“We may just be moms, but come November, you’ll be just a former governor.”
Suburbs across Florida, October 19, 2022 – Today, Red Wine & Blue released “Just Moms,” a new ad featuring Florida moms fighting back against Ron DeSantis’ education extremism. The ad, which has a six-figure ad buy behind it, will run across streaming services and online video most consumed by suburban women.
DeSantis’s Board of Education–which includes at least one appointee who has supported the Capitol insurrection, QAnon, and the Proud Boys–met today to put rules into Florida education code that will revoke teacher certificates for violations of Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law, implement a harmful bathroom policy, and shut down teachers’ classroom libraries until they review all of their books.
Mainstream parents don’t want DeSantis’s extreme agenda:
- Seventy-five percent of Americans believe state laws banning books or making it illegal to talk about LGBTQ or race issues are about politics and not in the best interest of children, according to an August Ipsos poll.
- When Florida parents are offered school library restrictions, they reject them. In all but one Florida county that offered them, less than 1% of students have been restricted by their parents.
In the “Just Moms” ad, nine moms from Florida push back against DeSantis’ support of book bans, suing teachers, and attacking the rights of LGBTQ kids and others. The ad ends with moms saying to DeSantis, “We may just be moms. But come November, you’ll just be a former Governor.”
“Mainstream moms do not want book bans or schools where teachers do not feel safe teaching, and they definitely don’t want politicians using their kids to score political points,” said Katie Paris, Founder of Red Wine & Blue. “Florida moms will not be silent – and that should worry Ron DeSantis.”
The text of the ad reads as follows:
“We might just be moms, but we take that role seriously. So when politicians use our kids as pawns in their extremist agenda, we stand up and fight back. Book banning – forget it. Our kids should learn the truth. Suing teachers – we trust teachers. And scoring cheap political points by picking on kids who just want to fit in. You don’t deserve to hold public office. We may just be moms, but come November, you’ll be just a former governor.”
From restricting what books schools can keep in their libraries or use for instruction, to signing the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, to requiring armed law enforcement officers to be stationed at every school, to his “Stop Woke” act that sets limits on how issues involving race may be taught, DeSantis has a long track record of extremism.
Red Wine & Blue has been working with women in Florida to train and connect them with a network of nearly half a million suburban women of all political backgrounds – including many who have never been political before – to organize in their communities and address the growing threats of extremism to public education, freedom, and democracy.