Meghan Budden’s family was considering moving if their Pennsylvania school district didn’t change course. She normally isn’t politically active, she said, but felt compelled to volunteer when a slate of Democrats launched bids to take back their school board in Central Bucks School District, just north of Philadelphia.
Central Bucks is well known both statewide and nationally for heated board meetings over masks and Pride flags, policies banning certain books and directives to not use students’ preferred names and pronouns. Accusations of discrimination against LGBTQ students have also led to an ongoing investigation by the U.S. Department of Education.
“I couldn’t have my kids in a school district where these kinds of things were happening,” Budden said.
Are the outskirts of Philadelphia that MAGA red or was deception used to get the MAGA board members elected in the first place?
So, every one of Philly’s surrounding counties (four of them, not including the ones in New Jersey) elected majority Dem commissioners last week, although they haven’t all been reliably blue in recent history. Obviously Philly itself is incredibly blue, to the extent that a third party beat out the GOP for the few commissioners seats reserved for a minority party. Central Bucks (the school district in question here) includes the county seat for Bucks County, which is more blue, but also some pretty wealthy areas that are more red. Bucks is also most of Brian Fitzpatrick’s district, supposedly one of the most moderate members of the house GOP.
Central Bucks is probably an area that will continue to trend blue, if I had to guess. It’s a lot of college educated white people, which is a demographic that’s trending blue. Bucks county in general is probably the reddest of Philadelphia’s suburbs though.