Loudoun county, Virginia, attracted national headlines in 2021, when parents outraged over the alleged instruction of critical race theory and policies regarding transgender students shouted down officials at school board meetings.
Republican Glenn Youngkin made the issue a central focus of his gubernatorial campaign in the months after, accusing Democrats of politicizing education to the detriment of students’ learning and blaming them for pandemic-related school closures. And he had hoped it would continue to work in Tuesday’s general election.
“No more are we going to make parents stand outside of the room,” Youngkin told a crowd in Leesburg, part of Loudon county, on Monday. “We are going to put them at the head of the table in charge of our children’s lives.”
But that message failed on Tuesday, as Democratic-endorsed candidates won a majority on the Loudoun county school board.
The elections, in which every school board seat was up for grabs on Tuesday, had been framed as a test of the resiliency of parents’ rights as a campaign issue. Republicans had hoped to replicate Youngkin’s success in Loudoun county, which serves more than 80,000 students in a wealthy area located about an hour outside Washington. Instead, Loudoun county voters delivered a six-seat majority for Democratic-backed candidates on the nine-seat school board.
The Democrats’ wins reflected their broader success on Tuesday, as they maintained their majority in the state senate and flipped control of the house of delegates. Despite Youngkin’s hopes that Republicans would take full control of the legislature, he will instead finish his gubernatorial term with a statehouse led by Democrats.
Over the first two years of his governorship, Youngkin had pushed a series of controversial policies in schools to amplify his support of parents’ rights. On the day that he took office in 2022, Youngkin signed an executive order to “restore excellence in education by ending the use of divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory, in public education”. Another order signed on the same day eliminated mask mandates for students in Virginia’s schools.
“No day will be more vividly held in my mind than when I sat on those steps in our capitol, and I signed that bill that said that parents will decide if your child wears a mask in school,” Youngkin said on Monday. “Folks, children belong to parents, not to the state.”
Republican-backed candidates championed a similar message in Loudoun county ahead of this year’s elections, pointing to the school board’s mismanagement of sexual assault allegations as evidence of the need for a change in leadership.
The new Loudoun county school board will be composed solely of new members, as the two incumbents who ran on Tuesday both lost, and Republicans fell short in their efforts to take the majority.
As Democrats took a victory lap on Tuesday, some of them pointed to the results in Loudoun county as evidence that Youngkin’s message of parents’ rights no longer resonates with Virginia voters.
“It’s always been obvious to those who paid attention that Republicans oversold their political advantage by weaponizing school board meetings with culture war issues,” the Democratic strategist Sawyer Hackett said on X, formerly known as Twitter. “Glenn Youngkin’s politics have never been popular in Loudoun.”
The disappointing results could spell trouble for Republicans as they look ahead to the 2024 elections, when control of the White House and Congress will be on the ballot. As one of the only states holding off-year elections, Virginia generally serves as a test of each party’s messaging before a presidential race.
The results in Loudoun county and across the state of Virginia indicate that Republicans may need a new message.
