Comment Rescue: As DEGOP continues to make school board elections partisan – Democrats need to rally
It is no secret that the DEGOP is trying to partisan-ize Delaware school board elections and thereby turn Delaware school districts into Florida-style racist, right-wing, homophobic and transphobic ideological gulags.
So far they’ve met with little success, but white christian nationalism never sleeps.
Big elections in Red Clay school board this year.
13th Republican Carlucci Coelho (whose whole campaign against DeShanna neal was calling them a socialist and a bad parent for having a trans kid) is running against Jose Matthews. Throw Jose some money. This could get dirty. http://www.jose4redclay.com
AJe English Wynn is running for the other seat in Red Clay. It’s currently held by the awesome Adriana Bohm, who is not running for reelection after a decade on the Board. One candidate John Shulli’s Twitter seems to be a dumpster fire of Trumpism. Another candidate Jing Han doesn’t seem to have much out there. Throw AJe some money http://www.ajeforredclay.com
A lot of young people would vote if asked but most have no idea which school board district they live in, and aren’t going to squint at maps to figure it out. Especially college students.
So I’m looking for an online tool that tells you what your Red Clay nominating district is by typing in your address. Hopefully Deldems have some resources here?
– Red Clay provides a link to PDF maps but no address search: https://elections.delaware.gov/maps/school/2012/newcastle/red_clay.pdf
– NCC Parcel Search gives Rep, Sen, and Council districts for your address but not school board nominating district (paging Matt Meyer!).
The school board races of all the northern NCC are at-large voting, so you can vote in both races. So, while the candidates have to LIVE in a nominating district, all voters in the District get to vote for EVERY seat. This has been problematic, because it has meant that the white suburban voters have been able to “Control” the city seats for the last 40 years. This happened in 2020 when Martin Wilson won a plurality of votes and his two opponents canceled each other out EVEN THOUGH his two opponents got MORE votes from the city precincts.
“all voters in the District get to vote for EVERY seat. ”
Are you sure that’s true? I don’t recall seeing more than one board candidate on my ballot, or for that matter any candidate outside my nominating district.
At any rate, I did find a glitchy but effective GIS lookup tool that reports nominating district by address. Click “Districts Lookup Tool” on this page: https://gis.elections.delaware.gov/#lookup_tools
Last year there was only one race. In 2021 there was only one race. In 2020, there were two races and all Red Clay residents could vote in both. IN 2019, there was no race because no one ran against conservative Jason Casper.
School board elections are my meat and potatoes. Trust me, when you walk into the voting booth on May 9th, you will be able to vote for both seats. Support Jose and AJe.
I’ll be damned, I guess it’s true. Do all school boards elections work this way, or are the rules potentially different for every district?
Unfortunately the Department of Elections has not published sample ballots. I don’t know if they plan to.
I was hoping for my kids with UD connections to mobilize at least some of their friends to vote. A lot of young people have never voted in any election, let alone a school board.
But school board elections seems an easier ask for the never-voted crowd, since registration is not required. Even 18yr olds in high school can vote. And voting against Florida-style bigotry is a strong motivator for the LGBTQ-friendly youth vote.
School board elections don’t have party identifiers, and right-wing candidates have learned to sanitize their campaign websites. So we’d have to ask new voters to do research on social media to satisfy themselves who the non-bigoted candidate is.
Rules are different around the state.
The four districts representing the city of Wilmington are the ONLY ones in the state that have this bizarre AT-LARGE voting for nominating district seats. AGain, this allows suburban voters to put up their own candidates who live in the city (see: Martin Wilson, who has been on Red Clay’s board for 25 years, but who actually lives in Pike Creek and uses a rental address in Wilmington to continue to run and win that seat). My theory is this was done specifically to water down city voters during the contentious desegregation period. That law needs to change.
Every other district around the state has either ONLY nominating district voting OR specific AT-LARGE voting seats AND nominating district seats (See: Appo, Indian River, etc.).
School board races were once the farm leagues for GOPers looking for higher office. Dems have done better in recent years.
Somebody needs to write an explainer to mobilize college age youth for school board elections. I’m too freaking old for this.
Sounds like a job for the UD College Democrats, or their counterparts in other colleges. But I’d expect pushback from Coons-style establishment Dems warning against “partisanizing” school board elections.
The first thing a college age new voter will do when seriously planning to vote is look for the campaign websites of the candidates (as they should). But as I said, the bigots will have sanitized their campaign websites so they will be deeply coded and not immediately offensive.