Charlie Crist Goes All In for Teachers Unions

Ms. Hernández-Mats, who is also a vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, opposed reopening Florida public schools. In September 2020, the UTD organized a caravan, including a hearse, to protest reopening schools outside the Miami-Dade County School Board headquarters. Ms. Hernández-Mats insisted that “lives are going to be lost” if Miami schools reopened. Florida’s schools reopened in 2020, but in 2021 the AFT successfully lobbied the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to tighten school-reopening guidelines, which kept schools elsewhere closed longer.

You’d think Mr. Crist might have learned something from Virginia, where Democrat

Terry McAuliffe

last year failed to regain the governorship after he declared in a debate: “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” Republican

Glenn Youngkin

beat him in a state that favored

Joe Biden

by 10 points. (Donald Trump carried Florida by more than 3 points in 2020.) A Virginia mom toldCNN that the “nail in the coffin” was when AFT head

Randi Weingarten

stumped for Mr. McAuliffe the night before the election.

Like Mr. McAuliffe, Ms. Hernández-Mats has publicly disdained parents. Last October she tweeted a meme likening parents who express their views at school-board meetings to serial killers and horror-movie villains and commented: “For any of you following the school board meetings, you know the craziness is real.”

Mr. DeSantis championed school choice in his 2018 campaign.

William Mattox

of the James Madison Instituteargued in these pages that “unexpected support from minority women,” whom he dubbed “school-choice moms,” accounted for his narrow victory. More than 100,000 low-income Florida students participated in the state’s tax-credit scholarship program at the time. Mr. DeSantis expanded Florida’s choice programs and now 150,000 students are enrolled.

Mr. Crist, who was elected Florida governor in 2006 as a Republican, supported school choice then. He ran as an independent for the Senate in 2010, then became a Democrat and changed his position when he ran for governor in 2014. The AFT has donated at least half a million dollars to his campaign this year. Unsurprisingly, Ms. Hernández-Mats strongly opposes choice. She has said private and even charter schools “shouldn’t be funded with public tax dollars because they do not have any public oversight.”

DeSantis-backed candidates won big in Tuesday’s nonpartisan county school-board races. Earlier this summer, a survey by the AFT found Republicans leading on education in battleground states. What could Mr. Crist have been thinking when he selected Ms. Hernández-Mats? Surely not that she would help him to victory.

Mr. DeAngelis is a senior fellow at the American Federation for Children.