Among these liberal groups are the Campaign for Our Shared Future Action Fund, who have backed several dozen candidates, including in races in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia in 2023. In 2022, they spent around $100,000 on school board campaigns and endorsed 38 school board “liberal-leaning” candidates, as reported by Education Week. “We are looking at where there have been school board disruptions that started off with reactions to masking during the pandemic and students going back to school,” the group’s political director, Joaquín Guerra, told Prism Reports earlier this year. “That’s where all of the disruptions around schools and public education really started. Then it evolved into the manufacture of hysteria around critical race theory. That just started a whole whack-a-mole for all of the attacks on equity, social emotional learning, LGBTQIA+ students.” They are one of several groups that are getting more into the school board race fight, like Run for Something, who have pledged $10 million to support progressive school board candidates in 2024 and 2025, and like the nonpartisan 501c4 We the People for Education. The latter group’s executive director, Tiffany Van Der Hyde, has said their goal is partly “to make school boards boring again.”
A typical race might look like the one in Henrico County, Virginia, in which high school teacher Madison Irving, endorsed by Run for Something and the Campaign for Our Shared Future, was vying for a seat against Eleina Espigh, who has described herself as “anti-mask, anti-vax, anti-abortion … the school board’s worst enemy.”Irving defeated Espigh on Tuesday: 10,108 votes to 7,484. One schoolteacher who voted for Irving told the Henrico Citizen that she had canvassed for him too, in part because “I don’t think that [Irving] stands for any type of banning of books. He wants all children to be represented.” Another voter said he cast a vote for Irving largely because “Republicans suck.”
This race, like others that played out this week, illustrates a broader principle. These campaigns don’t have to be complicated in order to prevail; when the Republican-based candidates are so openly unhinged, their opposition need only not be. Some liberal candidates are parents themselves who want to push back on what they and their children have experienced during the far-right swing on school boards and education policy generally. Moms for Liberty became a useful shorthand for all they were running against.