50 appear to have won their elections, for a success rate of approximately 35 percent.
It’s risky to extrapolate trends from two data points. These figures, for instance, don’t account for the number of MfL-affiliated candidates who ran without an official endorsement. Last week’s election was also an off-year contest, when some MfL strongholds like Florida weren’t holding races for school board members.
But provisionally: damn, that looks like a backslide.
Before we get into the data, a shoutout to its source: journalist Teddy Wilson who’s been operating an ongoing School Board Watch tracker at his Substack, Radical Reports. You can see his breakdown of wins and losses by MfL (as well as fellow far-right education group 1776 Project) here. That candidate list is based on MfL’s now-deleted endorsements page, which is archived here.
Of the 134 endorsements, 47 appear to have won their races on Tuesday.
Certainly MfL could argue that many of its best-performing states from 2022 did not hold school board elections this month. In its self-published election report from last year, the group touted win rates of “50%+ nationally, 80% in Florida, 59% in California, 54% in Maryland, 53% in New Jersey,” and “62% in South Carolina.”
Of those states, only New Jersey went to the polls for school board members this year. But even in that state, the year-over-year data looks disappointing for MfL. This year, the group ran 20 candidates, only 7 of whom won. That’s 35 percent, almost exactly consistent with MfL’s national win rate this month.
And where when MfL candidates won, it tended to be en masse.
All three MfL candidates running in Pennsylvania’s Mifflinburg Area School District won their elections, as did all four running in Pennsylvania’s South Western School District. Only occasionally did a district elect some, but not all MfL candidates. (See: Pennsylvania’s Moon Area School District, which elected four out of five MfL endorsees; the lone MfL candidate who lost her election was the only incumbent whom MfL endorsed in the race.)
More interesting are the states and districts that rejected MfL candidates. Iowa, which has tacked increasingly to the right in presidential elections since 2008, rejected 12 of its 13 MfL candidates. In Virginia, where Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin has tried to make school culture wars a key plank of his campaign, five of the six MfL candidates lost. (The victor ran in Virginia’s Loudoun County Public Schools, where recent political battles could easily fill a book.)
And in Pennsylvania, where MfL ran more than 50 candidates this month, the group also witnessed one of its most striking defeats. Bucks County was a centerpiece of MfL’s first election cycle in 2021. In a “win alert” on Twitter that year, the group claimed to have won 33 school board seats, clinching majority control of eight of the county’s 13 school districts for MfL members or their allies.
This year, the trend reversed, with Bucks County candidates flipping their school boards blue in multiple districts. "We're not organized in the best ways necessarily, but it Jon Valant, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution,kind of all fell into place,” a mother who helped campaign against MfL candidates in the county told Salon. “And we're all obsessed a little bit.”
This year, as The Daily Beast noted, MfL only ran one candidate in Bucks county. (The candidate, Michael Hartline, won his race, but had previously served eight years on the district’s school board and another four years as president of the county school board.)
Those modest numbers might not reflect the full scope of MfL’s network in Pennsylvania and beyond. The group has informally backed a number of candidates who did not appear on the official endorsement list.
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, MfL issued a “voter guide” on Bucks County school board candidates, promoting a slate of Republican candidates but clarifying in fine print that “this is not an official endorsement.”
The lack of endorsement is notable as MfL enters its third election cycle. After its initial 2021-2022 blitz of candidates, who ran with professionalized branding in oft-ignored races, MfL and its baggage are better-known in 2023. The organization and its members are known for book bans, anti-LGBTQ+ measures, and turning once-staid school board meetings into toxic messes.
That reputation might be a boon to some candidates; some others might want to avoid the association, even if they’re otherwise aligned with MfL’s messaging.
“A Moms for Liberty endorsement can cut either way,” Jon Valant, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, told the Inquirer.
Hey, thanks for reading MomLeft! It’s been a good week for U.S. women, electorally. Pro-choice candidates and ballot measures prevailed during Tuesday’s elections. But it’s been a bad week for women’s media, with feminist website Jezebel shutting down after gross mismanagement from venture capital morons.
Here are the weekend’s MomLinks, featuring the good, the bad, and the bullshit:
-Reproductive rights continued to be a winning issue for the left, with Ohio voters passing a constitutional amendment to enshrine abortion rights, and voters in Virginia and Kentucky blocking abortion opponents. These off-year results add to a mountain of evidence suggesting that Democrats can win on abortion, provided they actually run on protecting it. “If I were an antiabortion politician, I’d be scared,” said Tresa Undem, a public opinion researcher studying abortion told the Washington Post.
-[Axios voice] BUT! Anti-choice Republicans in Ohio are already trying to block the state’s newly passed abortion measures. Four GOP lawmakers in the state issued a press release signaling their intent to strip judges of the ability to rule on a pro-choice amendment. “To prevent mischief by pro-abortion courts with Issue 1, Ohio legislators will consider removing jurisdiction from the judiciary over this ambiguous ballot initiative,” their press release reads, going on to warn that “The Ohio legislature alone will consider what, if any, modifications to make to existing law.”
-Long-running feminist blog Jezebel is dead—the latest casualty of a greedy and incompetent management company that bought the suite of former Gawker companies and proceeded to run them into the dirt, despite the best efforts of talented writers and editors. At 404 Media, Jason Koebler offers Jezebel’s closure as an indictment of a short-sighted media economy that doesn’t know how to turn a profit even on high-traffic sites, and a marketing industry too squeamish to run ads alongside articles on “sensitive” topics like abortion and immigration.
“In theory, the ‘free market’ should reward publications that are doing important work,” Koebler writes. “The more people care about a given issue the more they’ll read news stories about it, which should give publications covering it traffic and ad dollars. In reality, the advertising industry has singled out the issues the audience cares about most, like reproductive rights, as unsuitable to sell ads against, even though a ton of people want to read about them. This helps explain the precarity of publications like Jezebel, despite it being more vital to its audience than ever.”
-And in the Guardian, Moira Donegan connects Jezebel’s closure to the collapse of other feminist sites that defined an era of the internet for women. Though women’s verticals still exist, “the era of explicitly feminist media – as opposed to simply women’s media – appears to be over,” Donegan writes. “Jezebel’s voice, its unabashed political commitment, its willingness to explore questions of freedom and dignity, right and wrong, and to risk making mistakes – these are not present in what remains of the media landscape. We’re at a moment when there is tremendous feminist sentiment – ask any political pollster what has been happening since Dobbs. But there is no feminist movement. Jezebel was one of the last remaining feminist institutions, and now it’s gone.”