Issue #195: A Detailed Look at the 2024 DeSantis School Board Loses
DeSantis tried to flip several school board seats, and failed
Two weeks ago, Florida held its August primaries. Across the state, voters went to the polls to cast ballots for a litany of partisan primaries from Congress, to State House, to county commission. I covered these partisan primaries extensively in my 3-part preview series - which can be found on my main website.
In addition to these primaries, however, were a slew of races for non-partisan local offices. The most prominent of these are city councils and school boards seats. These races are non-partisan by law (except Jacksonville City Council but that’s another story). However, thanks to the actions of Ron DeSantis, these races have become much more partisan in recent years. DeSantis made major efforts to flip seats in 2022 and he came into the 2024 primaries with a list of races he wanted to exert his influence in.
There was only one problem for Ron - he got his ass handed to him this year! So with that, I am going to talk about the 2024 School Board races. This newsletter will cover the key facts, but I have an expanded version on my main website. That link has all the same information below, but includes additional maps and analysis for individual races.
Read the Extended Version here!
With that, lets dig in.
Ron DeSantis vs School Boards
Since becoming Governor in 2019, Ron DeSantis has increasingly sought to mold the state in his image. This has included several blatantly anti-Democratic moves as well as blatantly partisan efforts. These include, but are not limited to
As these efforts went on, DeSantis and the far-right also began a war on public education officials. This article covers much of this history well. It started with COVID and masking decisions, something that DeSantis embraced at first then ran away from as he sought to cultivate the far-right. Then post-COVID, DeSantis and his allies opted to use the LGBT community as a social wedge issue; attacking gay and transgender rights. This also came as the group “Moms for Liberty” - a far-right hate group (as designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center), formed to “protect kids” from “woke ideologies.” I wrote about this issue twice.
Then in 2022, as DeSantis ran for re-election, he endorsed 30 candidates for school boards across Florida. These boards, varying in size by county, are all officially non-partisan. However, DeSantis sought to inject partisanship in them, declaring Florida is “where WOKE goes to die.” Amid a massive resources advantage toward the GOP and a historically bad Democratic turnout (which I discussed here) - most of DeSantis’ candidates won there races.
New conservative majorities were established in places like Brevard and Sarasota; which shortly after fired their superintendents. After 2022, DeSantis was the unquestionably the most powerful politician in Florida. It seemed whoever he put his weight behind was destined to win.
That didn’t last long.
The 2024 Targets
It was not long after the 2022 midterms that DeSantis then turned his eye to 2024. With his disastrous Presidential campaign months away from being announced, DeSantis announced to Fox News in February of 2023 that he had a list of 14 incumbents he wanted to target for defeat. Broken down by party: 8 were Democrats, 3 were Republicans, 3 were independents.
This was just a preliminary list and would evolve with time, but don’t worry I will go over how these races shook out. As the next year and half went on, several other races that would become high-profile targets. However, DeSantis and Mom’s for Liberty would eventually not be the only players in school board races. By 2024, the Florida Democratic Party, still rebuilding after the 2022 disaster that forced out the last chair (read my initial post-2022 takes here), had a string of high-profile wins. Under Chairwoman Nikki Fried and the team that has been built, Democrats worked with candidates to and local orgs to flip the Jacksonville Mayoral Election and House District 35; races you can read about in my archives. Following this, the party announced the Take Back Local campaign for down-ballot races. This program targeted several school board seats for either flipping or defending. Some of these races overlapped with DeSantis targets, while others did not.
Meanwhile, Mom’s for Liberty suffered a major black eye when one of its co-founders, Sarasota School Board member Bridget Ziegler, was implicated in a major sex scandal. In 2024, Florida GOP Chairmanship after Christian Ziegler was forced out when it was revealed he and his wife, Bridget, engaged in a 3-way relationship with other women. The revelation came as Christian was accused of sexual assault by the third woman. While Christian was not charged with assault, the investigation revealed he and Bridget engaged in an open marriage where Bridget sought Christian to sleep with other women and engage in 3-ways with him. Bridget, who is an anti-LGBT voice on the school board, has resisted calls to resign despite her blatant hypocrisy.
It was amid this dynamic that Ron DeSantis would eventually release an official list of endorsed candidates. This included challengers to incumbents and a slew of conservative incumbents facing challenges. This did leave out some of the races DeSantis has discussed targeting back in February of 2023.
At the same time, the Take Back Local campaign announced 11 candidates they were endorsing. Many additional races did not have formal endorsements but were part of broader proxy wars. In some cases Florida Democrats did not endorse because such an endorsement would hurt candidates. The same goes for DeSantis leaving several races off his lists.
The 2024 August Results
Once all the results came in, the story for DeSantis were not good. The results showed that most of the races he got involved in went against his candidates. First thing’s first, how did everything shake out with the initial list of targets he laid out in 2023? The table of results is below.
Of his fourteen targets, EIGHT won re-election, five retired, and one incumbent is in a runoff. Lets take a moment with these results. First off, being unable to directly defeat any incumbent is a major shift from his 2022 success; with one race in a runoff that may give him one win - maybe. The retirement seats also showed mixed results. As the table shows, some seats did not see DeSantis formally endorse anyone.
In addition to these targets, DeSantis made a slew of endorsements for other seats that saw several of his candidates lose. In total DeSantis endorsed 23 candidates directly: only SIX of them won, ELEVEN lost, and SIX are in runoffs. That means for DeSantis needs to win all the runoffs to just pass 50%; far from the strong performance he had in 2022. Meanwhile, the Take Back Local program won SEVEN races, lost TWO, and and has TWO in runoffs. TBL will come out far ahead regardless of these runoffs.
The numbers breakdown is below. I broke down the races based on if it was a race where only DeSantis had staked out a claim, races where he and TBL were involved, or races with just TBL.
Below is a full list of the races were are talking about. Included in this list is a handful of high-profile races not directly tied to Take Back Local or had a DeSantis endorsement. Some races did not have direct involved but had right vs left politics going on in the periphery.
There were so many races here where DeSantis not getting his way is striking. The losses in Sarasota are a major rebuke of the situation out there. The failure to knock off an incumbent in deep-red Indian River, the loss of a conservative incumbent in Pasco.
Now I’ll go over a few key races. I cannot touch on every race, but I have some coverage and maps for several. FAR MORE of these will be on the expanded version of my article: which you can view here. I simply cannot fit everything within substack’s email size limits.
Ok lets take a look.
Sarasota is sick of the drama
It only seems fitting to start with Sarasota County; the site of a major swing in 2022 and still-incumbent Bridget Ziegler’s sex scandal. After the 2022 elections, the board went from 3-2 “liberal” to 4-1 conservative. (I’ll also stress whether a board was liberal or just non-political is open for debate). Conservative Chairwoman Karen Rose ran for another term. She was challenged by Liz Barker, who ran as a moderate beyond partisan politics. Rose was clearly on defense despite being a “moderate conservative” - less outspoken than some of the board’s other members. Rose notably called for Ziegler to resign. However, as an enabler of the conservative majority, she took plenty of brunt for the antics of the board. She also was not free of complaints, as she supported the ouster of the Superintendent when the conservative majority came to power.
Meanwhile, challenger Liz Barker is former longtime school psychologist who has four children in the school district. She came into the race arguing that the district has become bogged down in ideological fights instead of tending to students and managing finances properly. She gained strong Democratic support as well as moderate Republicans. The race got insanely expensive for a school board fight: with candidates spending over $200,000. In the end, Barker won by 3% - OUSTING the Chair.
With this victory, the board would move to a 3-2 conservative majority. Unfortunately moderates could not alter the board further, as the other seat up was held by the board’s lone for-sure Liberal and Democratic member: Tom Edwards.
Edwards, who is openly gay, was one of the incumbents targeted for defeat by DeSantis back in 2023. Shortly after that was announced, Edwards faced a string of homophobic attacks at a school board meeting; including speakers calling him a “groomer.” Edwards defiantly walked out of the meeting and discussed everything with the press. He would formally file for re-election the very next day. When the Ziegler sex scandal broke, Edwards was a major critic of the hypocrisy of Ziegler’s anti-LGBT history.
Despite the target from DeSantis, Republicans never mustered a strong candidate against Edwards. Two candidates filed with Republicans first just hoping to force a runoff. Despite being the lone liberal vote, Edwards very much campaigned on the board being too political and needing to focus on day to day education issues. Edwards raised over $200,000 and opponents Thomas Babicz and Greg Wood not even hitting $30,000. Despite the initial threat by DeSantis, opposition to Edwards remained weak and the incumbent managed to secure 56% of the vote.
This vote, along with the Rose loss, shows how frustrated Sarasota voters were with the antics of the last two years. This is still a reliably Republican county. The results show, however, that many Republican voters in Sarasota want less drama and politics in the district debates.
Pinellas County Rejects MFL
Over in Pinellas, a preverbal swing county in Florida, the results for DeSantis were a disaster. He targeted Board Chair Laura Hine, an independent with moderate and left-wing support. To take her out, Danielle Marolf was endorsed by the governor At the time, the Pinellas School board is not in conservative hands, and Marolf openly talked on the trail about “flipping” the board. Marolf openly ran as a conservative candidate while Hine focused on keeping politics as out of the school board as possible.
Despite being a near-even county in 2020 and a big win for DeSantis in 2022, Laura Hine easily bested Danielle Marolf; winning across the county.
Hine was strongest in the Democratic-heavy Southeast, but had big margins in the county’s northern Republican epicenter. Only one precinct tied; with none going to Marolf. This is a definitive landslide.
Things were no better for Team DeSantis in the single-member districts of the county. Up in the 4th; which covers the hyper-Republican north end of the county, another DeSantis challenger fell. Independent incumbent Eileen Long was targeted by Erica Picard, who secured DeSantis’ endorsement. Like the countywide race, Picard campaigned on conservative values. She also repeated a long-debunked conspiracy about “kids identifying as cat.”
Ok so if you have no idea what that is, I am so sorry for what I am about to explain. Sooooo as part of the completely insane anti-transgender movement, which insists any kid can be convinced to just “become transgender,” a joke went around that kids were identifying as cats and using LITTER BOXES in classrooms. This was a joke and I’m not even sure of its origin and if it was meant to mock transgender people or mock the over-reaction of anti-transgender critics. Either way, some conservatives started thinking it was a real story that is actually happening. So sure enough, Picard at one point said “have you heard about…….” and here we are. Of course any conservative repeating it is trying to make an anti-transgender argument that “kids can be convinced of anything.” Have I mentioned conservatives are fucking weird?
Anyway, Picard LOST her bid to unseat Eileen Long by 9 points!
It cannot be stressed how Republican this area is. It has long been the conservative bastion of the area. However, Picard proved to be a bridge too far.
In a district just below the 4th, a DeSantis-backed candidate was forced into a runoff. That race, for an open seat, I will cover in the fall. It will feature a DeSantis-backed Stacy Geier vs a moderate Republican Katie Blaxberg; giving Democrats the ability to rally and stop any DeSantis-backed candidates from winning in Pinellas.
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Ok that will cover the district-specific coverage or this piece. Like I said, far more races are covered in my expanded article.
Final Thoughts
Back in 2022, Ron DeSantis decided to make school board races a major focus of his brand. He rode a massive re-election wave and flipped many seats; all done to try and cement his status as a Presidential frontrunner. Well, two years later, after his Presidential campaign crashed to earth, his brand is clearly weakened in Florida. DeSantis went from 25-5 in school board races to current sitting at 5 wins, 6 losses, and 5 runoffs. He can sweep November and still be far from his 2020 strength.
The results also reflect a continued re-emerge of Florida Democratic operations. It comes after the Jacksonville Mayor and House 35 flips. No doubt Florida Republicans and DeSantis still control the state; holding far more resources than combined Democratic efforts. However, we are clearly well past the 2022 height of DeSantis power.