Revolt of the Parents, Vol. 3 The GOP is winning local races over Covid policies and curriculum.
America’s fed-up parents on Tuesday sent another set of school board incumbents to the timeout corner to reflect on what they’ve done wrong. This time the elections were in Waukesha, Wis., a suburb of Milwaukee. The races were nonpartisan officially, yet it was a win for a slate backed by the state and local GOP.
Three Waukesha school incumbents lost their seats, one in the primary, two on Tuesday. “Our children have endured an awful lot in the past two years navigating a pandemic that unleashed mandates, restrictive rules, remote learning and constant changes to their normal school routine,” one of the winning challengers, Mark Borowski, says on his website. He also criticizes—and he ran against—“equity initiatives” that “infiltrated district curriculum,” while dividing students and “espousing falsehoods about America.”
The incumbents protested that Mr. Borowski and the other challengers were running on national GOP talking points. But the arguments had local resonance.
Last year a Waukesha kindergarten teacher was suspended for a day after she refused to take down a gay and transgender pride flag she had hung in her classroom. The local teachers union urged staff to wear rainbows in solidarity. Parents could be forgiven for wondering about this seeming focus on ideological activism instead of education.
More news from Tuesday: Down the highway in Kenosha, Wis., sadly famous for the rioting of 2020, a Republican won the county executive seat for the first time in decades. Could the riots and their aftermath have mobilized voters to make a change?
In Norman, Okla., home of the University of Oklahoma, incumbent mayor Breea Clark lost. The election was officially nonpartisan, but the incumbent had been criticized for her Covid-19 policies. “We were the first to put a mask mandate in place, the last to remove it,” she boasted. She also moved to cut police funding amid the 2020 racial protests.
These are local races with local dynamics, but the themes echo what has happened elsewhere. Last year Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governorship with help from parents upset at being told they should have no say in what their children are taught. In February three school-board members in San Francisco, of all places, were recalled in a landside. Amid Covid the board was preoccupied with trying to rename schools, rather than pushing to reopen them.
November is a long way off, but surprises like these results are often signals that something larger is stirring in the electorate. The outcomes in Waukesha, Kenosha and Norman could be another sign that the people’s revolt against progressive ideology might be as broad as Republicans hope and Democrats fear.
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