Change in POlitical Trends and challenges against book titles
Introduction
The school years from 2021-2023 saw an exponential increase in the instances of books being challenged and being removed in school districts, reversing a 17 year (2003-2020) declining trend across the United States. 
Another interesting observation associated with the rise in book challenges was the fact that many books that were challenged had themes and/or characters that are LGBTQ. Challenges based on LGBTQ content began increasing in 2014, but since 2021, the majority of titles being challenged in schools contained LGBTQ content.
There has been a rise in anti-LGBTQ sentiment in Florida for the past few years. At the forefront of it has been Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, who was first elected in 2018 and was re-elected in 2022. DeSantis has been responsible for signing the controversial Parental Rights in Education Bill, commonly known as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill. The bill reads, “Classroom instruction by school personnel or third parties on sexual orientation or gender identity may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.” DeSantis signed bills through which health care providers who provide gender affirming care can be penalized, gender-inclusive bathrooms and changing facilities in schools, public shelters, healthcare facilities and jails have been prohibited, and has signed a bill that would allow the state board of governors to give direction to universities on removing majors and minors in subjects like critical race theory and gender studies.
GUbernatorial Elections & Censorship
Due to DeSantis’ controversial views we chose to compare election data between the 2018 and 2022 gubernatorial elections, both of which resulted in DeSantis’ Victory.
I chose to map political data based on the difference of votes between the total democrat vote and republican vote for each county. The more negative or positive the difference was, the more a certain county had Democrat or Republican votes.
From the maps, we can observe that in 2022, DeSantis soared in popularity so much so that most of the counties that voted for a democrat governor in 2018, voted for DeSantis for his re-election in 2022, including Miami-Dade, Osceola and Palm Beach counties which have been reliable democratic parties in the past.
It is notable that DeSantis’ land slide victory comes after a series of controversial bills he signed. Including the ones mentioned above, DeSantis also signed the “Stop WOKE Act” which allowed parents to sue school districts that teach critical race theory and the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act” which banned transgender women and girls from participating and competing in middle and high-school girls’ and college women’s sports competitions in Florida.
Parental Rights Groups
Before the “Don’t Say Gay Act” was passed towards the end of the first quarter of 2022, a number of local chapters of Parental Rights Organizations who campaign for book censorship in schools had started operating in Florida. The most active ones, and the ones that were responsible for most of the book challenges were the Moms for Liberty and the Citizens Defending Freedom Groups. To see if there was a correlation in where Parental rights groups operated, we mapped how many of them were operating in each county and compared it to the election data from the gubernatorial elections from 2022.
Almost all except one of the counties that voted for a democrat governor have at least one parental rights organization active in them. Most of the counties that flipped in the 2022 gubernatorial elections are geographically close to counties with active parental rights organizations and all the counties that flipped in 2022 have a parental rights organization active in them. Another thing that is noteworthy is that areas where there are two or more.
Another area I thought would be interesting to map out to see if there was a correlation or not was the amount of book challenges where these parental Rights Organizations were active.
From this data, we can see that all of the counties where books were challenged had at least one parental rights organization active. However, there were almost the same number of counties where these organizations were present but there were no book challenges. What is interesting is that one of the counties, Indian River, has exponentially more books being challenged than any other county and local chapters of the Moms for Liberty parental rights group is active in all the counties with book challenges, with the exception of Lee county which has other Parental rights organizations active there.
Number Of challenges & Election DAta
Trying to look for more patterns, I mapped out the election data with the number of challenges in each county. This is what I ended up with.
With the exception of Osceola County, all other counties that flipped had at least one book challenge in them. 11 of the 18 total counties with challenges were pivot republican counties that DeSantis won in both 2018 and 2022. DeSantis won in 16 out of the 18 counties with challenges in 2022.