We’re going to see more of this, I’m afraid.
New political action committees targeting North Texas school board seats are spending big money on conservative rallying cries ahead of Saturday’s elections.
Some Richardson voters, for example, received mailers decorated with baby blocks with the letters CRT. “RISD schools can’t teach the basics if they’re too busy teaching ‘critical race theory’ nonsense,” the flyers read.
It’s yet another sign of how local school board races are now the front lines of Republican culture war issues, such as those on race, gender, library books and parental choice.
At least 10 conservative PACs are trumpeting “taking back” school boards as they funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars to influence local races.
Some are tapping the same consulting groups, including GOP heavy hitter Axiom Strategies, which worked with Sen. Ted Cruz and helped on Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s strategy in Virginia.
Last month, Axiom received more than $100,000 from at least four local conservative PACs and a handful of the candidates they endorsed for school boards in Richardson, Keller, Highland Park and Southlake. Those funds largely went toward mailers, according to April 29 campaign finance filings.
“Usually those [races] would be below the radar screen for national-level political operations,” said Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University (SMU supports The Education Lab). “But so many of the really hot-button contentious issues over the last couple of years have been fought out at the school board level that it’s not surprising to start to see some of that.”
Axiom vice president Nick Maddux said in a statement that his firm works to win tough races across the nation.
“High-intensity school board campaigns have become the new norm,” he said.
Patriot Mobile Action, tied to a Texas-based cellphone company, spent more than $400,000 supporting conservative candidates in four North Texas school board races, NBC News reported. The PAC endorsed 11 candidates in Keller, Mansfield, Carroll and Grapevine Colleyville, according to its website.
It still has over $100,000 cash on hand, finance records show.
Meanwhile, several PACs are collectively spending tens of thousands of dollars with a group called Edgerton Strategies, a group with little online presence. It is registered to a lawyer in Wyoming but run by Erik Leist, a Keller father who does marketing work. He said he got involved with the different groups based on word-of-mouth.
Leist previously did communications work with a KISD parent who challenged a library book and disputed the district’s process for reviewing it.
Heading into the final stretch, the KISD Family Alliance PAC got a financial bump: A $10,000 donation from Monty Bennett, CEO of Ashford Inc. The hotelier is a major Republican donor.
While trustee races are technically nonpartisan, their work has become increasingly politicized over the past two years as ideological battles raged over COVID-19 protocols and how schools should discuss race and gender.
There’s more, but you get the idea. It’s not just in the Dallas area that these large sums of PAC money are pouring in to support wingnut candidates – John Coby has been documenting this for CCISD races. There’s been a bit of coverage on this in the Chron, but not nearly as detailed.
There was a time in the aughts during Tom Craddick’s Speakership when some Republicans wanted to mandate school board elections be held in November of even-numbered years, on the theory that this would necessarily make them more partisan, and that would work in Republicans’ favor. Clearly, they didn’t need the races to be in November for the partisanship. I don’t know what to expect today, but I won’t be surprised to wake up tomorrow and find out that a lot of terrible people are now on a bunch of school boards. Unfortunately, these are the times we are now in.
I searched for any CRT caterwauling by the local school board candidates, which would be an automatic vote against. I even held my nose and dug through Nextdoor.
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