Op-ed: Moms can decide the 2024 election

The 2024 election is five months away, but pollsters and pundits are already hard at work determining which groups will play a decisive role in charting America’s future.

Turn on any network…

The 2024 election is five months away, but pollsters and pundits are already hard at work determining which groups will play a decisive role in charting America’s future.

Turn on any network and you’re likely to see political insiders debating whether Trump can expand his share of Hispanic voters, if black voters will turn out in sufficient numbers to deliver a victory to Biden, or if RFK Jr.’s third-party campaign will steal more votes from Trump or Biden.  

In all those formulations, there’s one group that rarely gets mentioned – one group that, if motivated and mobilized, can lead our country back from the brink.  

This election must be about moms. 

The sad state of our country is enough to make the biggest, toughest grown man call out for his mother. As moms, we do everything we can to ensure that our children are safe and that they know they are loved. But now, our political leaders are doing everything they can to undermine us.

The Biden administration has chosen to leave our southern border wide open, sowing nationwide disorder and chaos and unleashing violent criminals and drugs into our communities. Most Americans mourn the tragic death of Laken Riley, the 22-year-old nursing student who was raped and bludgeoned to death by a criminal illegal immigrant at the University of Georgia. But many are unfamiliar with the scores of other children who are victimized each day. 

Earlier this month in Lake Worth Florida, an illegal immigrant snatched an 11-year-old girl off the street in front of her home, dragged her into a van and sexually assaulted her. In March 2024, a 23-year-old illegal immigrant raped a 14-year-old, mentally incapacitated girl in Alabama. Sadly, these stories are becoming all too common.

Meanwhile, our schools are becoming less safe every day. Narcan kits to prevent fatal overdoses are now distributed in American middle schools and, sadly, with good reason. From 2019 to 2021, monthly overdose deaths among young people ages 10 to 19 increased 109%. According to the CDC, 90% of those deaths involved opioids, and 84% of those opioids are from illicit sources. In 2023, Park View High School in affluent Loudoun County, Virginia saw eight overdoses in a three-week period, all attributed to illicit fentanyl. 

When our children aren’t overdosing on drugs, they’re being fed dangerous political and sexual ideology in our schools. Books like Genderqueer featuring graphic, sexually explicit content are stacked on shelves in school libraries across the country. In many districts, teachers are prohibited from informing parents if their child elects to identify by a new gender, guiding them on a path to psychological ruin. Where teachers used to teach kids the American ideal that we are created equal, they are now dividing children up by race, often lecturing about structures of oppression. And in some cases, innocent children are even forced to apologize for their white privilege.

These radical curricula have sent good teachers running for the exits, and as they’ve been emphasized, math and reading scores have plummeted. The 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress found that from 2014 to 2022 only 33% of 4th graders were proficient in reading and 36% in math, while only 31% of 8th graders were proficient in reading and 26% in math.

We now have an educational system where our children are taught about every letter in “LGBTQIA” and how to condemn their classmates for inherent racism they can’t escape, but they’re not taught the basic skills they need to participate in a free society. This is a virus eating away at our civic fabric, and it’s long past time that moms developed a cure.  

We shouldn’t be afraid to organize. I joined the fight to secure parental rights several years ago because I realized the government can’t be a co-parent. I realized that no one loves our kids more than we do, and the stakes have never been higher.  

Our children’s futures hang in the balance, but we should feel confident moving forward because the American public is on our side.

Americans increasingly reject radical gender ideology.  Polling consistently shows Americans want border security and an end to the violence plaguing our communities. Polling data also suggests that a majority of Americans are on our side when it comes to school choice, with results consistently showing 60-70% of Americans support allowing parents to use tax dollars to choose the public or private school that best meets their children’s needs. 

It’s no wonder, then, that grassroots networks led by groups like Moms for America and Moms for Liberty are popping up all over the country to register moms to vote and train them to be advocates for their children, in their neighborhoods and on local school boards. These efforts have borne some meaningful fruit.  

Today, more than 30 states have passed legislation to ban DEI curriculum from our classrooms, and more than 20 have enacted policies to protect our children from radical gender ideology, protecting girls’ sports and banning the medical mutilation of children. These are the kind of wins we need for our kids, and it’s moms who are making them happen.

We have a real opportunity to show the out-of-touch political elite in Washington D.C. just how much our votes matter. And we’re taking advantage of that opportunity.  

On August 31, 2024, a group of concerned Americans hailing from all walks of life will gather under yellow umbrellas – a sign of our role as protectors of our children – for the March for Kids. We’ll assemble on the National Mall to send a powerful reminder to the Biden Administration that decisions regarding our kids’ upbringing belong to us. I’ll be asking every mother and grandmother in my community to join me, and I know countless other mom-leaders will, too.  

It’s time for mothers across this country to declare with one voice that if the current political leadership won’t fight for our kids, we’ll replace them with leaders who will.