Far-right 'Moms for Liberty' school board candidates lose races in 5 states

08 November 2023

Moms for Liberty (M4L), a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated extremist group that promotes book bans in schools and opposes LGBTQ visibility in education, suffered stinging losses in school board races across the country Tuesday night.

The Daily Beast reported that the group either directly endorsed or promoted school board candidates in six states — Alaska, Iowa, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Virginia — yet lost a bulk of those races with the exception of two in Alaska. M4L had a slate of candidates win elections in Bucks County, Pennsylvania in 2021, but the extreme nature of the group prompted most candidates seeking reelection to ask M4L to not explicitly endorse them. Still, the five Republicans running for the Central Bucks School District that M4L "recommended" voters cast ballots for were swept by Democrats, according to the Beast.

Elsewhere in Bucks County, Republicans running for five open seats in the Pennridge School District — who backed an agenda dubbed "Project Pennridge" that would have required students use bathrooms and play for sports teams associated with their biological sex — were also swept by five Democrats.

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M4L-backed school board candidates also lost big in Loudoun County, Virginia, which is a populous suburb in the Northern part of the state. The beast reported that M4L candidates Michael Rivera, Chris Hodges, and Joe Smith all lost, while Deana Griffiths won by just 185 votes. Liberals now hold six of nine seats after Tuesday night's election.

In Iowa, nine M4L candidates lost their bids for school board seats in five different school districts, including Teri Patrick, who is Moms for Liberty's Polk County chapter president. In 2021, Patrick co-signed a letter seeking to criminally charge the district for making two books about LGBTQ issues available in schools. The letter accused the district of "disseminating pornography to our children."

The Beast further reported that M4L suffered major setbacks in Minnesota, with all four candidates backed by the group losing board of education races in the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan school district. Voters instead reelected three incumbents and one newcomer, with none of the M4L conservatives capturing a double-digit vote share. Meanwhile, voters in North Carolina's Mooresville Graded School District rejected M4L-backed candidate Theresa Knight.

M4L's only electoral success Tuesday night came in Alaska's Matanuska-Susitna (Mat-Su) School District, where unofficial results show incumbents Kathy McCollum and Ole Larson in front of their opponents.

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