To win reelection, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis harnessed the power of one of the most coveted groups of voters anywhere — motivated parents. The strategy could build a key pillar of support if, as widely expected, he runs for president in 2024.
The Republican governor was able to tap into a cohort of riled-up parents by exerting his influence in local school board races. With endorsements and campaign cash for dozens of candidates who share his ideology, DeSantis found a way to both stoke fury among moms and dads and then harness it for his own political gain. School-board races boosted Republican turnout by at least 5 percentage points across Florida in 2022, according to the governor.
Those motivated voters helped deliver a landslide reelection win, even in places Republicans used to write off like Latino-heavy Miami-Dade County.
DeSantis, who has three young children, used education to motivate voters in a way that former President Donald Trump never did, setting himself apart from a potential rival for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. He convinced some parents that he shares their values and concerns about what’s happening in classrooms.
“DeSantis has been such an awesome leader and pro-parent,” said Ashley Cote, 35, who has a 10-year-old son in Sarasota public schools, where days after being sworn in four DeSantis-endorsed board members ousted the superintendent. “It’s made me go out and vote and made me go out and campaign too.”
DeSantis, 44, rose to national prominence by re-opening schools and businesses earlier in the pandemic than most states and slamming Democratic governors for forcing their residents to endure prolonged shutdowns. Speculation about a potential national run started in early 2021, when DeSantis took his anti-lockdown, “anti-woke” fight on the road. He raised tens of millions of dollars and became a popular speaker at Republican events like the 2022 Conservative Political Action Coalition convention.
“Just building that kind of conservative foundation at the grass roots level gives him a huge bully pulpit at the state level,” said Nick Larossi, a longtime DeSantis fund raiser and a co-chair of the governor’s inaugural committee.
Now DeSantis is touting his accomplishments as a national blueprint for Republicans as the U.S. heads into another fight for the presidency.
“His policies didn’t just help kids. They helped entrepreneurs, helped working parents,” said Miami private school owner Leila Centner, who made news during the pandemic by banning masks and asking teachers not to get vaccinated. She and her husband have donated $391,000 to DeSantis since April 2021.
DeSantis’s push to rebuild Florida’s schools from the ground up started with an online loyalty test.
School board candidates were asked to answer 15 questions about the governor’s push to restrict teaching about race, gender and sexual orientation, including, “Do you agree that students should be educated and not indoctrinated?” and “Should Florida’s students be subjected to long-term school closures or forced masking?” Those deemed sufficiently in line with DeSantis’s ideology were rewarded with his personal endorsement and money for their campaigns — a total of $2 million for the 29 chosen.
“I certainly feel that I’m an extension of his team,” said Jacqueline Rosario, who credits the governor’s support with helping get her reelected to the Indian County school board in Vero Beach. Rosario is scouring teacher training manuals for anything that, in her view, runs afoul of DeSantis’s Parental Rights in Education Law, dubbed by critics the “Don’t Say Gay” law. The law bans teaching about sexual orientation through third grade and requires it be “age-appropriate” later.
Governors rarely get so involved in local races, but schools have been ground zero for the cultural fights that helped vault DeSantis into the national spotlight.
Some educators, parents and school board members, say DeSantis’s crusade against what he calls “the woke” needlessly vilifies teachers and is hurting education. Florida’s Department of Education hasn’t documented the widespread indoctrination that the governor describes, said Andrew Spar, a teacher and president of the Florida Education Association, the state teacher’s union.
“The governor’s trying to have something to campaign for president on,” Spar said. “He seems to feel like this idea of trying to divide our community and divide people is the path to go, and one of the best ways to do that is by making these baseless, untrue accusations against teachers in our schools.”
It’s unclear how DeSantis’s anti-woke strategy might play outside Florida in a presidential race. A nationwide poll in mid-December for the American Federation of Teachers, found that most voters view cultural battles as distracting public schools from educating students. Two-thirds of the 1,402 registered voters surveyed said their educational priority is for teachers to meet the needs of all students, not going after perceived “woke, liberal” agendas, according to the poll, which had a margin of error of 3 percentage points.
Martha Schoolman, a university professor with a daughter in high school in Coral Gables, said DeSantis is hurting students by censoring discussion of issues they want to talk about: race, gender and sexual orientation.
“These laws are so repressive,” Schoolman, 52, said. “They are not going to work, and they are so cruel.”
The DeSantis play book is the same one that helped Republican Glenn Youngkin win the Virginia governor’s race. The former co-chief executive of the Carlyle Group, who is also viewed as a potential 2024 presidential candidate, held “Parents Matter” rallies, promising to give them more say over what happens in classrooms.
DeSantis has spent years crafting that play book. Christopher Rufo, an activist and documentary filmmaker, helped lead conservative protests about how race is taught in public schools. One day in late 2021, DeSantis’s aides summoned Rufo to Tallahassee to help work on legislation restricting teaching about race in schools, called the Stop the Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees (W.O.K.E.) Act. In April, Rufo was standing next to DeSantis as he signed the law, which bans the teaching of critical race theory in schools.
Critical race theory is an academic framework for examining systemic racism that is typically taught in law school, but it has become a catch-all phrase for conservatives and critics of teaching about race and racism in K-12 schools.
“For most of U.S. history, that’s how politics worked, you build at the local level and cultivate grass roots support,” said Rufo, who’s also a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “DeSantis brought that back.”
The strategy is showing results.
In Sarasota, four DeSantis-endorsed board members hauled Superintendent Brennan Asplen in for a public reckoning in mid-November, a few days after being sworn in. In 2021, the school district, under Asplen, defied DeSantis’s ban on school mask mandates. Now the governor’s allies were in control, led by Chair Bridget Ziegler, co-founder of Moms for Liberty, a conservative parents-rights group that says it has has grown to 246 chapters in 43 states. Now she’s education director at the conservative nonprofit Leadership Institute, training school board hopefuls.
Ziegler, a 40-year-old mother of three, had been on the Sarasota board since 2014, and her conservative activism won her appearances on Fox News. But DeSantis’ support supercharged her quest. Under her leadership, the Sarasota board voted 4-to-1 to oust Asplen. At the public meeting, Asplen said his ouster was driven by politics because he’d complied with what the board wanted. “I spend more time on politics and nonsense than anything else,” he told the board.
Ziegler said Asplen was too dismissive of parents’ and board members’ concerns that inappropriate materials were finding their way into lessons. One example, she said, was an animated video of an African American girl speaking about Black Lives Matter protests that followed George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police. In the video, which students could watch on an outside instructional app, the girl says that while America made great strides in combating racism, the protests were also “about structural racism in our society.”
That kind of discussion could make some kids uncomfortable, Ziegler said, and the superintendent hadn’t condemned such materials forcefully enough. “He took a middle of the road approach,” she said. “That’s a cop out, in my view.”
In early December, another board controlled by DeSantis-endorsed members removed the Brevard County school superintendent.
DeSantis’s policies led Anita Carson to quit teaching last June after a decade in Polk County public schools. The 6th-grade science teacher had focused on accomplished women and people of color to comply with state guidelines that recommend teaching that anyone can be a scientist. Carson worried she could be accused of violating DeSantis’s Stop W.O.K.E. Act, exposing her to penalties that include losing her teaching certification.
“Teaching has always been a political job,” said Carson, who made an unsuccessful bid for school board and now works for the LGBTQ advocacy group Equality Florida. “The governor made it very clear that not only is it political, but he is going to censor what you say, how you can teach.”
There’s evidence more teachers may be making the same decision as Carson. There were 6,006 teacher vacancies in Florida as of August, almost triple since 2016, according to a teacher union survey of job postings.
DeSantis, in contrast, says he’s done a lot for teachers, raising pay by $1.3 billion since 2020. In December, he proposed banning unions from automatically deducting dues from teacher paychecks and boosting funding for charter and private school voucher programs. That’s energized charter and private school owners, who donated almost $1 million to DeSantis since early 2021.
And, DeSantis has a corp of advocates to push his social ideology in schools and, more importantly, rally motivated parents to vote.
“This,” DeSantis said at an event in Orlando recently, drawing applause, “is really, I think, just the beginning.”
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(Bloomberg News writer Felipe Marques contributed to this report.)
