Are Moms for Liberty More About Elections Than Education

Never forget this quote from October of 2021.

I have been trying for a dozen years to get 20- and 30-year-old females involved with the Republican Party, and it was a heavy lift to get that demographic. But now Moms for Liberty has done it for me.

That's Christian Ziegler, a political operative with a PR firm. He pulled in $300K from a Trump-related PAC. He was once a Heritage Foundation Fellow. He’s buddies with Corey Lewandowski. He appears to be behind the Protect Wyoming Values PAC (a Trump anti-Liz Cheney proxy). He was at Trump’s January 6 rally. And in February, after had been “effectively… campaigning for the job for years,” Christian Ziegler was elected Florida’s GOP party chair.

And, of course, the husband of Bridget Ziegler, one of the co-founders of Moms for Liberty.

Ziegler (as detailed here) had several years of anti-public education political work under her belt by the time she formed Moms for Liberty. That's not unusual--some days it seems as if behind every Florida Man who holds a political office, there's a Florida Woman working in political advocacy.

But it can be useful to look at M4L not only through the lens of aiming to dismantle public education but also through the lens of a GOP electioneering project. 

Four researchers put up a fascinating study for Brookings, looking at some of the details of the M4: deployment. It breaks down the deployment of M4L, looking at it by state and by the electoral leanings of the county. And most importantly, the researchers do it two ways--simply by the number of counties, and also by population. 

That distinction matters. Of the counties that have a chapter, 45% are in red counties, 25% in purple, and 30% in blue. But if we weight by population, blue populations account for 54% of M4L chapters and purple is 30%. Some of the findings are unsurprising-- M4L are most prevalent in the suburbs--by unweighted count, 31% of chapters are in rural/town settings, but weighted for population, rural/town makes up only 7% of M4L. They are more prevalent in counties where the white population is decreasing. 

The researchers also looked at M4L endorsements (and found a discrepancy--they found that M4L endorsed 340 candidates, not the 500 that M4L has boasted and which M4L declined to explain). The majority of those endorsements were in blue or purple counties. They were most successful in purple and red counties, and better in suburbs than elsewhere.

It is hard to know more specifics about the county chapters. When I looked at Pennsylvania, I found multiple county chapter pages listed in the M4L directory, but many of those had no actual chapter chief listed. In many cases, the Facebook page for the chapter was "run" by Pat Blackburn, the national organization's chapter coordinator. So there is some question about how organic and grass rootsy the organization is.

Looking at the Brookings map, one notices that chapters and members are clustered in states like Pennsylvania, New York, Florida, the Carolinas, but not, as the researchers note, in the red strongholds of the South and the Plains. 

Take the whole picture in, and it's believable that M4L is meant to function as a way to activate red voters in places where the GOP needs a win. Pennsylvania in particular is a swing-ish state that has been targeted by the christianist right, and here we sit with the second-highest number of chapters bumping up against the third-highest populations. We've got off-year elections coming up in about two weeks; we'll see if the M4L stir gets people to the polls to vote to boost the whole GOP ticket. 

M4L is not just about reactionary school policies; it's about realizing Chris Ziegler's long-ago dream-- activating suburban white ladies in 20s and 30s to help lift the GOP (or at least the MAGAfied version of it). Of course, it's not just Ziegler's dream-- it's the dream of other seats of power and money on the right who have been there helping get M4L launched since Day One. 

It's a natural fit. Like the GOP itself, M4L pushes policies that are not actually popular with the majority of voters, and so it needs creative ways to circumvent democracy to achieve its goals and to acquire power. P. J. O'Rourke's definition of politics-- the business of getting power and privilege without possessing merit--applies here.

Yes, oppose Moms for Liberty for what they want to do to public education in this country. But stay aware that they are also warming up the deep fryer for larger fish.