It’s the most important race in Virginia you’ve never heard of—and it was engineered that way.
The largest school district in Fairfax County is having an upcoming special election in August that is costing taxpayers a quarter million dollars. The reason is utterly despicable, and I’ll get to that in a moment.
Elizabeth Schultz
First, a little background. Fairfax County is a Democratic bastion located in Northern Virginia. There is no reason why the GOP should be as successful as they have been winning several key elections. And there is certainly no reason in the world these winning candidates should be vile bigots, like school board member Elizabeth Schultz.
To give you an idea of the kind of person she is, hop on over to her Twitter feed. Her contempt for certain students is horrifying. You will find nuggets like this one, where she literally defended Trump’s groping of women because hey, he’d at least he’d go after transgendered students:
And this was her disturbing response to a former student on Twitter who challenged her:
This is a member of the Fairfax County School Board. This is the type of person the GOP thinks should oversee the county’s children.
And they want to give her an ally. Elizabeth Schultz is strongly backing Chris Grisafe for the upcoming special election.
Schultz is calling the School Board seat for this race the “Scalia seat”.
Which brings me to the whole reason this seat is even open. You see, there was another right-wing School Board member, incumbent Jeanette Hough, who was supposed to serve her term through 2019. However, she recently resigned in order to move her family overseas due to her husband taking a new job. How she resigned was nothing short of deplorable: she could have waited to resign shortly after June 10th, which would have allowed the new election to coincide with the general election cycle this November.
Yet the GOP apparently pressured her to resign early so they would get a low turnout, stand-alone election to be held this summer while many families would be away on vacation. As Fairfax County DC chair, Sue Langley, stated:
Efforts by the Republican establishment to pressure Hough to resign early are a shameful effort to deny hundreds of thousands of Fairfax County voters a chance to elect a new School Board member. No parent should be denied the opportunity to elect someone who will have an impact on their children’s daily lives and education.
It is bad enough that Republicans short-circuited the democratic process. Worse yet, their strategy will waste approximately $250,000 of taxpayer money by holding this unnecessary election. Ms. Hough was unwilling to delay her resignation by a couple weeks. Had she done so, she would have stood with the children of Fairfax County, their parents, and fiscal responsibility, rather than with the Republican establishment.
There’s a lot of things schools could do with a quarter million, yet the GOP thought it was worth it to pull a fast one and put another right-winger on the board. The GOP counts on tactics like this to keep turnout low, along with other weapons of disenfranchisement such as voter ID obstacles, gerrymandering, purges, and intimidation. The GOP is absolutely counting on low turnout to be their key to winning this special election, as they say on their website:
Turnout will be extremely low – possibly as low as the single digits. It’s critical that we get out the vote on August 29th!
The GOP website goes on to say that the seats they won in 2015 changed the dynamic of the school board, (as you can tell by Schultz’s awful tweets), and say if they lose this special election, they will “lose much of the ground we gained in the last 18 months.”
Fortunately, the Dems are finally (FINALLY) catching on and learning how to fight back. It helps that we have a dream candidate for this race: Karen Keys-Gamarra.
Karen Keys-Gamarra
A few things about Karen:
- She specializes in family law
- Works as a Court-appointed Guardian for children in Northern VA
- Fully informed of the issues vulnerable children face
- Will fight for those children, rather than attack them
- Mother of three sons, all of whom have either graduated or are attending Fairfax County public schools
- She’s a Planning Commissioner
- She almost won in 2015, her first election ever, coming within 1% of winning by garnering 10,000 votes
Compare that with her GOP opponent’s resume, who has little connection to schools or education. Yet I’m sure he can be counted on to make life miserable for the most vulnerable students like Schultz is trying to do.
If you are wondering why I’m spending time fighting for a local school board race in a state far from Florida, it’s because this is exactly the kind of race we need to be winning. As horrible as the GOP is at everything, the one thing they understand is how to win elections. They know the only way to promote their hateful agenda is to run the table in the rural areas, and then try to pick off as many Dem seats as they can—by any means necessary—in Dem strongholds like Richmond, Tidewater, and NOVA (Northern Virginia).
A necessary victory here will help launch the upcoming November races in NOVA’s House of Delegates districts 40, 42, and 67. All of them are currently held by the GOP, and they ALL should be flipped to the Democrats. (BTW, start now! Support progressives candidates Donte Tanner, Kathy Tran, and Karrie Delaney on 90for90.org!) Building on those successes, we then move on to 2018, where we will knock out the Trump-backing, unpopular and awful Barbara Comstock from her Congressional District 10 seat.
OH, and then in 2019, we can finally kick Elizabeth Schultz off the Fairfax County School Board—where she never should have been in the first place.
She ran UNOPPOSED in 2015!!
Seriously, Dems, we need to stop this. We cannot concede any race, but especially races in Democratic districts. We should be using this special election to our advantage—such as registering a slew of new voters who will, in turn, come out for the more publicized races this November, 2018, and beyond.
The GOP knows all of this, and they are assuredly going to be pouring money into the race to elect Schultz’s ally, Republican Chris Grisafe. Our candidate, Karen Keys-Gamarra, needs money to publicize the importance of turning out and winning this special election.
You can help by donating or volunteering through her website here:
karen-keys-gamarra.ruck.us
Calling this the “Scalia seat” is accurate: the real Scalia seat was stolen by the GOP with dirty tricks. At least this time, we have a chance to make sure they don't succeed.
www.90for90.org
