Florida Culture Warriors Just Suffered A Major Blow

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ attempt to take over school boards in Florida fell flat on Tuesday night. Only six of the 23 candidates he endorsed won their races, and another six are headed to runoffs in November, while the DeSantis-linked Moms for Liberty, a far-right organization, saw wins from just seven of the 14 candidates they had backed.

It was a major setback for the culture warriors in Florida who have been working tirelessly to transform the state’s public schools into a haven for their ultra-conservative and extreme ideas.

DeSantis, a Donald Trump acolyte, took office in 2018. After winning by a decisive margin in 2022, the governor supercharged his culture war agenda, signing a flurry of bills designed to target people of color and the LGBTQ+ community. He championed the ” Stop WOKE Act ,” which censors what teachers can say in the classroom about race, and the “Don’t Say Gay” bill , a measure that prohibited educators from talking about sexual orientation and gender identity. (He also picked a fight with Disney after the company half-heartedly came out against the measure.)

There was a time when it seemed like the far-right message pushed by DeSantis and Moms for Liberty was poised to completely take over Florida’s school boards.

“They were able to take advantage of the fact that people weren’t paying attention to school board races,” Maya Henson Carey, a research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told HuffPost. “They were able to play on the politics of fear.”

In 2022, DeSantis was considered a top presidential contender; when he endorsed candidates in 25 school board races, nearly all of them won. That fall, he beat Democratic nominee Charlie Crist by 19 points and won his reelection bid for