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Polk County School Board District 3 candidate Victor Sims began receiving screenshots of an Oct. 31 Facebook post from the Republican Party of Polk County soon after it appeared on Facebook.
The post, shared at almost 10 p.m. on Halloween included the text, “This Halloween, the scariest thing isn’t a costume. It’s Victor Sims on our School Board and Angie Nixon in the U.S. Senate. Don’t let Polk get spooked. Vote Republican on Tuesday, November 3.”
The text was accompanied by an AI-generated image depicting Sims with vampire fangs and a cape, alongside U.S. Senate candidate Angie Nixon in a witch’s hat and cloak, both of who are African American.
The post drew criticism because of its use of the word “spooked,” which has a history as a racial slur, particularly when directed at Black people.
Sims said he wasn’t particularly concerned when people began sending him screenshots.
“People were worked up about it,” Sims said. “I didn’t think much about it, mainly because I’m just used to the REC (Republican Executive Committee) attacks.”
A little more than three hours after it was shared, the post was edited around 1 a.m., and the text reading “Don’t let Polk get spooked” was removed.
Editing the post
Sam Romain, chairman of the Polk County GOP, the person behind a majority of the content on the Facebook page, said he meant the post playfully.
“I’m trying to bring a younger crowd into politics,” Romain said. “The intention is just to show younger people that politics doesn’t have to be boring.”
Romain said he chose Sims and Nixon because their values and the organizations supporting them differ from those of the Republican Party. He said the rose in the moon was a reference to a symbol used by socialist organizations, including the Democratic Socialists of America. In the context of Halloween, he said the word ‘spook,’ to him, only meant being scared.
Not long after he published the post, Romain said his close friend and spiritual advisor, a man he described as an “older Black man from the rural south,” reached out to him. He said the man told him the word had been historically used as a racial slur.
“I’m 32,” Romain said “It’s a very old word. I was ignorant to it. I’ve never heard it used in that way — only in reference to being scared.” Romain said he grew up in a military family and the only other meaning he was previously aware of for the word was an intelligence officer. “My intentions on that post were not to be a racist dog whistle,” Romain said. “There’s nothing to hide. There is no scandal. There is no story.”
After the conversation, Romain deleted the sentence in the post but did not add an explanation. “Revising the post was signal enough,” he said. “In this season, it doesn’t matter what I say — whether I make a follow-on comment or I don’t make a follow-on comment — either way they’re going to attack you. That’s the way that it works during an election cycle.”
Sims accepts explanation
Romain said he spoke to Sims after learning about the racist connotations of the word and updating the post. When asked if he apologized to Sims, he said he wouldn’t share details of a private conversation.
Sims confirmed that they did speak, and he was satisfied with Romain’s explanation. Sims described the post as in “poor taste,” but he did believe Romain was sincere when he said it was solely motivated by the holiday. “I think his intentions were to try to be funny,” Sims said. He said he understands Romain’s humor. “If I haven’t had conversations with him or I hadn’t met him in person and stuff like that, I probably would have different reactions to it.”
Asked about the revision to the post, Sims said, “I think when people know better, they do better, and so I think he did that.”
The post also caught the attention of satirical Facebook page “The City of Lakeland,” which posted a screenshot of the post before and after revisions, along with text, “The original post was racist, right? Why make the edit if it wasn’t racist? We called out racism in the primary and we’re calling it out now.”
In response to the post from “The City of Lakeland,” Romain said, “It could be ignorance on my part that I don’t know the meaning of the word spooked. But it’s ignorance on the other side to assume that your political opponent is racist.”
Romain said it was “a bit unfair to broadly paint someone as a racist.”
Race as an ongoing issue
The Halloween post wasn’t the first time race entered the discourse surrounding the school board contest.
Sims said he previously spoke to Romain about an individual who described Sims as “the monkey in the middle” in multiple posts in conservative Facebook groups not owned or managed by the Polk GOP. Sims said the post was blatantly racist, but moderators did not take it down.
Sims also told LkldNow that his campaign regularly received text messages referring to Sims with a racial slur, “probably one of the worst things you can say to an African American human being,” he said. Romain said the Polk GOP did not send these texts and does not condone the behavior.
Just days before the election, Sims said he wasn’t paying attention to social media posts, but throughout the campaign, he was bothered by “continual name calling” on the Polk GOP’s page and what he described as “things that aren’t tracked by fact.”
“Their goal was to align me with the big ‘S-word,’ socialist,” Sims said.
“To me, it kind of distracted from the actual thing that we’re running for: our children and our staff,” Sims said. “It’s a nonpartisan race, and for me, I’ve wanted to stay as much of a nonpartisan race as possible, and let the candidate speak to the actual issues.”
“I don’t really spend much time talking about my opponent,” he said. “And it’s because I’m not asking people to vote against her. I’m asking them to vote for me, and those are two different ways of campaigning.”
Sims received 46.6% of the vote and lost to incumbent Kate Wallace in the November 2026 election.
Newsroom note: This post was updated to clarify Romain’s quotes and position.
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