Like many Americans, when Vanessa Steinkamp was stuck inside early in the Covid-19 pandemic, she logged into Twitter to talk to the outside world. The teacher and mother of three schoolchildren in Dallas was worried that closed classrooms would hurt kids, particularly the most vulnerable students who needed the special resources that schools provide. Calling for children to go back to in-person learning earned her a lot of backlash, but she also befriended likeminded moms.
When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis pressed public schools to reopen in the summer of 2020, he became their hero.
These women built an informal network of overlapping chatgroups across several states, many of them outside Florida. They had a mix of political views, from liberal to conservative, and were brought together by frustrations with a Covid response that they felt left opening schools a low priority.
College-educated and affluent, the mothers are the kinds of voters seen as critical to both political parties in swing districts and states, and one of the voting groups among whom former President Donald Trump and Republicans underperformed in both 2020 and 2022.
They’re the kinds of voters DeSantis hopes can drive him to victory in a general election if he can overcome Trump to secure the GOP nomination – and appealing to them is a key part of his case in the primary.
One of Steinkamp’s first Twitter friends was Jennifer Sey, then an executive at Levi’s. In 2022, Sey said the company pressured her to stop tweeting about opening schools and playgrounds, and when she refused, she said, she was pushed out of her job as brand president. Levi’s disputed her account, telling The New York Times it supported Sey’s advocacy on schools but her comments “went far beyond calling for schools to reopen, and frequently used her platform to…
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