Florida, School Board Races
In Florida’s August primaries, New Southern Majority supported school board candidates who believe classrooms should be places of learning, not political battlegrounds. Each of our supported candidates were challenged by people hand-selected by Florida’s extremist Gov. Ron DeSantis and the far-right political organization Moms for Liberty.
In a very close race (50.9% to 49.1%), Duval County School Board incumbent Cindy Pearson defeated a former Moms for Liberty chapter president.
The candidates: Jessica Vaughn, from left, Nadia Combs and Cindy Pearson. (Credits: Jefferee Woo/Tampa Bay Times via ZUMA Press Wire; Bob Self/Florida Times-Union / USA TODAY NETWORK)
In Hillsborough County, voters rejected two leading DeSantis challengers who were seeking to flip the makeup of the Tampa-area board after the board became one of 10 to resist DeSantis’ “Don’t Say Gay” law. Nadia Combs won her election in District 1 despite being outraised 2 to 1 by her opponent. Jessica Vaughn won her election in District 3 against a vocal proponent of book banning.
New Southern Majority spent $13,226 on text campaigns in these races and $62,300 in digital advertising.
Sheriff, Caddo Parish, Louisiana
On March 23, Henry Whitehorn became the first Black person to be elected sheriff for Caddo Parish, a parish in northwestern Louisiana with over 200,000 people. Whitehorn won the November 2023 runoff election by one vote. But after Republicans convinced a retired judge to overturn the election results, voters returned to the polls for the third time to choose their next sheriff.
Whitehorn promises to be an improvement over his predecessor, Steve Prator, who has been admonished in the past for racially insensitive remarks he made during a news conference on state efforts to enact justice system reform. Prator expressed a need to keep “good” Caddo Parish inmates incarcerated so that they could continue to “wash cars, to change the oil in our cars, to cook in the kitchen, to do all that where we save money.”
The New Southern Majority IE PAC targeted roughly 25,000 Black voters with six waves of text messages in the month before the election. These texts included persuasion messaging highlighting Whitehorn’s experience and values, as well as information on early voting dates/hours, polling locations at a cost of $15,000. These efforts contributed to Whitehorn’s more than 4,000-vote victory.
For more on the disparity between Louisiana’s racial demographics and the ethnicity of its sheriffs and district attorneys, read the SPLC Action Fund’s report, Out of Balance.