Interesting hypothesis from the Chron.
Several conservative candidates with right-wing support lost their bids for Houston-area school boards Saturday night, a change that some experts said could reflect dissatisfaction with the current state of national politics.
Even though school boards are supposed to be nonpartisan entities, many ultra-conservative candidates have been elected with support from outside political organizations and large private donations, leading to book bans, censorship of instructional material and restrictive gender policies. In Katy, Fort Bend and other districts across Texas, trustees who supported those conservative policies, lost their bids for re-election.
“You could call it a kind of a mini-reactionary bump … A lot of voters may choose to go vote because this is the only way that they can show their displeasure at the current moment,” University of Houston political science professor Brandon Rottinghaus said. “(It’s) a global factor that would definitely produce an outcome where you have more moderate to liberal candidates winning.”
[…]
With Cross and Redmon winning their [Katy ISD] elections, parent Anne Russey, co-founder of the Texas Freedom to Read Project, said she hopes the board will stabilize over the coming months.
“We’ve been in the news a lot for controversial, and kind of embarrassing things, and I think people are tired of that,” Russey said. “The majority of people in Katy love our schools. We love our teachers. We support public education. And just to continually be bombarded by stories of more books being banned or more students being targeted, it doesn’t feel good to read about yourself in that kind of light.”
Russey railed against the notion that Katy ISD was now seeing a “leftist takeover” as neither candidate who won their races was openly political.
Statewide, comfortably conservative boards were disrupted by local elections on the same day that Gov. Greg Abbott signed a $1 billion school voucher proposal into law.
“In communities like Keller and Katy, where it’s felt like we’re just continually losing, our voices are continually being ignored, … this was kind of a reckoning,” Russey said.
She hopes the statewide trend would be a wake-up call for legislators that book bans and culture war themes were not “winning issues politically.”
Despite the area losses, Harris County GOP spokesperson Vanessa Ingrassia said the group was “not discouraged by the results of this election” and pointed to misinformation about school vouchers as a potential reason for the shift.
“Elections surrounding midterms are historically challenging, especially for the party in power. In this case, widespread misinformation, particularly from anti–school choice campaigns, created an added layer of difficulty for our candidates,” Ingrassia said. “Despite these setbacks, the Harris County Republican Party has a strong track record of electing local leaders and remains fully committed to supporting our candidates at every level. … (We) will continue to work toward policies that reflect the values of our community.”
Rottinghaus said the discussion on school vouchers this year could have swayed voters toward more liberal candidates or coalesced protestors around the anti-vouchers issue.
“This is a classic move from protest politics to policy making, where a lot of local organizations who’ve had less success either getting the state to spend more money on the basic allotment or on fighting vouchers, have now transitioned into running for office,” Rottinghaus said.
And he doesn’t expect his to slow down over the next few cycles.
“We’re going to see more people who are going to find dissatisfaction with the state of funding in Texas public ed and seek to find a way to involve themselves in the process politically,” he said.
See here and here for some background. Gotta love the copium from the local GOP spokesbot. I don’t know what role, if any, the voucher saga may have played in these elections. School boards aren’t direct participants in that debate, and as we know there were plenty of other hot-button issues at play in these and other races. I can believe that the people who voted to oust these odious incumbents or block equally odious non-incumbent candidates were also largely opposed to vouchers, but that doesn’t really tell us anything. I sure hope that vouchers are a motivating factor, especially next year, but safe to say that remains to be seen.
For what it’s worth, in this Fort Worth Report story about the local elections in Tarrant County, Professor Rottinghaus doesn’t mention the V-word.
In recent election cycles, local races have gradually become the “latest battlefield for policy making” for both sides of the political spectrum, said Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston.
“We are seeing more money poured into local races, more attention to individual candidates and more advocacy policies,” Rottinghaus said. “That competitiveness of local politics makes it easy for people to see clearly where candidates stand ideologically. That’s not something that was sort of obvious in the past.”
He said it’s difficult to gauge broader political sentiments based on local, off-cycle elections, which consistently see lower voter turnout than November elections with national candidates on the ballot. The results in Mansfield are likely more the result of a group of passionate, civically engaged residents who are angry about the partisanship they’ve seen in recent years, Rottinghaus said.
About 8% of registered Tarrant County voters cast ballots in the May 3 election. Across the three Mansfield ISD races, an average of 12,263 voters cast ballots — up from an average of 10,393 voters in the four May 2022 school board races. School board members are elected at-large, allowing all voters in the district to weigh in on candidates.
“It would be misleading to read too much into these results, or to ascribe what’s happening as a direct rebuke to what’s going on at the federal and state levels,” Rottinghaus said.
Clayton Waters, who as founder of MISD Future PAC supported the school district challengers, said he feels conservative voters weren’t motivated by the incumbents’ partisan message. He said the results were a “loud and clear message that partisanship isn’t welcome on the school board.”
Conservative leaders agreed their voters weren’t motivated this election cycle, but they don’t agree that it’s due to a rejection of partisanship.
“I know the Left will spin this to motivate their troops saying Tarrant is blue. It’s not. One election can’t make that determination,” Julie McCarty, CEO of True Texas Project, said in a statement to the Report, adding that it was only six months ago that Republicans swept Tarrant County in the November election.
“The problem for the Right is we win in Federal and State elections, and we let that lull us to sleep,” McCarty said. “The Right needs to learn to stay the course. We will rally, and we will win again. Just watch.”
[…]
Rottinghaus said there is a possibility that Republican PACs were “off the mark” this election cycle or too extreme, leading to less Republican turnout. If Republican-backed incumbents have already addressed the issues they previously campaigned on, voters likely won’t see those issues as a threat anymore and will be less motivated to cast ballots.
“It could be that the issues didn’t motivate the way that they used to because they weren’t quite as raw and didn’t touch a nerve in the same way,” he said. “It’s also conceivable that the groups went too far that they’re out kicking their coverage and making arguments that people don’t believe.”
With just a few thousand votes to analyze, Rottinghaus added: “It’s impossible to say definitively what’s going on.”
That latter bit comes after a discussion of the flameout of the Patriot Mobile PAC candidates. This story covered municipal elections as well as school board races, so the spectrum of issues in play is even wider. The wingnut PACs cited here have likely been playing in legislative races as well. What Rottinghaus says here is consistent with his remarks on the Houston-area races, just less specific on that one item. And if he’s right about the Republican PACs going too far, in part because they’ve already passed lots of their bills, that would also be nice for 2026. Again, we’ll have to see.
There is one more possible cause for these election results that gets mentioned in both stories. I’ll cover that in a separate post.
wow, if only voters knew who did what.