The party recruited and invested in school board races to oust Republicans. It worked.
In Cypress, Texas, a Houston-area suburb that lures families with its high-quality education, Republicans used their two years of control on the school board to ban textbook chapters on climate change, diversity and vaccines.
This month, Democrats took over the majority, picking up three seats on the school board and ending the conservative reign.
From Texas to Pennsylvania to Ohio, Democrat-backed candidates ran successful campaigns in some of the nation’s largest school systems and in political battlegrounds. They emphasized test scores and bus safety over debates about which bathrooms transgender students use and banning books from school libraries. The result was a set of election results at the local level that accentuated the punishment meted out against Republicans by swing voters earlier this month. Those results were accentuated by Democrats’ strong showing across the nation, as Americans issued a stinging repudiation of the party in power.
In Pennsylvania, Democrats flipped at least two dozen school board seats, per an ongoing tally from progressive recruitment group Pipeline Fund. The under-the-radar trend was enabled by voters’ increasing weariness with the culture wars that helped the MAGA movement engineer school board takeovers and generate hyper-local interest in politics as the Covid-19 pandemic raged.
In addition to Texas, Republicans lost seats in the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio, and the national battleground of Pennsylvania — the result of well-funded campaigns orchestrated by local leaders. School board races are typically nonpartisan, but candidates receive endorsements and financial backing from partisan groups.
“Folks just want their school boards to be boring again,” said Lesley Guilmart, one of the newly elected members in Cypress-Fairbanks. “They want normalcy. Once the board was taken over by a super partisan extremist majority, folks across the political spectrum were dismayed.”
After facing years of setbacks in school board races, especially during the post-Covid era of educational culture wars, Democrats became motivated to recruit candidates to run more professional campaigns with national cash.
“It’s no longer the PTA,” said Odus Evbagharu, the campaign manager of the Cypress-Fairbanks Democratic slate of candidates. A Cypress native running for the state House, Evbagharu put together a campaign focused on fundraising and voter outreach. “You can’t just do it off hope. Hope is not a strategy.”
The issues animating the GOP takeover of school boards originated from grassroots organizations like Moms for Liberty, which formed to oppose school closures and mask mandates for children during Covid. In trying to control school boards throughout the country, these groups pushed members to argue that public school curricula had become too progressive. Republicans used the energy around those fights to win at every level of the ballot, catching Democrats by surprise.
Parents were also motivated to take up fights over the teachings of “critical race theory,” inclusion of trans students in school sports and empowering students to pick their preferred pronouns. Many of the book bans were based on eliminating from school libraries sexual content that opponents deemed inappropriate for children.
Those debates made their way to the presidential level last cycle. Ron DeSantis, who elevated the influence of Moms for Liberty as governor of Florida, leveraged his “war” on “woke” for his own failed presidential aspirations. Donald Trump’s closing message going after Kamala Harris on trans rights ended up being one of his most effective attack ads of the 2024 campaign cycle.
Now the culture wars harnessed by Republicans to gain power nationally and locally are fading in importance for voters worried about rising costs. Only 4 percent of Virginia voters listed transgender policies in schools as a top issue in their choice for governor this year, per a Washington Post-Schar School poll. Democrat Abigail Spanberger resoundingly won that race. And other issues, like rising concerns about school safety, rank higher for parents deciding on school board candidates.
Culture war battles sharply decreased in 2024 from their peak the year prior, according to an analysis from the Cato Institute. Neal McCluskey, director of the institute’s Center for Educational Freedom, said 2025 is on track to have around the same number of battles as last year — although conflict remains higher than it was before Covid.
“Covid went away, and the dissatisfaction with school districts abated. It’s not totally gone, but it lessened,” McCluskey said. “I think we’re more at a fatigue level.”
Still, some Republicans don’t view this month’s races as a sign that voters are rebuffing these base-energizing issues around parental involvement. As Republicans this month faltered in Virginia, in left-leaning Loudoun County — where prominent debates have unfolded over allowing transgender students to use restrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity — a conservative school board candidate flipped a seat, which she attributed in part to concerns over the policy.
Ryan Girdusky, founder of the 1776 Project, a PAC that backs conservative school board candidates, blamed Republican losses on the off-cycle blue wave in which voters resoundingly rejected the party in power.
“In states where there wasn’t a gubernatorial election, there was a complete difference when it comes to overall turnout,” Girdusky said. “Democrats are very ginned up about showing up, and Republicans didn’t know there was an election in a lot of places, and that had something to do with it.”
In Texas, conservatives’ decision to ban 13 chapters of state-approved textbooks roiled the Cypress community. Critics say it distracted from addressing the districts’ $45 million deficit and other pressing issues.
So Democrats there ran a campaign focused on eliminating politics from schools and returning the school board to its basic purpose. Candidates spent a lot of time door-knocking and fundraising, and benefited from a six-figure investment from local PACs. They worked to turn out new voters in the diverse community.
“Americans writ large don’t want this divisive political climate,” said Becky Pringle, president of the National Education Association, which got involved in races across the country. In Minnesota, 94 percent of the association’s candidates won.
Electing Democrats to school boards is a major goal of the Pipeline Fund, a liberal group focused on down-ballot races. That organization recruited and trained school board candidates in 12 states. In Pennsylvania, 43 of 49 of their candidates won in 15 counties, including in some rural, conservative areas like Lancaster County. In Ohio, 18 of 22 candidates won.
Pipeline Fund, which also recruits for other offices like state legislatures, plans to add another 21 states to its target map ahead of the midterms, when thousands of school board races will be on the ballot. The group’s founder and executive director, Denise Feriozzi, believes success at this level of the ballot is key to changing negative perceptions around Democrats when voters see them being focused on improving public schools rather than social issues.
“When you have a Democratic brand that is suffering, you can show people what it actually looks like to be a Democrat in Mobile, Alabama, and Anchorage, Alaska,” Feriozzi said.
In purple Central Bucks County, Pennsylvania — once the epicenter of the conservative wave in school leadership — Democrats built on their gains from 2023, when they overtook the Republican majority.
“National politics is very performative, but local politics is very personal,” said Daniel Kimicata, one of the Democrats elected to the Central Bucks school board, which is partisan. “One of the messages that really resonated with voters was that there is no national political agenda that we’re bringing to the school board.”
Some blame those national dynamics for dragging them down this year.
In the nonpartisan race for New Jersey’s Ocean City Board of Education, a slate that touted endorsements from conservative groups Moms for Liberty and Turning Point USA lost. Democrats saw high turnout across New Jersey, where Mikie Sherrill’s blowout performance in the gubernatorial race led to down-ballot gains, even in some redder areas. In Ocean City, where the GOP-backed school board slate faltered, Republican candidate Jack Ciattarelli outperformed Sherrill.
“For many parents, those endorsements signaled a strong commitment to parental involvement and transparency in public education,” Robin Shaffer, who was on the losing slate along with two incumbents, said in an email. He said they were “proud” to have those organizations’ support, but added, “for others, those associations carried national-level baggage and triggered intense backlash based on misconceptions about our actual views.”
Further up the ballot, Republicans also failed on culture war messages that helped deliver past wins.
Virginia Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears spent millions of dollars on anti-transgender messaging in her unsuccessful race against Spanberger. And Ciattarelli advocated against transgender athletes in girls’ sports and vowed to “implement a true Parents’ Bill of Rights” and “reform requirements for sexual and social education.”
“Republicans thought it was an effective strategy, because it represented the values of their party, like ‘We’re looking out for you, and Democrats are looking out for this niche group,’” said Chris Cormier Maggiano, a board member of pro-LGBTQ+ PAC Fight for Our Rights, which focuses primarily on state legislatures. “And I think that narrative has now flipped.”
Juan Perez contributed to this report.