In culture war backlash, Democrats sweep school boards

Politico ^ | 11/21/2025 | Liz Crampton and Madison Fernandez

[MinorityRepublican]

In Cypress, Texas, a Houston-area suburb that lures families with its high-quality education, Republicans used their two years of control on the school board to ban textbook chapters on climate change, diversity and vaccines.

This month, Democrats took over the majority, picking up three seats on the school board and ending the conservative reign.

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.

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TOPICS: Education; Society
KEYWORDS: democrats; education; schoolboards

[drypowder]

Democrats will lie, cheat and steal to win elections any way they can. The parents of those democrat heavy school boards will soon be sorry that they fell for their BS lies.

[cowboyusa]

Biden still had a reputation as a more moderate labor oriented Democrat, although he trashed that as president.

[Salman]

Death penalty for child castrators.

That does not directly address the story, but it's very relevant.

[Reily]

In my state and I believe that its true in most states school board elections are always at a time when there’s no partisan election. Meaning not during the 2-year midterms and the 4-year full term. The theory behind this is to remove “partisanship” from school board elections. Doing this does such a good job of removing “partisanship” that “partisanship” sneaks through the back door! Educrats and their teacher union sycophants then hustle out their mindless marching mommies to get to the polls and get their candidate elected. This is completely our own fault for letting this happen!

[odawg]

Strange, I heard just the opposite of who won the school boards.

[sphinx]

Surely Politico wouldn’t mislead us????

If we can’t trust journalists, who can we trust?