An advice column making the rounds reveals something more troubling than a marital spat: a 35-year-old man with no children, who his own wife says doesn't even like kids, is running for school board as part of a slate assembled by local party leadership — because a politically connected friend encouraged him to do it.
The Anchorage Daily News and Boulder Daily Camera both ran the identical syndicated column this week. A woman writing as "No Vote" told advice columnist Eric that her husband joined a party-organized slate of school board candidates. She can't understand why. He has no kids. She doesn't think he'd be good for the role. When she pressed him, he said it was "just good to have a voice" and that a politically active friend recruited him. Now he suspects she won't vote for him. She hadn't planned to vote at all.
Both outlets framed this as a relationship dilemma — should a wife vote for her husband? The Boulder Daily Camera headlined it around the missing spousal vote. The Anchorage Daily News buried it under lifestyle advice. Neither touched the actual story: party machines are packing school boards with recruited candidates who have no stake in the schools themselves.
This is how institutional capture works. A politically connected recruiter finds willing bodies — not parents, not stakeholders, just warm bodies who want "a voice" — and slots them onto organized slates. The candidates don't need to know the issues. They don't need children in the system. They need a connection to the people already running the apparatus.
Meanwhile, the wife's instinct is to sit it out entirely. "I hadn't planned on voting anyway," she wrote. That apathy is the other half of the equation. One side organizes slates and recruits candidates. The other side stays home.
The columnist's advice was standard fare — you don't have to vote for your spouse, your ballot is private, do your research. He pointed her to a neutral site for candidate information. Perfectly anodyne. Completely beside the point.
School boards across the country have become ground zero in the culture fight — curriculum, gender policy, library books, disciplinary standards. The people who show up to run these boards shape what children learn and how schools operate. When party insiders hand-pick candidates with no connection to the classroom, parents lose. When ordinary Americans can't be bothered to vote, let alone run, the insiders win by default.
The question isn't whether one wife casts a ballot for her husband. The question is why more Americans with actual skin in the game — parents, taxpayers, community members — aren't stepping up to fill these seats themselves, instead of leaving them to party apparatuses and their recruited placeholders.
The founders didn't wait for permission to reclaim their institutions. They showed up.
