Moms for Liberty is Supporting Candidates Differently This Election Cycle
Moms for Liberty is Supporting Candidates Differently This Election Cycle
As Election Day 2024 approaches, controversial “parental rights” group Moms for Liberty seems to be taking a different approach than it did in previous cycles. The group has been more subtle in its endorsement and support of candidates— particularly school board candidates— this time around.
On its official national website, the group has shared a short list of candidates for various offices who have signed its “Moms for Liberty Pledge,” as well as another relatively short list of eighty-four state candidates it has endorsed across twelve states (Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, and Wyoming).
For comparison, according to Brookings, in 2023 the organization endorsed 166 candidates on its website (though it later claimed it endorsed 202 in total). According to Brookings’ analysis, only 33% of those candidates won their races in 2023, compared with 47% of Moms for Liberty’s endorsees winning in 2022.
But chapters in South Carolina (and presumably other states) have seemed to rely this year more on word-of-mouth campaigns and private social media pages than on the kinds of bigger public endorsements they embraced in previous years.
There are two likely reasons for this new strategy.
The group did much more poorly than expected nationally in getting candidates elected last time around.
As Jack Schneider and Jennifer Berkshire argue in their book Education Wars, being anti-public school is an inherently unpopular platform. The group has increasingly embraced a slate of positions most voters likely understand will harm public schools:
school “choice” (vouchers and other funding for private and religious alternative education
“parental rights” (in the form of attacks on traditional elected school board governance, school staff, librarians, and teachers
censorship of books (primarily books on LGBTQ+ people and systemic racism
a growing embrace of white Christian nationalism (with, for example, local South Carolina groups supporting an amendment to the State Constitution largely perceived as a functionally meaningless, symbolic attack on immigrants)
participation in creating the Heritage Foundations’s radical 2025 Project plan (as one of its official “advisory board” members).
These are positions that don’t have broad appeal, and this is reflected in the group’s local social media pages, which are often made up of a relatively small number of people with a few passionate and politically radical voices monopolizing most of the conversation.
Moms for Liberty has also faced mounting controversies that potentially make its endorsements poisonous in more moderate and progressive districts.
The group is coming off a series of unforced errors and a growing awareness that their “parental rights” rhetoric doesn’t tend to serve most parents:
An Indiana chapter quoted Hitler in a message attacking public schools.
The group was labeled an “extremist group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its anti-LGBTQ+ views and opposition to “racially inclusive school curriculum”.
One of the group’s founders was involved in a political sex scandal that is only noteworthy because of how often the group has targeted “sexuality” in books as a way of eliminating LGBTQ+ representation in school libraries, and because it highlights the group’s foundational connections to the establishment GOP (and, of course, because the Zeigler’s husband, former Florida GOP Chairman Christian Zeigler, has been accused of sexual assault).
The group initially presented itself as nonpartisan, before eagerly embracing far-right conspiracy theorists and hosting right-wing figures like Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.
The group increasingly moved away from rhetoric that supported the rights of “all parents” to make choices for their own families to rhetoric more explicitly prioritizing straight, white, Christian nuclear families. (Zeigler, for example, was a strong supporter of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill.)
This may be a factor in the group making fewer formal endorsements.
In South Carolina, the national organization has only formally endorsed five candidates: Catherine Huddle, Jason Baynham, Cliff Springs, Abbot “Tre” Bray, Robert Hamilton. (Notably, Huddle and Baynham, along with Ken Loveless, were supported by the group Deafeating Communism, a Super PAC which Baynham and Loveless collectively gave $15,000 in donations. The group took an approach to the campaign similar to the Moms for Liberty playbook, overtly smearing a local teacher, Mary Wood, who was not running for office.)
Nine South Carolina candidates have also signed the Moms for Liberty pledge to uphold “parental rights”. (These include both Huddle and Superintendent of Education Ellen Weaver.) The fact that only nine candidates in a GOP-dominated state have signed the pledge again suggests that the group has become at least somewhat toxic, politically.
In most of the SC counties represented as having chapters on the national Moms for Liberty website, there is either no county-specific page (instead, the map takes users to a page which has read “chapter pages coming soon” for at least a year) or a page without specific information about endorsements or candidates.
A previous version of the Greenville, SC, Moms for Liberty chapter’s page has disappeared from the website, but a web search description shows that Greenville School Board incumbent candidate Sarah Dulin was listed as an officer in the organization before the link was broken.
Other candidates have been publicly supported by local chapters. Anderson County’s Moms for Liberty chapter, which was involved last school year in a campaign to dox local librarians, has endorsed a slate of candidates publicly. Several of these candidates have proudly shared the endorsement on their public pages.
In Charleston County, where the group saw some of its biggest electoral successes in past elections, Moms for Liberty has openly supported Ed Kelley and Michele Leber. As the Post and Courier recently reported,
Ed Kelley stands apart as the most problematic member of the board. In 2023, the board voted 6-1 to censure him after allegations that he implicitly threatened to shoot a teacher. It’s a complicated story, but his eventual denial came only after he claimed inaccurately that state law barred him from discussing the matter.
Some candidates are eager to distance themselves from the group.
But in significantly less-conservative Richland County, the local chapter has declined to endorse anyone, despite openly seeking candidates for endorsement earlier in the campaign.
This raises the question of whether candidate simply didn’t feel being associated with the group would help them, or have rejected the group’s platform on a personal level.
In a private message to a member of its Facebook page, the chair of Moms for Liberty—Richland said some candidates reached out about endorsements but never completed the group’s process. (Richland County generally leans Democratic, but is by no means some kind of liberal bubble. The mayor of Columbia, for example, is widely considered a moderate Republican., and the past several years have seen tight House races between Republicans and Democrats in the county.)
Richland Two School Board candidate Gary Dennis has publicly clarified he is not endorsed by the group, after joining its private Facebook page and identifying himself as a candidate over eight months ago. And he evidently did not seek out an endorsement or complete the group’s endorsement process.
Dennis has said he is concerned about depictions of “sexual experiences” in content used in schools, but that he disagreed with most of the book challenges made last week at the State Board of Education. He seems to be seeking a middle ground between the group’s version of “parental rights” and the values of many of its critics.
Ultimately, Richland County’s Moms for Liberty chapter chair Melissa McFadden recommended Larry Smalls and LaShonda McFadden in personal messages, and not Dennis.
Moms for Liberty’s agenda doesn’t seem as popular as it once was.
That a Moms for Liberty endorsement is likely a liability for moderate conservatives (and certainly for candidates in more moderate or liberal areas) is an indicator that the group’s positions are not shared by the majority of voters in most places. But it is noteworthy that some candidates even in much more moderate parts of the state still don’t want to alienate these relatively small groups.
While it’s hard to estimate how many active participants there are in each county, there are only 198 members of the Moms for Liberty—Richland Facebook group. There are 275 in much-more-conservative Pickens County, 1,300 in Charleston County, 534 in Anderson County, and 121 in Horry County. (A page for Colleton County seems to be defunct. The page has been paused, and a post from January from an admin reads, “Moms for Liberty is actively seeking a new leader for this group”.)
A list of known South Carolina Moms for Liberty endorsees and pledge signers can be found here, but, again, there are other candidates who seem to be courting both the extreme Moms for Liberty vote and more mainstream votes, suggesting that they believe the group still has some political juice. And the local groups themselves are using word-of-mouth endorsements in many cases, with members of the private Facebook groups often crowd-sourcing opinions from other members of the groups about who to support.
If you haven’t done so already and are registered, please don’t forget to vote on Tuesday! The future direction of our public schools, our communities, and our country will be largely decided by those votes. And in school board races in particular, a small number of people can truly decide the outcome.
Vote411 (a project of the nonpartisan League of Women Voters) is an excellent resource if you’re still researching candidates.
Two years ago, Moms for Liberty York County had signs on every corner endorsing four school board candidates. One of them won a seat.
This year, they won’t acknowledge their single endorsed candidate OR the fact that she is on their leadership team.
They’re on a sinking ship and are trying desperately to hide it from everyone how unpopular and unsuccessful they are.
Sarah Dulin is already on the Greenville County School Board, and voted to ban books.