2021: The year of the parent activist

In the early hours of Nov. 3, Republican Glenn Youngkin, now the governor-elect of the commonwealth of Virginia, took to the stage at his campaign election night watch party to promise a conservative renewal in governance in a state that had moved to the left in recent years.

Youngkin’s victory over former governor and Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe was an unexpected upset and amounted to a political earthquake in a state that had voted for President Joe Biden by a double-digit margin the year prior, and it took place in Washington, D.C.’s backyard.

Youngkin’s victory, on a platform featuring a vow to empower parents in public education, proved to be the culminating achievement of a parental rights movement that was visible in Virginia but also swept across the nation to Texas, Minnesota, Colorado, and everywhere in between.

From the refusal of numerous schools to reopen following the pandemic closures, the inclusion of critical race theory and gender ideology in school curricula, the fight over mask mandates, and the Loudoun County public school rape case, a wide breadth of issues pertaining to education motivated a new kind of voter, turning the Virginia race into an unexpected referendum on public education.