Commitment to education wins in Boise school board election. Dog-whistle politics loses
The results of Tuesday’s election for Boise’s school board showed a clear commitment to education and a defeat for dog-whistle politics.
In Race 1, incumbents Beth Oppenheimer and Dave Wagers received 15,430 and 13,905 votes, respectively, while challengers Krista Hasler and Greg Woodard received fewer than 5,000 votes each.
In Race 2, incumbent Andy Hawes won with 70% of the vote over challengers Neil Mercer and Matthew Shapiro.
In Race 3, incumbent Elizabeth Langley won with 60% of the vote over three challengers.
In Race 4, Boise High senior Shiva Rajbhandari defeated incumbent Steve Schmidt by more than 2,000 votes.
In that last race, Schmidt perhaps was undone by the endorsement of the Idaho Liberty Dogs, a toxic extremist group whom Schmidt failed to strongly denounce after he received its backing. That failure swayed this editorial board to endorse Rajbhandari and likely swayed voters, as well.
The endorsement of the Liberty Dogs for Hasler, Woodard, Mercer and Kurowski also clearly didn’t help their campaigns.
With the overwhelming victory of the other incumbents, it also sent a clear message that Boise voters are mostly happy with the schools and they don’t want anyone coming in and trying to make radical changes based on unhinged accusations of sexualization of children, pornography in libraries or unfounded conspiracies about Boise Mayor Lauren McLean’s transition team report from two years ago.
The incumbents not only won, they dominated, making the message even clearer.
School board races have become a hotbed of politics and hot-button issues, such as critical race theory and library book bans, with attacks from the far right coming from culture-war issues.
The Ada County Republican Party tried to inject itself in the nonpartisan races, endorsing Hasler and Woodard based, in part, on keeping pornography away from children and claims that “the Left has always seen these groups (school boards and library boards) as the way to pitch their racist and jaded view of America, push sexuality and deviancy into early elementary school just as has happened here in Boise. Parents finally had enough and are now taking American values and beliefs to these races.”
The Ada County Republican Party also smeared Rajbhandari on the grounds that he led an effort to have Jane Fonda donate money to send a group of students to a climate change class at Boise State University, saying he “spit on veterans” and “took money from a communist.” It’s ludicrous, unhinged attacks like that that earn them the label “extremist.”
The Boise school board results are similar to last year’s Boise City Council elections, in which Lisa Sánchez defeated Greg McMillan with 57% of the vote, despite his support from right-wing groups that paid for attack ads against Sánchez.
Tuesday’s school board results demonstrate that while some groups and factions may be loud, their base of support is tiny. School boards that hear from them should remember that they are not relevant, and shouldn’t be bullied by a vocal minority.