DeSantis School-Board Endorsements Are Duds
In deep red Florida, most of Gov. DeSantis-endorsed school board candidates went belly up in the recent primaries.
The Summer 2024 zeitgeist is, arguably, embracing change of fortune. Presidential polling in early July, for example, had GOP nominee Donald Trump notably, if not comfortably, ahead of Democratic incumbent Joe Biden. Today, it seems Trump may be trailing his new Democratic competition, Vice President Kamala Harris.
In Florida, change of fortune may be seen in the lackluster primary showings of school board candidates endorsed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who has been leading his state into ever redder waters.
“The results are clear: Floridians are tired of the politics of rage and division,” offered Stratton Pollitzer, chair of Equality Florida Action PAC, a leader of the state’s LGBTQ advocacy, in a statement following the primaries. “Voters across the state – Democrats, Independents, and moderate Republicans – stood up to reject the extreme candidates backed by DeSantis and his allies.”
Under Florida voting rules, any single candidate winning a simple majority in the school board primaries wins the seat. Absent that simple majority, the two candidates winning the most votes will face off in November’s general election.
Among the 23 DeSantis-endorsed candidates, 11 lost, six won, and six will head into the general election.
Incumbent Allison Crumbley of Pasco County was one of those DeSantis-backed losers. The winner, who will take her school board seat in November, is Jessica Wright.
While the school board races are technically nonpartisan, this is of particular interest in such a ruby-red county. During the 2020 presidential election, NBC News political analyst Steve Kornacki stepped in front of the “big board” map of vote tallies to zero in on Pasco during an episode of Morning Joe.
“Take a look at Pasco County,” Kornacki instructed his audience, sharing margins of GOP wins. In 2012, the county went for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama, 53 percent to 46. Come 2016, Trump took the county by an even bigger margin, 59 percent to Hillary Clinton’s 37. Trump’s 2020 win in Pasco earned him 60 percent of the vote.
As reported by Suncoast News, “the school board election had been expected to be a low-key campaign. … Things heated up, though, after Wright began sending text messages to registered voters blasting Crumbley and the rest of the board for failure to lead on several issues, including her own lawsuit against the district.
“Crumbley’s supporters began pushing back, blasting Wright as a liberal Democrat who only recently switched her registration to no-party affiliation. Wright briefly helped run the 2022 campaign of failed board candidate James Washington, who championed LGBTQ+ issues among other topics.”
“It all came from these ghost PAC’s trying to paint me as some sort of leftist extremist, which I’m just not,” Wright, a 34-year old teacher, mother of two, and longtime Pasco resident, told Metro Weekly.
Some of the heat came from the notoriously anti-LGBTQ Moms for Liberty, even if Wright says she’s been able to work productively with some individuals associated with the group.
In early August, Wright took to Facebook to push back on Moms for Liberty’s claim that she refused their interview request.
Wright confirmed that claim, adding, “I have declined to meet with Moms for Liberty. I also want to be clear that I was part of the volunteer group that helped Southern Poverty Law Center identify them as a hate group. I will not stand for bullying or doxxing our kids or staff.”
Speaking of DeSantis and his so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law limiting discussion of LGBTQ topics, Wright, who has no party affiliation, sees her own position as fairly moderate.
“Anytime we’re passing legislation that can specifically target any group of people, I think it’s concerning,” she says. “I don’t want to hypersexualize children, but I do also want to make sure that kids feel safe when they walk through my classroom door. If you’re asking me if I agree with the governor overall, no, I don’t.
“I want kids to have access to books. But my kids are 8 and 9 years old. Do I want them to pick up Gender Queer? No, I don’t. But that’s not in our schools. Do I think that should exist in a public library or a bookstore? Sure. I believe in freedom of speech, absolutely. We have a responsibility to make sure things are age-appropriate and developmentally appropriate, but we’ve always had that.”
While Wright’s is one of the more surprising change-of-fortune upsets in this recent round of elections, she’s hesitant to read anything into it beyond the county line. She will say, however, that appealing to moderates is a solid strategy.
“Statistically, we’re in a very red county,” she says. “We actually have more [No Party Affiliation] than we do Dems. But when you’re talking to voters, when you look at our races historically, they also go moderate. They never go extreme.”
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