Mat-Su Moms for Liberty's Impact on Candidate Wins: Not Even a Participation Trophy

The launch of extremist organization Moms for Liberty's Mat-Su chapter was strategically timed to coincide with this year's school board races. This wasn't because school board members Richard "Ole" Larson or Kathy McCollum needed any heavy lifting done to help propel them across the finish line, but because by endorsing their campaigns, Moms for Liberty could take a phony victory lap and claim their influence made the difference on election day.

To be clear, Moms for Liberty Mat-Su had practically zero impact on school board candidate wins. This was not unexpected, especially given that the Mat-Su is a deeply red area where a January 6th insurrectionist could get elected as borough QAnon shaman.

I'm not even kidding. Remember when residents cheered after the Palmer Public Library roof collapsed on top of the children's area? Yeah, it's THAT kind of red.

Anyway, looking at the most recent unofficial election results, Kathy McCollum leads by a margin of 511 votes. In District 6, Larson leads Shibe by 299 votes. There are still 432 uncounted ballots in Shibe's race and 319 in Sydney's. It's unlikely that the margins in either race will change significantly. Overall voter turnout in this week's election was an abysmally low 9.53%.

Both Larson and McCollum ran unopposed in 2022, McCollum as a first-time candidate. Voter turnout in those districts was 38.44% and 42.24% respectively. And if we look back at the 2020 election results, we see that Larson won his race by 570 votes, or, as it presently stands, 271 fewer votes than he currently leads Shibe by.

So, it's pretty clear that in this year's election, where voter turnout was less than 10% in the Mat-Su, Moms for Liberty failed to drive voter turnout, Larson performed worse than he did in 2020, and McCollum likely performed as expected. The extremist organization can't even say with a straight face that Parental Rights was an issue a majority of registered voters cared about.

But while the Valley Karens take an undeserved victory lap for having done nothing more than plastering their anti-freedom logo on social media endorsement graphics (they didn't even run a single Facebook ad in either race), remember that overall, Moms for Liberty-endorsed candidates performed poorly nationwide.

Right-Wing Rout

The American Federation of Teachers said that roughly 70% of candidates who received public endorsements from far-right organizations like Moms for Liberty and the 1776 Project lost in this week's national election races.

For some context, according to Ballotpedia, more than 24,000 school board seats were up for election. On social media, Moms for Liberty championed just 50 election wins—that's not a typo.

In Iowa, only 1 of 13 endorsed candidates won their race. None of the four candidates backed by Moms for Liberty in Minnesota were successful, and the same fate befell all four candidates in Washington state. In New Jersey, out of the 19 candidates endorsed by the group, only four won. Of their 25 candidates in Ohio, only 5 won, and every candidate in Kansas, and North Carolina lost.

In the key battleground state of Pennsylvania, Democrats swept both the Central Bucks and Pennridge school district school board races, presumably because your average voter believes quoting Hitler in a newsletter, degrading the quality of public education, and banning books are bad things.

But even after voters delivered Moms for Liberty endorsed candidates devastating election losses, you can bet your asses that its deranged contingent of Hitler-quoting members will continue to try and have school librarians arrested, enact discriminatory anti-LGBTQ policies, ban books, and work to erode the very freedoms they claim to champion.

And when the Moms for Liberty Anchorage chapter officially launches (efforts are supposedly underway), progressives and Democratic voters, already eager to oust deeply unpopular extremist Mayor Dave Bronson next year, will likely have something to say about any right-wing candidates championing Parental Rights.

Mayor Bronson won't be the only one facing an uphill battle come April.