Florida progressives defeat Moms for Liberty-backed school board candidates

Sarasota flipped, home county of Moms for Liberty co-founder

Progressive candidates beat opponents backed by or aligned with Moms for Liberty in school board races across Florida in August — in many cases reversing gains made by the group in 2022, according to candidates, organizers and the LGBTQ+ rights group Equality Florida. Of the 30 candidates the group supported in 2022, 20 have declined to seek re-election, lost their seats or will face runoffs in November, Equality Florida said.

In Sarasota — home to Moms for Liberty co-founder Bridget Ziegler — Megan Tennimon and Beth Mayberry replaced more conservative members on the school board, flipping it. Florida school board races are technically nonpartisan. Jimmy Glover, a Black father of four, received more votes than either of his conservative opponents, but his race will go to a November runoff since no candidate won a majority. If he wins, he would be the first person of color ever to serve on the Sarasota county school board. He will face Republican-backed candidate Heidi Brandt.

Moms for Liberty, in a public statement provided to The Guardian, disputed the framing: “Moms for Liberty-endorsed school board candidates won or advanced in 11 of 15 races across Florida.” The group had issued fewer endorsements than in past elections and declined to endorse any candidate in several counties, including Sarasota, where board chair Ziegler — who the Guardian reported has been plagued by scandal — was not running for re-election.

Organizers for Glover’s campaign and others said the August elections in Florida mark a turning point — a rejection of rightwing educational ideology in a deep-red part of a deep-red state — and that the victories hold lessons for progressives campaigning on the national stage in the midterms and beyond. “We know that a better future is possible,” said Sebastian Martinez, president of the Sarasota Next Gen Democrats, a youth organizing group that helped campaign for the county’s progressive slate. “We’ll work every day to get there.”

The losses represent a reversal from 2022, when, according to the Guardian, Moms for Liberty built influence on school boards nationally by channeling anger over pandemic mask mandates and joining “the larger rightwing campaign against critical race theory.” Members pushed schools to remake curricula along conservative ideological lines, erasing mentions of LGBTQ+ Americans, slavery, racism and more, the Guardian reported.

Governor Ron DeSantis’s announcement that Florida schools would begin teaching students that some Black people benefited from slavery was one of the events that prompted Glover to run. “There was this culture of fear that was permeating throughout the district,” Glover said of Sarasota county. “Now my children and the students in my community weren’t going to be learning about the true history of this country,” he said.

Moms for Liberty’s popularity has waned since 2022, said Liv Coleman, a professor of political science and international studies at the University of Tampa. By 2024, when Stephanie Vanos ran for the Orange County school board, the top question voters asked her was: “Are you the one who wants to ban books?” Vanos, who won her seat that year, said it “speaks to the outrage at state censorship in our schools and the complete disrespect for the first amendment.”

The Sarasota campaigns drew on a broad coalition. Sebastian Martinez started the Sarasota Next Gen Democrats last year; he has been active in school board organizing since age 16 and is now 22. The group recruited about 20 high school students to phone bank, knock on doors, distribute yard signs and help decorate a school bus that drove around Sarasota on Election Day, said Kennedy Cole, the group’s political director. To help recruit and retain young canvassers, the group paid $20 an hour. “The Democratic party is supposed to be a party of working-class people supporting working-class people, and so it only makes sense to then pay people to work,” Martinez said.

Students were motivated by what they had seen from the board, Cole said. “Students were sick of what we’ve seen from our school board, and we knew that Megan, Beth and Jimmy would help return normalcy to it,” said Cole, a 17-year-old high school senior. “Students really worked their butts off to get those results.”

The organizing extended beyond youth. Youth organizers met regularly with other community activists, including a group of retired women who sent 7,000 handwritten postcards to Sarasota voters. A parents’ group invited candidates to a local park to meet voters while their children played. Equality Florida spent $250,000 on mailers supporting candidates around the state who faced Moms for Liberty-aligned opponents.

“In order to do something like this, it takes a web of people,” Cole said. “It’s a lot of different people operating in their own ways.”

Whether they were knocking on doors or meeting families at the playground, winning candidates spread a back-to-basics message that resonated with voters across political lines. They campaigned on school funding, academic achievement and support for teachers and students, Coleman said. “They really just focused on things that affected people’s everyday lives.” Beth Mayberry, a former teacher who won a seat representing Sarasota’s fifth district, said the county schools’ statewide ranking had slipped since conservative activists took control of the board. “The focus came off of academic performance,” she said.

Cole said a close friend’s conservative parents voted for liberal school board candidates “because they were tired of the chaos” that Moms for Liberty had brought. The coalition, Cole said, was “not right v left, not parents v students, not students v teachers.” Cole added: “We were able to organize as a community coalition of people who are sick and tired of political games being played with our students and our education, and want a better change for the future.”

Glover faces a district that has dealt with book-ban battles and faces funding cuts as a statewide school voucher program pulls money from public schools.

“We have a big challenge coming up,” Glover said. “We’re coming out of a time when culture wars and personal agendas dominated the headlines, so we have a lot of work to do.”

He and the organizers behind him said they are optimistic — not just about Sarasota, but about the country as a whole. “If it can happen here,” Martinez said of the August victories, “it can happen anywhere.”