There may not have been much of a red wave last week across the country as a whole, but there certainly was one in Florida. And it washed ashore in more places than just the gubernatorial and Senate races. While not receiving as much media attention as the big-ticket races, Governor Ron DeSantis took time out from drubbing Charlie Crist into the dust to endorse dozens of conservative school board candidates at the local level. Starting in August and continuing last week, 25 of the 30 school board candidates endorsed by the governor won their respective races and will be steering a path intended to ensure parental rights and keep parents involved in their children’s education.

A cohort of conservative school board candidates in Florida backed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) rode the coattails of his landslide victory Tuesday and won their respective races.

While DeSantis’s 20-percentage-point blowout victory over Democrat Charlie Crist was a historic accomplishment in the traditionally purple state, the electoral victories of conservative school board candidates endorsed by DeSantis in localities throughout the Sunshine State provided further evidence of the state’s rightward shift.

DeSantis, as part of a renewed focus on education issues, initially endorsed 30 school board candidates over the summer. The governor’s parent-focused education agenda made national headlines earlier this year as a parental rights bill the governor supported was dubbed the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by critics outraged at a provision that prohibited classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity for students from kindergarten to third grade.

Six of the school board candidates on DeSantis’ list were forced into runoff elections last week. All six of them wound up prevailing. This was true even in places where Democrats had previously held an edge in many local races, including Indian River County and Manatee County.

While the MSM at large rarely takes time to cover stories like this, it’s difficult to overstate the importance of winning races at the local level. Most of our focus is directed toward who holds the White House and Congress, but the decisions made at the highest levels don’t always wash down to your own neighborhood. A lot gets decided at the local level, involving how community budgets are spent, funding for police departments, and efforts to attract businesses and create more and better jobs.

The local school board elections are just as important, if not more so. When those positions are ignored and quietly overtaken by progressives, schools can quickly devolve into woke indoctrination centers as we’ve seen far too often in recent years. Then, before you know it, you have an outbreak of transgender madness and drag queen story hour shows on your hands.

Ron DeSantis (who declared that “Florida is where woke goes to die”) clearly understood all of this and pumped energy and resources into changing the landscape. He even carried Miami-Dade, a feat deemed impossible for any Republican or conservative in recent years. And that momentum clearly impacted the results at the local level.

As the GOP continues to conduct its postmortem on what went wrong in the 2022 midterms and how that can be prevented from happening again, we may be seeing an opportunity in Florida. Rather than infighting and playing the blame game, Republicans should look at what DeSantis did and find a way to replicate it elsewhere. Yes, Ron DeSantis drives the national media crazy and MSNBC loves to portray him as a monster. But doesn’t that just mean that he’s doing something right?