Liberal and moderate school board candidates claimed victory across the country this week, wresting majority control from Republicans in some swing suburban districts, fending off challenges in liberal communities, and defeating some conservatives who had sparked intense backlash in right-leaning counties. While school board elections are officially nonpartisan in most of the 16 states that held them on Tuesday, the rancor over culture war issues such as book bans and policies dealing with gender and race polarized many of the contests. And in many of the districts where these issues have dominated board meetings and local politics, conservative candidates were unable to successfully leverage them. Over the past three years, Republican groups have poured energy and resources into culture war disputes and propelled conservatives onto school boards, where they imposed restrictions on LGBTQ accommodations, terminated administrators and pulled books from shelves. While comprehensive national data on Tuesday’s school board elections was not immediately available, the results largely reinforced recent polling suggesting lagging voter enthusiasm for these fights — in a variety of communities. Julie Marsh, an education policy professor and co-director of the Rossier Center on Education Policy, Equity and Governance at the University of Southern California who has studied public school disputes, said conservative losses in swing districts and red states such as Iowa and Kansas particularly reinforced this trend. “I think parents are tired of talking about bathrooms, books bans and flags and pronouns,” she said. Marsh said she hopes that with more voter participation it will be harder for a small, vocal group to control school districts, though she expects political rancor over public schools to continue. “I don’t think it’s over,” Marsh said, “but I do think that moderate and liberal groups seem to be a little bit more engaged and savvy and not caught off guard, perhaps as they were early on a couple of years ago.”