Be aware: ‘School board moms’ are new swing voters

First there were “soccer moms” — the minivan-driving suburban mothers who became swing voters in the 1996 presidential election.

Then there were “security moms” who after 9/11 were concerned about keeping their children safe from terrorism.

Well, in 2022, the new swing voters will be “school board moms” — suburban women who are deeply concerned with the direction of their children’s education and are showing up at school board meetings across the country to make their voices heard. But instead of addressing their concerns, Democrats are likening them to terrorists and weaponizing the FBI to intimidate them. Big mistake.

School board moms are furious about pandemic school closures, mask mandates and teachers unions that put the interests of adults over the interests of kids. They are irate that schools are indoctrinating their kids with extremist ideologies — teaching them to see everything through the prism of race and to believe that America is a systemically racist country. They are angry about the elimination of merit-based admissions and gifted-and-talented programs in the name of diversity.

And what is the Democrats’ response?

To treat them as domestic terrorists. Not figuratively; literally. In September, the National School Boards Association sent a letter to President Joe Biden accusing parents of engaging in “domestic terrorism and hate crimes” and asking Biden — I kid you not — to deploy the “U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Secret Service, and its National

Threat Assessment Center” as well as the FBI and “its National Security Branch and Counterterrorism Division” to investigate this “immediate threat” using the “PATRIOT Act in regards to domestic terrorism.”

In its letter, the school board association did not cite a single incident that violated anti-terrorism statutes, much less warranted federal intervention. It noted that an “individual was arrested in Illinois for aggravated battery and disorderly conduct during a school board meeting” while in Virginia “an individual was arrested, another man was ticketed for trespassing, and a third person was hurt during a school board meeting.” In Michigan, an “individual yelled a Nazi salute in protest to masking requirements.” In Ohio, a school board member received a letter that “calls the school board member a ‘filthy traitor,’ implies loss of pension funds, and labels the school board as Marxist.” And in other states, the association said, parents “are inciting chaos during board meetings.”

Sorry, calling someone a Nazi or a communist is not a crime. And the FBI does not give out tickets for trespassing or make arrests for disorderly conduct.

But within days, Attorney General Merrick Garland responded to the letter with a memorandum to the director of the FBI in which he ordered “the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working with each United States Attorney, to convene meetings with federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial leaders in each federal judicial district” to, as the Justice Department put it, “determine how federal enforcement tools can be used to prosecute these crimes.”

Democrats have declared war on school board moms, and they are going to regret it. In 2016, suburban voters helped put Donald Trump in the White House. But in 2018 and 2020, suburban, college-educated women defected from the GOP in droves and helped give Democrats the White House and their narrow majorities in Congress. Writing for The Post last year, former Chicago mayor and Obama White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, D, predicted that “these women, many of whom live in the nation’s suburbs, are now slipping out of the GOP’s reach.”

Well, today, the Biden administration is doing everything in its power to drive these women back into the GOP fold. Just as Democrats missed the rise of Trump, what is happening in school board meetings across the country is a harbinger of electoral defeat for the Democratic Party. School board moms are mad as hell — and Democrats will rue the day they treated them like terrorists.