Jennifer Jenkins, who first made headlines when she beat Tina Descovich, co-founder of the far-right Moms For Liberty, in the Brevard County, Florida, school board race in 2020, announced Wednesday that she’s running for U.S. Senate in Florida.
Under the leadership of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state has become the poster child for the right-wing extremism that has saturated school board races around the country. And Moms for Liberty, an extremist group that purports to support parental rights and has been behind the wave of right-wing school board takeovers, was founded in Florida and has wielded influence over the state’s education policies.
Jenkins surprised political experts in Florida when she beat Descovich, the incumbent, by nearly 10 points.
“When the school board wasn’t delivering, I decided to run myself,” Jenkins said in a campaign launch video. “And despite the odds, I won. In a county that Trump won by double digits.”
Jenkins has long pushed back on the parental rights movement, whose leaders say parents should be the final decision-makers when it comes to their children’s education. The movement has been behind the conservative charge to ban books with racial justice and LGBTQ+ themes, censor what teachers can say in the classroom and craft policies attacking transgender youth.
In 2024, Jenkins founded Educated We Stand, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to fighting extremism on public school boards across the country. Nearly 80% of the group’s endorsed candidates won their races that year, including in Florida and Wisconsin.
Jenkins is ready to expand her work.
“I don’t want to fight the culture wars anymore. I never did,” Jenkins said. “But I refuse to back away from defending people who are being marginalized and attacked.”
“The most important issue [for Floridians] is the affordability crisis,” she added. “Property insurance, groceries, rent, and utilities keep increasing, and we have career politicians who refuse to do anything about it.”
Culture wars have been injected into all sorts of political races across the country in the last few years.
School board candidates in states including Virginia, Pennsylvania and Florida promised voters they would remove sexually explicit materials from schools and keep transgender kids from playing sports or using the bathroom that matched their gender identity. They saw varying degrees of success. Moms for Liberty’s big push to take over Pennsylvania schools fell short, while right-wing school board candidates in Texas were able to win majorities. Republican Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia gubernatorial race in 2021, partially because of “parental rights” concerns.
