Liz Barker, mother of four and former school psychologist, successfully ran for School Board District 2 in Sarasota, Florida. (Courtesy of Liz Barker)
More than half of candidates who trained with Moms Demand Action won their races in the 2023-2024 election cycle — and the gun safety group says one of its key takeaways is that nonpartisan messaging is key to victories, especially in lower moods.
Of the 330 Moms Demand Action volunteers who successfully participated, nearly 200 were in local offices. They included two school board candidates in Florida: Liz Barker, who won a seat in Sarasota County over a candidate backed by the conservative group Moms for Liberty, and Rebecca Thompson, who defeated a Broward County incumbent appointed by the Republican governor . Ron DeSantis.
Such victories are especially critical to creating real change, says Angela Ferrell-Zabala, executive director of Moms Demand Action. “These are the people in the community closest to the problems,” she said. “Some of our volunteers who have run for school board have been part of the PTA, they work with other people in the community, they see their kids play together, they are on the same teams. … It’s important because as soon as they come in, they get to work right away.”
This report was originally published by The 19th. The Illuminator is a founding member of The 19th News Network.
She points to the progress that school administrators serving nearly 11 million students have made to provide their communities with information about safe storage — something she says is especially critical considering that guns are the leading cause of death among children in the United States.
Barker, a former school psychologist, described herself to The 19th as “your typical public teacher turned PTO mom.” As the mother of four children, ages 5 to 13, she was never particularly politically minded until she saw a “very hyperpolitical ideology” coming into the community. Ultimately, the deciding factor was the day her eldest, then in sixth grade, said she should have helped her English teacher pack up the classroom library. It was no longer allowed in the classroom.
“That was the moment I said enough,” Barker said. “This kind of politicization of education is not in the best interest of students, and I cannot stand by and watch it happen. And that was the day I decided to flee.” Already involved with her local chapter of Moms Demand Action, she learned more about their Demand a Seat program and quickly signed up for it.
Sarasota County has nearly twice as many Republicans as Democrats, and Barker’s opponent was supported not only by Moms for Liberty, a leading force in the right-wing effort to remove books that discuss sex, gender or race from classrooms, but also by many “more establishment Republicans” in the area, Barker said. Barker focused on talking about the most effective way to help students learn and grow – and emphasized that this care was inherently impartial.
“My message was to put the community first, put our kids first, save space for those conversations and leave politics at the door.” For Barker, that conversation included a dialogue about the threat of gun violence in schools, along with other topics that had become highly politicized, such as book bans. Talking about everything that keeps children from going to school to learn destigmatized some of these issues, she found.
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Likewise, Thompson never expected to run for public office. She became involved with her local Moms Demand Action chapter because, as a school social worker, she often thought about the danger of school shootings. Thompson said she had gotten into the habit of recording audio messages for her children at the beginning of each school year, in case anything ever happened to her on school grounds.
“It’s extremely morbid to think about, but unfortunately that’s the risk we as a country impose on our teachers, social workers, staff and children,” she said.
When the opportunity arose to challenge an appointee of the DeSantis school board, she realized she wanted to let other mothers know not to be deterred by divisive partisanship. She worked to ensure her district had the best students not only academically, but also in mental health – including how supportive resources lead to better and safer school environments and how it can impact gun violence in schools. She made a point not to mention that her opponent was also appointed by DeSantis when she campaigned.
Rebecca Thompson won a seat on the Broward County District 2 School Board in Florida. (Courtesy of Rebecca Thompson)
The network Thompson built through Moms Demand Action proved essential to her campaign in other ways, too: She found an emotional support system from other women like her, who were running for office for the first time through their Demand a Seat program. She also found a practical network of support among members of her local Moms Demand chapter, like-minded women who were willing and available to watch her children while she campaigned, “something you can’t just ask anyone.”
Both Barker and Thompson describe the Demand a Seat training as a crucial part of their victories — especially in the way it emphasized that candidates can talk about gun safety in a nonpartisan way and use that to find common ground among ideological diverse voters.
“When you talk to parents, we are all concerned about the same thing: we want our children to be safe, we want our children to be healthy and we want them to have access to high-quality education – if we remain in the world that lane it’s very easy to find common ground,” Barker said. It’s especially easy among voters who are parents, people who are “absolutely terrified” about what it means to send children to school in America today. “It’s very scary to be a parent now. You have to put that fear aside to go about your daily life, but it is still with you all the time. Every time you get a text from your kid, you think, “Oh, this is it? Are they okay?’”
Barker said she heard “daily” during her campaign from parents expressing concerns about student safety and asking what school officials could do to better protect their children from school shootings. Taking this conversation out of a partisan framework was not only strategic, but also natural — Florida school boards are nonpartisan. Talking about safety in a way that wasn’t defined by party lines also allowed voters to connect on other issues, Barker said.
“Everyone knows I’m a Democrat — it’s certainly not a mystery — but there’s a level where a voter gives themselves permission to vote across party lines where there’s not the idea that it’s a partisan race,” Barker said.
Thompson also talked about how Moms Demand Action pushed her to have conversations about gun safety impartially — and conversations that were organically connected to the school community. She specifically mentioned conversations about safely storing firearms as something that doesn’t have to feel political. “The purpose of this is to keep children safe. So how can we work together to ensure this is possible?”
Monday’s shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, in which a student killed a student and a teacher and injured six others before dying in an apparent suicide, once again reminded many parents of the fear of a mass shooting . According to a CNN tally, it was the 83rd school shooting of 2024, surpassing 2023 as the year with the most school shootings since the network began tracking them in 2008.
While not everyone agrees on what exactly needs to be done to stop such shootings, there is broad agreement on many measures, Ferrell-Zabala said. Polls show that about six in ten Americans support gun restrictions, such as raising the minimum age to purchase a gun.
The successes of local candidates are key to long-term change, Ferell-Zabala said.
“We can reach Congress and become president if we start building from the ground up in our own neighborhoods,” she said. “These are all important places for people to get a really good, solid idea of what it looks like to use guns wisely and protect the community. We need those people.”
Barker said parents’ desires for their children are not biased.
“It’s very easy to worry about what might happen with the Ministry of Education, but what impacts our daily lives are these hyper-local issues, and any way we can make small, positive impacts in our own communities, that’s huge,” Barker said. “If we choose each other over politics, that is huge.”
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