Notebook: Libraries and the Election
by Ann Kjellberg, editor Are we fighting over the First Amendment, or something more?
Eclectic Public Library, Eclectic, Alabama
In the summer of 2021, as Congress was debating the 2021 Infrastructure Act, I spoke with John Chrastka, founder of the nation’s only political action committee for libraries, EveryLibrary. A year and a half of pandemic, in which digital connectedness arose as the indispensable conduit for education and learning of all sorts, had thrown in to high relief libraries’ usually supporting status as the one bearer of digital access to everyone: an essential system of national intellectual infrastructure. Advocating for a comprehensive program for national broadband rooted in its natural, already-existing provider, public libraries, John pointed out that 90 percent of US libraries’ funding derives from its local zip code; i. e., the energy local voters and library patrons and employees put into ballot initiatives and lobbying their officials decides whether the individual synapses of this vast system continue to emit their charge. The one guarantor that these synapses aren’t weakened by stretches of poverty and isolation, that they deliver for those in particular need like elderly people and those with disabilities, is the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), which distributes federal grants to underfunded libraries and library programs throughout the country. Like Title I, the federal program administered by the Department of Education that redresses inequalities in local tax provisions for public schools, the IMLS ensures that access to information is not confined to pockets of local wealth. John told me that truly connecting America would require a TVA-level investment; in the event, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal allocated $65 billion to broadband.
Fast forward to 2024. The “Mandate for Leadership,” the 2024 version of the conservative Heritage Foundation’s annual policy blueprint, popularly known this year as “Project 2025,” recommends, like its predecessors in 2020, 2022, and 2023, the elimination of the IMLS, as well as the Department of Education and Title I school funding. During his last presidency Donald Trump called for the elimination of IMLS spending every budget season. (An EveryLibrary report on the likely consequences of 2025 Project policies notes that “tribal libraries, in particular, would face challenges in preserving cultural heritage and providing educational resources” if the IMLS disappeared.) On November 6 John Chrastka sent out an EveryLibrary response to the recent election, versions of which appeared in Publishers Weekly and Library Journal, saying “last night, American voters elected politicians who proposed defunding libraries while slandering library workers … the future of our public, academic, and school libraries cannot be taken for granted.” It is the particular burden of EveryLibrary that, not only do they have to fight each year for the budget and even the ongoing existence of the IMLS, but, because of the dispersed nature of the American library system, they fight on a case-by-case basis for every library in the land. (Give here.) For instance, John knew about the ballot initiative this year (passed) to increase funding for the one-room library in my small upstate New York town.
EveryLibrary’s analysis shows that, as in other outcomes of the November 5 election, in spite of the ringing message at the top of the ticket, the downballot results for libraries are mixed, showing, broadly, an increasingly durable support for library infrastructure the closer you get to home. EveryLibrary identified 153 library elections in in 2024. These elections were buffeted by the combined national messages of fiscal austerity and ideological resistance to libraries in the form of book removals and challenges to library governance. On November 5, the pass rate for libraries’ operating levies and referenda was about 80 percent, down from the ten-year average of 90 percent, and seven out of ten building bonds passed. In Craigshead, Arkansas, an effort to refund a public library that had been defunded for ideological reasons failed. In Marysville, Ohio, a must-pass levy replacement for the local library overcame fierce opposition to succeed. In Rochester, Illinois, a third attempt at funding for building expansion and operating costs for district libraries failed after a multi-pronged campaign against it by the Illinois wing of the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity PAC. John noted that where proponents of library restrictions have been blocked by First Amendment protections at the administrative level, they have gone after library funding.
The total number of library elections in 2024 is down from previous years and has been declining since the 2017 election following Donald Trump’s first win. EveryLibrary’s report observes that “over time, collections and programs stagnate without new funding, staff are not replaced, and buildings begin to fall into disrepair.” The report attributes the decline in total number of measures before the electorate to a “crisis of confidence among library boards and leadership” that began in the anti-tax mobilizaton of the Tea Party years and has exponentially accelerated, since the pandemic, with the dramatic growth of ideological challenges to library collections and governance. EveryLibrary is developing training and support to help local library officials mount successful ballot measures to maintain their funding, working to “identify and encourage libraries that are hesitant or afraid in order to help them to get ready to go to the ballot. We want to see more libraries win their elections, but we need more libraries to have the courage to try.”
Other 2024 ballot outcomes affecting library livelihood also showed mixed results. In California, Proposition 5, which would have made it easier to fund municipal bonds, which would have benefitted housing as well as library infrastructure, failed. In North Dakota, Measure 4, which would have ended collection of property taxes for any purposes, drying up funds for libraries, as well as schools, parks, etc., also failed. At the legislative level, only the Michigan legislature flipped, from Democrat to Republican, leaving in place the deep-red legislatures in fifteen states that have in the last year considered, among less draconian measures, a dozen new laws criminalizing librarians and teachers for books in their collections. Four of these laws have passed their legislatures, two have been vetoed, one has been overturned by the courts, and one, a law in Indiana that allows parents and other community members to initiate a book challenge that can lead to a felony conviction against a teacher, is on the books, a chilling precedent in the view of library advocates. A 2024 law in Utah causes a single book to be banned from all public school libraries if three school districts determine it to be “objectionable”—a campaign that can easily be coordinated by a small number of people. Similar bills criminalizing librarians and teachers have been prefiled for 2025 in Alabama and Texas.
2024 Candidates for local school boards (many of whom ran during spring primaries), also saw a variety of outcomes. After a year (2023), in which candidates endorsed by the library-challenging groups Moms for Liberty and Project 1776 were widely pushed back, and the strength of their movement questioned (see book note), the 2024 results were more equivocal. Moms for Liberty/Project 1776-endorsed candidates won in Clark County, Nevada; Huntington, California; and Maryland; but lost roundly in their home state of Florida, where Governor Ron DeSantis tried unsuccessfully in the 2024 Republican primary to cast his state’s culture-war policies as a national blueprint. Florida also defeated a Republican-backed initiative to create partisan school board elections. (Only Louisiana, Alabama, Pennsylvania and Connecticut currently identify school board candidates by party.) The failure of Moms-for-Liberty-backed school board candidates in Florida led some local observers to suspect that the influence of the organization, which has been identified with extremist groups, had begun to wane, and with it the governor’s effort to build a broader movement around challenging “wokism” in public institutions. Localities with second thoughts about their Moms for Liberty school board members found that, in the words of scholar Maurice Cunningham, “they are only good at breaking things,” and their unwavering attention on removing books, questioning curriculum around race, and rejecting LGBTQ+ identities meant they inititiated little progress toward improving educational outcomes in an environment that Chalkbeat CEO Elizabeth Green characterized as “an education depression” even before pandemic interruptions.
Two House bills to defend libraries against censorious measures now stand little chance of coming up for a vote. Last December Florida Democrat Maxwell Alejandro Frost introduced H.R. 6592, the Fight Book Bans Act, which would allow the Department of Education to provide school districts with grants to cover the costs of adjudicating book challenges. Also in December House Democrat Ayana Pressley introduced H.R.6830, the Books Save Lives Act, requiring school libraries to maintain a diverse collection of books and classifying discriminatory book removals as violations of federal civil rights law. The Books Saves Lives Act follows finding of the US Department of Education Office of Civil Rights that the Forsyth County School District in suburban Atlanta violated federal civil rights law when it removed books from school libraries because they address LGBTQ and racial themes. If the new Trump administration were to succeed in eliminating the Department of Education, the civil rights enforcement that, with funding for underfunded schools and collection of data on school performance forms a large part of the Department of Education portfolio, would be moved to the Department of Justice for adjudication, potentially falling under the jurisdiction of an Attorney General Matt Gaetz.
The Heritage Foundation policy prescriptions, most recently Project 2025, call for converting Title I funding for high-poverty schools and students with disabilities to block grants to the states with no federal strings attached and educational savings accounts for parents, eventually phasing Title I funding out altogether, with likely effects on underfunded school libraries comparable to the elimination of the IMLS for public libraries. (Republicans since Reagan have vowed to close the Department of Education and “move education back to the states,” but a series of lawsuits at the state level beginning with Rose v. the Council of Education in Kentucky in 1989, which call on states to equalize education funding, often continue to labor to provide equal access to education geographically.) Donald Trump has further said he would withhold federal education funding from schools that teach “critical race theory, gender ideology or other inappropriate racial, sexual or political content on our children” and from Democratic-leaning states like California and New York.
EveryLibrary offers an analysis of the ties of Heritage Foundation planners to Donald Trump’s campaign, which the campaign labored to disavow in the months running up to the election and has since stopped bothering. A book, Dawn’s Early Light, by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, with a forward by Vice President-elect J. D. Vance, promising a “path” for “taking back Washington to save America”—not unlike Project 2025’s “historic movement … to take down the Deep State and return the government to the people”—initially scheduled for September, was delayed by its publisher during the summer, but launched without comment last week with a standard-issue book party in a Manhattan hotel. “We’re very optimistic about working with the administration,” Kevin Roberts said during an interview at the party.
Eliminating the Department of Education would be difficult. It would require sixty votes in the Senate and the agreement of rural senators for whom Title I education funding is important for poor and rural constituents. We considered last spring a ProPublica story that noted how Republican efforts to expand voucher programs to funnel government money to private schools are unpopular in deep-red rural districts, where public schools—and their libraries—are much-needed community resources and private alternatives are thin on the ground. Three out of three states that proposed voucher measures in the November elections, Kentucky, Nebraska, and Colorado, all of which went for Donald Trump, defeated them.
Notably Moms for Liberty emerged in the recent election cycle at the national level to join Republican governors in filing suit against President Joe Biden’s extension of Title IX protections (against discrimination in education on the basis of sex) to LGBTQ students. Currently those extended protections are enjoined in all but twenty-four states and Donald Trump says that he would retract President Biden’s order. Project 2025 proposes amending Title IX to define “sex” to mean “only biological sex recognized at birth.”
After representing themselves initially as vanguards for local political advocacy, celebrated in Republican circles as a new model for downballot electioneering and embodying citizen/parent involvement in public life, Moms for Liberty has shifted resources and attention to national politics, interviewing Donald Trump at their annual gathering (though they did not endorse him as an organization) and funneling $3 million into registration and turnout efforts in four swing states, on the argument that their issues were motivating for habitual nonvoters, a major target of Trump’s strategy (the redirection of local resources may have accounted, some note, for Moms-for-Liberty-endorsed candidates’ muted performance in Florida). EveryLibrary points out that the Heritage Foundation has provided organizational and financial backing to Moms for Liberty, and its legal arm represents Moms for Liberty in lawsuits and provides training for Moms for Liberty members. Page one of Project 2025 echoes Moms for Liberty language in accusing school libraries of providing “pornography” to school children, and the document argues that “children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries” and that pornography is “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children.” (EveryLibrary and other advocates argue that the works disputed by Project 2025 and Moms for Liberty do not approach the legal definition of obscenity: content that is sexually explicit and designed to cause sexual arousal. They support relying on the professional expertise of librarians and teachers to identify developmental appropriateness in curricular and discretionary learning material.) The Project 2025 document states that such works, usually identified in practice by causing offense to a single parent or patron (or political organizer), should be outlawed, and “the people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned.” It further specifies that “educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders.”
Efforts to turn out low-propensity voters like those targeted by Moms for Liberty, which established their constituency by advocating similar views in the form of alleged “grassroots” parent advocacy, seem to have worked at the national level for President-elect Trump, and accordingly Moms for Liberty founder Tiffany Justice is said to be on Donald Trump’s list as a potential Secretary of Education. Like Donald Trump she supports cuts to federal public school budgets, although she advocates for more teachers and smaller class sizes and better teacher pay; she argues that removing DEI programs and “all of the ideology” would release enough funds adequately to support education. “We don’t have a funding problem in American education. We have a priorities problem,” she says. Moms for Liberty’s shift into a nationally-focused fundraising and electioneering operation, with operatives engaged in forming policy beyond individual libraries and comunities, raises the question of whether, like Phyllis Schlafly and her campaign against the ERA, the library-scourge element of their program was just a vehicle for a broader national political project, built on demonizing vulnerable individuals to mobilize support among low-engagement voters for a more expansive political project, leaving much pain and cultural harm only incidentally in its wake: contested funding for basic community needs, immobilized school and library boards, and demonized children, teachers and librarians—just when we need learning more than ever.
Ann Kjellberg is the founding editor of Book Post.
Other Book Post Notebooks on related themes:
On library and curricular restrictions in Florida
One library book restrictions nationally
On vouchers, curricular restraints, and segregation
On curricular restrictions and the College Board
On classroom libraries
On libraries, publishers, and booksellers working together
On library broadband and infrastructure
On libraries in times of crisis
Libraries and the history of the bookmobile
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Book Post is a by-subscription book review delivery service, bringing snack-sized book reviews by distinguished and engaging writers direct to our paying subscribers’ in-boxes, as well as free posts like this one from time to time to those who follow us. We aspire to grow a shared reading life in a divided world. Become a paying subscriber to support our work and receive our straight-to-you book posts. Our recent reviews include: Anthony Domestico on poetry on TV, Michael Robbins on the perils of translating Ovid, Barry Yourgrau on the policiers of Jean-Patrick Machette.
Dragonfly and The Silver Birch, sister bookstores in Decorah, Iowa, are Book Post’s Fall 2024 partner bookstores. We partner with independent booksellers to link to their books, support their work, and bring you news of local book life across the land. We send a free three-month subscription to any reader who spends more than $100 at our partner bookstore during our partnership. To claim your subscription send your receipt to info@bookpostusa.com.
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If you liked this piece, please share and tell us with a “like.”