WASHINGTON (AP) — In her welcoming speech at the annual meeting of Moms for Liberty in the U.S. capital on Friday, the group’s co-founder, Tiffany Justice, urged members to fight “like a mother” against the Democratic presidential nomination.
Later that evening, after interviewing Republican candidate Donald Trump on stage, she made it clear that she would personally support him for president. Her talk-show-style conversation was preceded by a chant of “Trump, Trump, Trump” from the audience.
The weekend’s meeting, which drew parent activists from across the country, showed how Moms for Liberty is now fully committed to Trump and his political messages as the November election approaches. The group is officially a nonpartisan nonprofit that says it is open to anyone who wants parents to have more say in their children’s education. However, there was little indication of which side of the country’s political divide it stands on.
A painting displayed on an easel next to the security area that attendees had to pass through before being allowed into the conference area showed Vice President Kamala Harris kneeling over the carcass of a bald eagle, with a communist symbol on her jacket and a mouth dripping with blood. A spokeswoman for Moms for Liberty said she had not seen the grisly painting and noted that the only official signage for the event included the group’s logo.
This group’s enthusiasm for Trump is likely to benefit the former president this fall by solidifying a key part of his base: parents who share his views that the U.S. Department of Education is bloated and ineffective, that equity programs distract from learning, that vaccination mandates violate parents’ rights and that schools that accept transgender children endanger other students.
What is much less clear, however, is how Moms for Liberty’s support for Trump and his agenda will affect local school board elections, which have been among the most contentious elections on many ballots since 2022, the year after the group was founded.
Many communities where Moms for Liberty candidates took majority control of the school board have been frustrated by their single-minded focus on removing books, challenging teaching about race, and rejecting LGBTQ+ identities. The lack of progress in improving academic achievement has, in turn, led to a backlash among more moderate and liberal parents and teachers unions.
Moms for Liberty won’t officially endorse the presidential election, but it’s not afraid to get involved. The group’s founders recently wrote an open letter to parents warning that Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a former high school social studies teacher, would be “the most anti-parent, extremist administration America has ever seen.”
In its first three years, the group became synonymous with the “parents’ rights movement” among local school boards, but recently it has become more involved in national politics. As an advisory board member, it participated in the controversial conservative blueprint for the next Republican administration, Project 2025. The group has also invested more than $3 million in four key swing states. The money has been used to finance advertising in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin, including messages critical of the Biden administration.
Justice said the advertising helped raise Moms for Liberty’s membership in those states and encouraged members who were previously not politically dynamic to register to vote.
“I think we’re going to see a lot of new voters who now understand that their voice and their vote counts,” she said in an interview.
She added that the group continues to support local school board elections and that she is encouraged by the recent Florida primary elections, in which 60% of the candidates endorsed by Moms for Liberty – some of whom were running for the first time – advanced to the general election this fall.
But those victories were offset by undeniable defeats for the group, including two in heavily Republican Sarasota County and two in Pinellas County, where a candidate backed by Moms for Liberty easily won a school board seat two years ago.
These results come after conservative candidates struggled to gain traction with voters in local school board elections across the country last fall. Moms for Liberty says only 40% of the candidates it supported won in that election.
Jonathan Collins, co-director of the policy and education program at Columbia University’s Teachers College, said parents’ rights candidates across the country may struggle because they focus on repealing existing policies and teaching materials rather than presenting a clear, forward-looking plan to address pandemic-related learning losses.
“They’re not going to let themselves be beaten by people who respond to the cultural attacks with their own cultural attacks,” he said. “They’re going to let themselves be beaten by people who respond to the cultural attacks with very, very practical, hyperlocal ideas for improving schools and districts.”
Across the country, in recent months, some school board members who are supported by Moms for Liberty or who implement the group’s agenda have been recalled by community members who say their policies have caused chaos.
In Woodland, California, north of the state capital, a school board member supported by Moms for Liberty members was recalled in March after she expressed concern at a 2023 school board meeting that children would come out as transgender “due to social contagion.”
In Southern California, a trustee of the Temecula Valley Unified School District was removed from office after he and two of his colleagues voted against a social studies curriculum because it included the history of the gay rights movement.
And in the heavily Republican state of Idaho, community members from across the political spectrum rose up last year to oust two right-wing members of their community board who sought to stamp out critical race theory and introduce a conservative agenda.
Katie Blaxberg, a Pinellas County candidate who will face the last Moms for Liberty-affiliated candidate for that county’s school board in the fall, said the group’s “viciousness” and “divisiveness” “is not conducive to good work.”
But a group of more than 600 supporters of the Moms for Liberty movement, exchanging phone numbers and listening attentively to slide presentations in Washington on Friday, offered a different perspective.
Gretchen Schmid, president of a Moms for Liberty group in Orange County, North Carolina, said her group lobbied for a up-to-date parental rights law in her state. It passed last year after the Legislature, whose districts are heavily gerrymandered in Republican favor, overrode a Democratic governor’s veto.
Schmid says that in the past, when parents called schools and asked for information about the assignments, they would not get a response, but now “people are getting more answers.”
On Saturday, the four-day Moms for Liberty summit interrupted its sessions to hold a demonstration a mile away organized by a coalition of more than 30 conservative groups. Rachel Mack and Sarah Recupero, adorned with yellow rhinestone visors, said they had traveled from Florida to support protecting all children, especially in sports.
“I am definitely someone who stands for all women in women’s sports and men in men’s sports,” Mack said.
A few blocks away, Moms for Liberty opponents were holding a competing event, a “Celebration of Reading,” to oppose the book ban and advocate for a more inclusive environment for children. Heidi Ross had traveled from Buckeye, Arizona, to volunteer for the event after seeing a post about it on Facebook.
“I have a two-year-old granddaughter and I want her to grow up in a world where she can read whatever she wants and nobody bothers her or makes a fuss about it,” she said. “So I got on that plane, really for her and all the children.”
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Associated Press writer Kate Payne in Tallahassee, Florida, contributed to this report.
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