TEXAS VOTERS PUNISH BOOK BANNERS AT THE POLLS

This was a statement election.

That’s a lot of green!

That was a drubbing.

I’ve been covering Texas school board elections for seven cycles, and as I have documented over and over again, book bans, attacks on educators and public schools, and attempts to target LGBTQ students do not fare well at the polls. Since dominating the May 2022 cycle—in which organized local groups backed by big-money PACs caught districts flat-footed—extremists repeatedly have been told “no” by Texas voters.

But Saturday night’s election results were next level.

Voters across Texas clearly and consistently punished the people who have been restricting students’ reading and learning. They delivered a message: Texans are sick of book bans, sick of attacks on educators and librarians, sick of leaders waging culture war battles at the expense of good governance.

Consider:

The Fort Bend ISD board of trustees implemented one of the state’s most restrictive book policies last year; on Saturday, voters sent incumbent Rick Garcia, who advocated for the policy, packing. The architect of that policy, resigning trustee David Hamilton, threw all of his weight behind a hand-picked successor, Cheryl Buford. She lost to FBISD parent Angie Wierzbicki, who vocally opposed the new book policy.

In Grapevine-Colleyville ISD, trustee Tammy Nakamura has led efforts to restrict books in the district; she even said she keeps a list of “poison” teachers she wanted run out of the district. And in Katy ISD, board president Victor Perez spearheaded that district’s anti-book crusade. Both lost their seats last night.

Humble ISD candidate Tracy Shannon, who claims responsibility for getting more than 1000 books removed from the district, also lost. So did Clear Creek ISD’s Scott Bowen, who argued for more restrictive policies in his local public library.

Maybe most shocking results of all were in Keller ISD, where a hyper-conservative majority has ruled the board unanimously for years. Keller ISD’s board was installed in 2022 by Patriot Mobile, a Christian-Nationalist phone company that dumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into school board races in North Texas. That board has been a disaster, but partisan, extremist candidates kept winning in Keller—until Saturday night. This cycle, all of the candidates favored by the board’s Patriot Mobile bloc lost, and the results weren’t particularly close.

That was a trend for the night, as all three Patriot Mobile trustees in Mansfield up for election lost handily. In fact, of the eleven trustees Patriot Mobile boasted about electing in 2022, seven have lost their seats as of Saturday.¹

Not that Patriot Mobile didn’t try! The Christian Nationalist phone company put more than $50,000 behind Nakamura, paying doorknockers and buying texting services. Didn’t work.

In the Houston area, candidates paid CAZ Consulting, the firm led by Chris Zook, Jr., who also heads the pro-voucher group Texans for Educational Freedom. CAZ consulting candidates have generally won in high-profile races. Saturday, they lost.²

Even Republican muscle couldn’t drag book-banning candidates across the finish line. In Llano, Republican Party Chairman Abraham George endorsed perennial candidate Pam Huston. She lost big. In Humble ISD, the GOP threw its weight behind four candidates, including Shannon. Two of them lost.

Extremist group True Texas Project recommended 25 candidates for school board races across the state; 20 lost. Moms for Liberty candidates lost in Liberty Hill, Humble, and Katy.

The trend was clear and consistent all across the state. Book banners lost in rural, suburban, and urban districts. They lost in Central Texas and North Texas, in Houston and in Victoria. Entrenched incumbents who supported book bans lost; so did rabble-rousing challengers. On Saturday night, book banners lost and lost big.

The Disappointments

By the end of the night on Saturday, my election night tracker listed 4 races “in the red”: Dripping Springs ISD, Eanes ISD, Northwest ISD, and Spring Branch ISD. The details complicate the picture a bit.

In Eanes ISD, incumbent Heather Sheffield lost to challenger Catherine Walker. The good news is that Walker is not a book-banning extremist. I gave her an orange rating in my voting guide because the district’s extremists lined up behind her as a means to stick it to the existing board, and because Walker seemed to actively court their support with her tone (if not with her policy ideas). The race got personal and ugly, and it was disappointing to see Sheffield ousted like that.

Similarly, Northwest ISD’s election got ugly, with someone sending deceptive text messages about Joe Washam to district voters. But Jeff Dearing’s election doesn’t really change the balance of power on the board.

The two most disappointing districts were Dripping Springs ISD, which seems to be one of the few remaining holdouts for extremist board members in the Austin area, and Spring Branch ISD, where the district’s unique political gravity—the (wealthy, mostly white) south side of the district dominates the (less wealthy, less white, more populous) north—reasserted itself after taking a break last year.

One disappointing individual race was the one for Humble ISD’s Place 3. Natalie Carter, a very good candidate, lost to incumbent Chris Parker by just 43 votes.

Really, though, the disappointments were few and far between, and the story of the night was the overwhelming message voters across the state sent about what we want—and don’t want—in our schools.

What’s Next?

Look, I don’t want to darken the unbridled awesomeness that was Saturday night, but in Texas right now we’re fighting book restrictions in schools on two fronts. School boards are one, and the legislature is the other. Restrictive laws tie the hands of even the best school boards. We’ve seen that with HB900 from 2023, and it could get a whole lot worse if SB13 passes this year.

The good news is that school board races that got us into this mess in the first place, so maybe Saturday night’s results can help get us out. In 2021, Legislators watched the craziness at school board meetings and the board takeover in Carroll ISD and decided that anti-woke politics required them to ban “CRT” and The 1619 Project. Then they saw Moms for Liberty’s success in 2022 and that shaped their desire to pass HB900 in 2023.

Our next job is to make sure that lawmakers hear the message voters sent on Saturday night.

1. Even that statistic doesn’t capture the full scale of Saturday’s anti-Patriot Mobile vote. Of the four Patriot Mobile trustees who weren’t voted out, three ran unopposed and one was not up for re-election this cycle. So every Patriot Mobile candidate who faced an opponent lost.

2. Clarification, 5/6/25: CAZ consulting clients did win in Spring Branch ISD, but lost in Katy and Fort Bend.