Over the past weekend, several candidates in suburban Texas school districts who opposed book bans won their elections, defeating conservative officials who had supported and implemented such policies in recent years.

Book bans in the Lone Star State have largely targeted titles with LGBTQ themes, Black or Brown characters, or authors of the same backgrounds. In the 2022-23 academic year alone, around 625 books were banned within the state. The year prior, the state banned over 800 books, the highest number of book bans in the country.

Local elections were held throughout Texas this past weekend, including school board races featuring incumbent candidates who supported such policies. In many of those contests, voters chose to remove far right leaders who had pushed hardest for book bans.

In the Mansfield Independent School District (ISD), just outside of Dallas and Fort Worth, the board president, board secretary and another board member were all handily defeated by local candidates opposed to book bans. Ana-Alicia Horn, a data management professional, defeated Keziah Valdes Farrar, the incumbent board president who was backed by a far right mobile phone company called Patriot Mobile, attaining more than 60 percent of support from voters.

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