At least one cohost of “The View,” Sunny Hostin, cannot fathom why a woman would vote Republican. She recently said: “I read a poll … that white … suburban women are now going to vote Republican. It’s almost like roaches voting for Raid, right?”

Hostin seems to believe that abortion is the issue that drives the women of America to the polls, not a failing economy or the educational crisis in public schools. The reality is that mothers headed to the polls because their children were kept masked in schools if they were allowed to attend at all, and because it was discovered that some teachers turned their classrooms into hubs of political activism.

Mothers across the country took to their local school board meetings to express their concerns over questionable curriculum and school policies. Rather than investigate the concerns, school board members called concerned mothers liars and deemed them racist, bigoted, or intolerant. Later, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland released a memorandum in which he deemed concerned mothers domestic terrorists and called for the mobilization of the FBI to investigate threats against school board members while providing no evidence of threats to school board members.

The memorandum may have been intended to intimidate concerned mothers, but it only added fuel to their fire. Mothers began to actively campaign against school board members who supported shutting down schools and masking children. Mothers began to support candidates who offered transparency and invited parents back into the classroom.

The battle of parental rights became the main issue to mothers across the country, and this can be seen in Virginia with Glenn Youngkin, who ran for governor and won on a message of defending parental rights. It helped other Republicans win Tuesday.

“Parents have a fundamental right to be engaged in their children’s lives,” Younkin recently said. “And, oh, by the way, children have a right to have parents engaged in their life. And we needed to fix a wrong. … Children don’t belong to the state. They belong to families. And so, in these most important decisions, step one has to be to engage parents, not to the exclusion of a trusted teacher or an adviser, but to make sure that parents are involved in their children’s lives.”

This is the message that resonates with mothers who have felt disenfranchised by elected officials who think children belong to the state.

Sunny Hostin cannot relate to mothers who are in the parental rights battle. She has lived a life of incredible privilege and has not experienced her parental rights being usurped by the state. Hostin cannot understand the damages that children have endured by political activists who have taken over the public school system. Hostin cannot understand how damaging the learning loss is for those students whose schools were shut down.

Comparing brave mothers who endured years of bullying and name-calling to roaches is wrong. Mothers are simply doing what they have been biologically wired to do — protect their children from threats.