Jennifer Jenkins, who first made headlines when she beat Tina Descovich, co-founder of the far-right Mothers For Liberty, within the Brevard County, Florida, faculty board race in 2020, introduced Wednesday that she’s operating for U.S. Senate in Florida.
Beneath the management of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, the state has turn out to be the poster youngster for the right-wing extremism that has saturated faculty board races across the nation. And Mothers for Liberty, an extremist group that purports to help parental rights and has been behind the wave of right-wing faculty board takeovers, was based in Florida and has wielded affect over the state’s schooling insurance policies.
Jenkins shocked political specialists in Florida when she beat Descovich, the incumbent, by practically 10 factors.
“When the school board wasn’t delivering, I decided to run myself,” Jenkins mentioned in a marketing campaign launch video. “And despite the odds, I won. In a county that Trump won by double digits.”
Jennifer Jenkins for U.S. Senate
Jenkins has lengthy pushed again on the parental rights motion, whose leaders say dad and mom must be the ultimate decision-makers relating to their kids’s schooling. The motion has been behind the conservative cost to ban books with racial justice and LGBTQ+ themes, censor what lecturers can say within the classroom and craft insurance policies attacking transgender youth.
In 2024, Jenkins based Educated We Stand, a nonpartisan group devoted to combating extremism on public faculty boards throughout the nation. Almost 80% of the group’s endorsed candidates gained their races that 12 months, together with in Florida and Wisconsin.
Jenkins is able to increase her work.
“I don’t want to fight the culture wars anymore. I never did,” Jenkins mentioned. “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.”
Tradition wars have been injected into all types of political races throughout the nation in the previous few years.
Faculty board candidates in states together with Virginia, Pennsylvania and Florida promised voters they might take away sexually specific supplies from colleges and maintain transgender children from enjoying sports activities or utilizing the toilet that matched their gender identification. They noticed various levels of success. Mothers for Liberty’s huge push to take over Pennsylvania colleges fell brief, whereas right-wing faculty board candidates in Texas have been in a position to win majorities. Republican Glenn Youngkin gained the Virginia gubernatorial race in 2021, partially due to “parental rights” considerations.
Democrats, in the meantime, largely struggled to reply to the motion, with some trying to appease conservatives by attempting to fulfill within the center on the query of civil rights for trans children and others calling the far-right motion a distraction from the “real” points.
Outdoors observers could consider Jenkins’ candidacy is an extended shot, as Democrats in Florida have suffered a number of main losses within the final decade. The final Democrat to be elected to the U.S. Senate in Florida was Invoice Nelson in 2012. He misplaced his 2018 reelection bid to Sen. Rick Scott.
However Jenkins thinks it’s a mistake to write down Florida off as a misplaced trigger for progressives.
“I reject the idea that the state isn’t winnable for Democrats. We don’t have to give up our state to one-party rule,” she mentioned. “This is my future, this is my 9-year-old daughter’s future. I’m not going to give up.”
If Jenkins wins the Democratic main, she would probably face Republican Sen. Ashley Moody within the normal election. DeSantis appointed Moody, the previous state lawyer normal, to the seat after Marco Rubio resigned in an effort to function President Donald Trump’s secretary of state.
