DeSantis Got Unexpected Boost From African-American ‘School-Choice Moms’

[Valin]

Washington Free Beacon

John Haughey
December 2, 2018

Conservative Republican Ron DeSantis and progressive Democrat Andrew Gillum presented voters with starkly different choices on an array of issues, none more distinctively polar than their plans for charter schools.

In short, DeSantis proposed expanding them while Gillum espoused "siphoning them off" as drains on the public school system.

That distinction – rather than the personalities and ideologies involved – may have compelled about 100,000 African-American women, the vast majority registered Democrats, to vote for DeSantis over Gillum on Nov. 6, according to William Mattox, director of the Marshall Center for Educational Options Director at the James Madison Institute, (JMI), a Tallahassee-based conservative think-tank.

According to a CNN exit poll, of the roughly 650,000 black women who voted in Florida, 18 percent chose DeSantis over Gillum – an unexpected wedge of support by "school-choice moms" that was the difference in the race, concludes Mattox in a Wall Street Journal analysis of Florida’s mid-term elections.

"While 18 percent of the black female vote in Florida is equal to less than 2 percent of the total electorate, in an election decided by fewer than (32,463) votes, these 100,000 black women proved decisive," Mattox writes.

(Snip)