Right-wing attempts to take over school boards in Durham, North Carolina, and in several New York counties largely failed in elections Tuesday. The losses come amid Republican efforts to turn the existence of public education itself into a culture war using racism, LGBTQ kids, and pandemic safety measures as their weapons—and as Democrats fail to push back aggressively to protect the values under attack or to capitalize on what could be a winning issue.
In Durham’s nonpartisan school board election, a stealth slate of five Republicans running under the name “Better Board, Better Schools, Better Futures” were defeated. One of the candidates, Joetta MacMiller, went to Washington, D.C., to protest the presidential election certification on Jan. 6, 2021, and wrote on social media that she had been tear gassed. Another, Curtis Hrischuk, posted climate denial and conspiracy theories about George Soros. A third, Gayathri Rajaraman, said she didn’t want elementary school kids learning history, telling INDY Week that U.S. schools are “distracting and overwhelming them with social topics such as racism, [gender identity] and political viewpoints in school classrooms,” and should be focusing on math and science instead.
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While all five of the Better Board, Better Schools candidates were defeated, their ability to run a stealth campaign was a result of state-level Republican maneuvering in North Carolina. State law there calls for school board elections to be nonpartisan, EQV Analytics noted, but “North Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature has been selectively chipping away at this non-partisan status for partisan advantage, passing special ‘local laws’ that make selected Republican-heavy counties’ school board elections partisan while leaving Democrat-heavy counties’ elections non-partisan, with the effect of promoting Republican control in GOP-heavy counties while enabling potential stealth-Republican inroads into Democratic counties.”
It didn’t work in Durham this time, but it’s yet another way Republicans are trying to rig elections for themselves while screaming that Democrats rigged the 2020 presidential election.
In New York State, dozens of right-wing candidates ran for the school board in several counties, emphasizing the familiar cocktail of opposition to respect for diversity, teaching about race or gender, and pandemic precautions. It wasn’t a clean sweep, but, the Albany Times-Union reported, “by 11:15 p.m. Tuesday 27 of those candidates had lost and four candidates had won.”
The defeat of most of the “parents’ rights” candidates came amid unusually high turnout, with some voters saying that, yes, they came out to vote in order to oppose the right-wing candidates.
”We haven’t voted since our kids graduated from high school,” one Schenectady voter told the Times-Union, but “We don’t want any books banned from the library. And we don’t want religion in the schools. We need people to be educated. We need it for our democracy.”
The results in Durham and New York state aren’t the only recent defeats for right-wing attempts to take over school boards. Something similar happened in New Hampshire in March when, after the state legislature passed a vague law threatening teachers with professional sanctions if anyone didn’t like what they were teaching about race, 29 public education supporters were elected, including in some traditionally conservative towns. Turnout was high there, too.
Republicans have encouraged supporters to storm into school board meetings and used their Fox News platform to set up angry white people as the face of concerned parents everywhere. They’ve made schools a battleground in their latest culture war, proclaiming with absolute confidence that they are representing parents—or the ones who matter, anyway. But in many places, voters are sending a different message.
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