- Grassroots organizations that prioritize parental rights in education saw several endorsed candidates in Wisconsin and Illinois win their school board elections.
- Across the two states, 30 of 1776 Project PAC endorsed school board candidates won their races and nearly half of Moms for Liberty’s candidates won their races, the organizations told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
- “We maintained the supermajority in the Wisconsin State Senate and we won on all the ballot proposals related to crime and welfare use. We won a majority of all the school boards that we campaigned at for Conservative candidates. And all of those things happened very successfully in Illinois. I think that that’s something that we can hang our hat on and say it was a positive point of the night,” Ryan James Girdusky, founder of the 1776 Project PAC, told the DCNF.
Two grassroots organizations focused on parental rights in education saw several of their endorsed school board candidates pick up wins in key battleground states.
Moms for Liberty, a coalition of parents working towards transparency in education, and the 1776 Project PAC, a political group that helps school board members against Critical Race Theory get elected, saw several endorsed candidates win their school board race on Tuesday. Their wins in Wisconsin and Illinois are the beginning of conservative school board candidates’ victories in 2023, the organizations told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“As we saw in Wisconsin last night, even when the Conservative Supreme Court Justice was not successful and lost in a blowout election, Conservatives won on issues and they won down ballot,” Ryan James Girdusky, founder of the 1776 Project PAC, told the DCNF. “We maintained the supermajority in the Wisconsin State Senate and we won on all the ballot proposals related to crime and welfare use. We won a majority of all the school boards that we campaigned at for Conservative candidates. And all of those things happened very successfully in Illinois. I think that that’s something that we can hang our hat on and say it was a positive point of the night.”
Across Illinois and Wisconsin, 30 of 1776 Project PAC endorsed school board candidates won their races, Girdusky told the DCNF. Over the last two years, about 133 candidates endorsed by the organization have won their school board races.
Most notably in Illinois, two 1776 Project PAC candidates in Minooka School District claimed seats on the school board while both candidates, Michael Houston and Michael Knoll, in the Yorkville Community School District won their elections, according to the organization.
“It doesn’t sound like a lot, 133, but when you magnify it by how many students there are, it’s millions and millions of students who have districts where they are not working to indoctrinate them, or there is someone pushing back on efforts to indoctrinate them,” Girdusky told the DCNF. “The one thing about local elections is that they are coming up very heavily this year. I think 29 states have school board elections this year and this is just the first two.”
So far, Moms for Liberty’s endorsed candidates were able to notch victories in Wisconsin, as eight candidates won seats across four school boards, the organization told the DCNF.
“We are excited that eight candidates that our chapters endorsed won last night in Wisconsin,” Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich, Moms for Liberty co-founders, said in a statement to the DCNF. “We are hopeful that as more people learn about Moms For Liberty and contribute to our PAC, we will be able to win more races. We endorsed in another 20 races – the majority of those were first time candidates – who did not win last night, and that just gives us a great bench of folks to have trained and ready to run again to fight for parental rights in future elections.”
Throughout 2022, Moms for Liberty was able to endorse more than 500 school board candidates, with 275 candidates winning their elections and 72% of first time candidates notching victories, the organization told the DCNF. The organization flipped the majority of several school boards in Florida, California and South Carolina in the last year.
People and members of “Moms For Liberty” group attend a campaign event for Jacqueline Rosario in Vero Beach, Florida, on October 16, 2022. (Photo by GIORGIO VIERA/AFP via Getty Images)
School boards across the country are in the middle of a culture war over lessons focusing on gender identity and Critical Race Theory (CRT); in California, a school board voted to ban CRT from the classroom after flipping to a conservative majority. In their first meeting, six South Carolina school board members endorsed by Moms for Liberty set up a process to eliminate sexually explicit books from the school libraries.
Though 1776 Project PAC does not make school board candidates give a list of promises or instruct them on how to vote, the organization hopes to see the new members bring forth policies that give parents rights within the classroom, Girdusky told the DCNF. (RELATED: House Passes Legislation To Give Parents More Say In Their Kids’ Education)
“Depending upon if they’re in the majority or the minority or whatever the case is, we’re going to hopefully see efforts to really bring parents’ bills of rights locally, and get them involved and really work on making sure that a woke agenda doesn’t really move into areas that it hasn’t and that it’s pushed back on in areas that it has,” Girdusky told the DCNF.
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