WASHINGTON — In her welcoming remarks at Moms for Liberty’s annual meeting in the nation’s capital on Friday, the group’s co-founder Tiffany Justice urged her members to “fight like a mother” against the Democratic presidential nominee.
Later that evening, after she interviewed the Republican candidate Donald Trump On stage, she made a point of saying she personally supported him for president. Their talk show-style conversation was preceded by a chant of “Trump, Trump, Trump” from the audience.
The weekend gathering, which brought together parent activists from across the country, showed how Moms for Liberty has fully embraced Trump and his political message as Elections in November The group is officially a nonpartisan nonprofit that says it’s open to anyone who wants parents to have more say in their children’s upbringing, but there was little pretense about which side of the country’s political divide it chose to sit on.
A painting prominently displayed on an easel next to the security checkpoint had to be passed by visitors before they could enter the conference room. It depicted the vice president. Kamala Harris kneeling over the carcass of a bald eagle, a communist symbol on her jacket, her mouth dripping with blood. A spokeswoman for Moms for Liberty said she had not seen the gruesome painting and noted that the only official sign for the event featured the group’s logo.
The group’s enthusiasm for Trump is likely to benefit the former president this fall because it will galvanize 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 academic excellence, that vaccine mandates violate parents’ rights and that schools that accept transgender children put other students at risk.
But it’s far less clear how Moms for Liberty’s support for Trump and his agenda will affect local school board elections, which have become some of the most contentious on many ballots since 2022, the year after the group was founded.
Many communities where Moms for Liberty candidates won a majority of the school board have been frustrated by their laser-like focus on removing books, challenging lessons on race, and dismissing LGBTQ+ identities. A lack of progress toward academic improvement has, in turn, led to a backlash from more moderate and liberal parent-teacher unions.
Moms for Liberty says it will not make an official endorsement in the presidential race, but it is not shy about getting involved. The group’s founders recently wrote an open letter to parents who warn that Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a former high school civics teacher, would be “the most anti-parental, extremist administration America has ever seen.”
The group was synonymous with the “parents’ rights” movement in local school boards for its first three years, but has recently become more involved in national politics, participating in the controversial conservative blueprint for the next Republican administration, Project 2025, as a member of its advisory board. The group has also invested more than $3 million in four crucial presidential swing states, using the money to pay for advertising in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin, including posts critical of the Biden administration.
Justice said the advertising has helped Moms for Liberty grow its membership in those states and register members who previously were not politically active to vote.
“I think you’re going to see a lot of new voters who now understand that their vote and their opinion matters,” she said in an interview.
She added that as the group continues to show its support for local school board elections, she is encouraged by the recent Florida primaries, in which 60% of Moms for Liberty-backed candidates — some running for the first time — advanced to this fall’s general election.
But those victories were countered by clear-cut losses for the group, including two in heavily Republican Sarasota County and two in Pinellas County, where a Moms for Liberty-backed candidate won a seat on the school board 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. In those elections, Moms for Liberty said, only 40 percent of the candidates they supported won.
Jonathan Collins, co-director of the Politics and Education Program at Columbia University’s Teachers College, says parent rights candidates across the country could face tough times because they focus on gutting existing policies and teaching materials rather than presenting a clear, forward-looking plan to address learning loss caused by the pandemic.
“They’re not defeated by people who respond to the cultural attacks with their own cultural attacks,” he said. “They’re defeated by people who respond to the cultural attacks with very, very practical, hyperlocal ideas about school and district improvement.”
In recent months, school board members across the country who are supported by Moms for Liberty or who carry out the group’s agenda have been recalled by community members who say their policies have created chaos.
In Woodland, California, north of the state capital, a school board member backed by members of Moms for Liberty was recalled in March after she raised concerns that children coming out as transgender “as a result of social contagion” “during a school board meeting in 2023.
In Southern California, a Temecula Valley Unified School District Board of Education administrator was recalled after he and two of his colleagues voted to reject a social studies curriculum because it was a history of the gay movement.
And in Idaho’s heavily Republican panhandle, community members come from across the political spectrum rose to recall two right-wing members of their board last year who wanted to eradicate critical race theory and implement a conservative agenda.
Katie Blaxberg, a Pinellas County candidate running against the lone remaining Moms for Liberty candidate for that county’s school board this fall, said the group’s “nastiness” and “divisiveness” are “not conducive to any good work.”
But a group of more than 600 Moms for Liberty supporters who exchanged phone numbers and listened intently to slide presentations in Washington on Friday offered a different perspective.
Gretchen Schmid, president of a Moms for Liberty chapter in Orange County, North Carolina, said her chapter helped advocate for a new parental rights law in her state, which passed last year after the Legislature, which heavily manipulated to favor Republicansoverrode the Democratic governor’s veto.
Schmid said that in the past, when parents called the school and asked to share information about assignments, they would get no response. But now, “people are getting more responses.”
On Saturday, the four-day Moms for Liberty summit interrupted its daytime sessions to hold a rally a mile away, organized by a coalition of more than 30 conservative groups. Rachel Mack and Sarah Recupero, wearing yellow rhinestone visors, said they had traveled from Florida to support protecting all children, especially in sports.
“I’m definitely someone who stands up for women in women’s sports and men in men’s sports,” Mack said.
A few blocks away, opponents of Moms for Liberty held a competing event, a Celebration of Reading, to oppose the book ban and advocate for a more inclusive environment for children. Heidi Ross traveled from Buckeye, Arizona, to volunteer for the event after seeing a Facebook post about it.
“I have a two-year-old granddaughter and I want her to grow up in a world where she can read whatever she wants to read and no one will bother her or make a big deal about it,” she said. “So I got on that plane, really for her and all the kids.”
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Kate Payne, Associated Press editor in Tallahassee, Florida, contributed to this report.
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