In culture war backlash, Democrats sweep school boards
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.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/11/21/culture-war-democrats-school-boards-00663699