‘Putting our children first’: How gun safety as a nonpartisan issue helped local candidates win

Mother of four and former school psychologist, Liz Barker, successfully ran for the School Board District 2 in Sarasota, Florida. (Courtesy Liz Barker)

More than half of candidates who went through a training with Moms Demand Action won their races in the 2023-24 election cycle — and the gun safety group says that one of its big takeaways is that nonpartisan messaging is key to wins, especially down ballot.

Among the 330 Moms Demand Action volunteers who successfully ran, nearly 200 were in local offices. Among those were two school board candidates in Florida: Liz Barker, who won a seat in Sarasota County over a candidate backed by conservative group Moms for Liberty, and Rebecca Thompson, who defeated an incumbent in Broward County who had been appointed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Such wins are especially critical to enacting real change, said Angela Ferrell-Zabala, the executive director of Moms Demand Action. “These are the folks in the community that are closest to problems,” she said. “Some of our volunteers that ran for school board, they’ve been part of the PTA, they’re working with other folks in the community, they see their children play together, they’re on the same teams. … It’s important because once they get in, they get right to work.”

This report was originally published by The 19th. The Illuminator is a founding member of The 19th News Network.

She points to the progress that school boards covering nearly 11 million students have made to provide their communities with information about safe storage — something she said is especially critical given that guns are the number one killer of children in the United States.

Barker, a former school psychologist, described herself to The 19th as “your typical public educator turned PTO mom.” The mother of four kids aged 5 to 13, she was never particularly politically inclined until she saw “highly hyper political ideology” coming into the community. The final deciding factor was the day when her oldest, in sixth grade at the time, said she’d had to help her English teacher pack up the classroom library. It wasn’t allowed in the class anymore.

“That was the moment that I said enough,” Barker said. “This sort of politicization of education is not in the best interest of students, and I can’t stand by and just watch it happen. And so that was the day I decided to run.” Already involved with her local Moms Demand Action chapter, she learned more about their Demand a Seat program — and quickly enrolled in it.

Sarasota County has almost twice as many Republicans as Democrats, and Barker’s opponent was backed not only by Moms for Liberty, a leading force in the right-wing push to remove books that touch on sex, gender or race from classrooms, but also by many “more establishment-sort of Republicans” in the area, Barker said. Barker focused on talking about the most effective way to help students learn and grow — and stressing that this concern was an inherently nonpartisan one.

“My messaging was putting community first, putting our children first, and saving space for those conversations and leaving politics at the door.” For Barker that conversation included dialogue about the threat of gun violence in schools alongside other topics that had become highly politicized, like book bans. Talking about all things that prevent children from being able to go to school to learn helped destigmatize some of these issues, she found.

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Likewise, Thompson never expected to run for any kind of public office. She got involved in her local Moms Demand Action chapter because, as a school social worker, she often reflected on the danger of school shootings. Thompson said she had gotten into the practice of recording audio messages for her children at the beginning of each school year, just in case anything ever happened to her on school grounds.

“It’s extremely morbid to think about, but unfortunately as a country, that’s the risk we put on our teachers and social workers and staff and children,” she said.

Then when a chance came to challenge a DeSantis school board appointee, she realized she wanted to represent to other moms that they shouldn’t be scared off by divisive partisanship. She ran on a platform of making sure that her district had not only the best students academically, but in terms of mental health — including how support resources lead to better and safer school environments and how this can impact gun violence in schools. She made a point of not mentioning that her opponent was a DeSantis appointee when she campaigned, too.

The network Thompson made through Moms Demand Action proved essential to her campaign in other ways, as well — she found an emotional support system of other women like her who were new to running for office through their Demand a Seat program. She also found a practical network of support among members of her local Moms Demand chapter, like-minded women who were willing and available to help watch her children while she campaigned, “which is something you couldn’t ask just anyone to do.”

Both Barker and Thompson describe the Demand a Seat training  as a critical part of their victories — especially in how it emphasized that candidates can talk in a nonpartisan way about gun safety and use that to find common ground among ideologically diverse voters.

“If you talk to parents, we’re all concerned about the same thing: We want our kids to be safe, we want our kids to be healthy, and we want them to have access to high-quality instruction — if we stay in that lane, it’s very easy to find common ground,” Barker said. It’s especially easy among voters who are parents, people who are “absolutely terrified” about what it means to send children to school in America today. “It’s very scary to be a parent right now. You have to put that fear aside in order to move through your daily life, but it’s still with you all the time. Every time you get a text from your kid, you’re thinking, ‘Oh — is this it? Are they OK?’”

Barker said she heard “daily” during her campaign from parents who expressed their concerns about student safety, asking what school boards could do to better protect their children from school shootings. Moving this conversation out of a partisan frame was not only strategic, but  natural —— school board races in Florida are nonpartisan. Talking about safety in a way not defined by party lines helped voters connect on other issues, too, Barker said.

“Everyone knows I’m a Democrat — it’s certainly not a mystery — but there’s a level there of a voter giving themselves permission to vote across party lines when there’s not sort of this idea of it being a partisan race,” Barker said.

Thompson also talked about the way Moms Demand Action primed her to make gun safety conversations nonpartisan — and ones organically linked to the school community. She specifically mentioned conversations about safe storage of firearms as something that doesn’t have to feel political. “The goal at the end of this is to keep kids safe. So how can we work together to ensure that’s possible?”

Monday’s shooting at Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin, in which a student killed a student and teacher and injured six others before dying in an apparently suicide, was another reminder for many parents of the fear of a mass shooting. It was the 83rd school shooting of 2024, according to a count by CNN — surpassing 2023 as the year with the most school shootings since the network began tracking in 2008.

While not everyone agrees on exactly what should be done to stop such shootings, there is broad agreement on many measures, Ferrell-Zabala said. Polling shows that approximately six in 10 Americans back gun restrictions such as an increase in the minimum age to buy a gun.

Local candidates’ successes are key to making change in the long run, Ferell-Zabala said.

“We can get up to Congress and get up to president if we start from building from the ground in our very own neighborhoods,” she said. “These are all important places for people that are going to have a really good, solid sense about what it looks like to be sensible with guns and to protect community. We need those folks in place.”

Barker said that parents’ desires for their children aren’t partisan.

“It’s very easy to become worried about what might happen with the Department of Education, but what impacts our day-to-day lives are these hyper-local issues, and any way that we can have small, positive impacts in our own communities, that’s huge,” Barker said. “When we choose each other over politics, it’s huge.”

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