Deep breath. We gave ourselves a
chance. We did not end the Trump administration, we did not stop the
rise of fascism in America, and we did not finally, finally, finally
wipe out the lingering Confederacy that the Republican party has
essentially become. Wednesday's firing of Jeff Sessions and
installation of Trump lackey as acting attorney general make that
abundantly clear. (Of course, we couldn't have one fucking day.) But
we gave ourselves a chance. And with the campaign infrastructure we
built over the course of this election, with some of the wins in
governors races, with some of the election reforms passed by
referendum, and with a more advantageous Senate map, we have a chance
to really eradicate this Republican party in 2020. The Republican
party has been building this particular system of power since Richard
Nixon's Southern strategy and it has been successful for decades.
We're not going to erase it in one election, especially when there
are so many structural impediments to the type of change we seek. But
we might be able to do it in in two. Deep breath.
Here are my thoughts about what
happened in the mid-terms and where we can go next.
Flipped the House!
We flipped the house in two distinct
ways. First and foremost, there is a Democratic majority, which means
that (assuming we can make it to January) we have saved Medicare and
Social Security for now, as well as what remains of Obamacare, and prevented
(well, we'll see what happens in the lame duck) more catastrophic tax
cuts. And it also means that there will actually be oversight of this
administration. There will at least be a
chance at confronting and controlling the rampant corruption in the
cabinet. At the very least, it's only a matter of time before Trump's tax returns become public. This was the knife-edge upon which democracy teetered and we
needed to flip the House Democrat, regardless of who those actual
democrats were, in order to keep us from falling completely over into
fascism.
But another flip happened in the House.
On Tuesday, the House took the single biggest step I think any of us
have ever seen in our lifetimes, and perhaps ever in American
history, towards actually looking like the population of America.
There are now Muslims in the House, as there are in America, and
Native Americans in the House, as there are in America, and Latinx in
the House, as there are in America, and refugees in the House, as
there are in America, and there are more women in the House, closer
to the actual number of women in America and more people of color in
the House, closer to the actual number of people of color in America.
The House even got slightly queerer.
There was a time in the not too distant
past when the argument that the Democrat and Republican parties were
essentially the same held water, but, today, all you need is your
eyes to know that is no longer the case. The Democratic Party looks
like America and the Republican party looks like the Confederacy. And
now the House looks more like America.
Flipped Governor's Races, State Houses,
DAs, and Newly Competitive Seats
The devastation of the 2010 midterm
wasn't really in Congress, but in the states where Republicans were
able to leverage the census year to insulate their power from all but
the most dramatic voter uprisings. 2010, in many ways, ended up being
a culmination of liberal, progressive, and Democratic neglect of
state and municipal politics, a neglect that allowed Republicans to
entrench themselves at all levels of state government and leverage
that entrenchment to create power at the national level they would
not otherwise have secured.
In 2018, Democrats, liberals, and
progressives paid attention to state and local politics and it
showed, with states flipping executive, legislative, and judicial
branches, progressive DAs being elected, and ballot referendums
successfully enacting a number of policies that will make it easier
to elect more Democrats the next time around. It is going to be hard
to know this and even harder to feel this in a meaningful way and
even harder to feel it with the same intensity as we felt the
disappointment in certain losses, but, in this election, we improved
the lives of millions of Americans. We saved lives. I'll say that
again, we literally saved lives.
Furthermore, even in some high profile
losses, the Democrats showed the power of a run-everywhere strategy.
An energetic campaign, especially one that draws on both national
resources and local volunteer energy, like Abrams (who at time of
writing still hasn't officially lost), Gillum (who at time of writing
might actually have won), and O'Rourke, can create victories
elsewhere. We can confidently attribute two flipped seats in the
House to O'Rourke's campaign and maybe two more to Abrams. I think
it's also fair to say that the enthusiasm for Gillum probably gave a
boost to Prop 4 in Florida. Run everywhere is effective even if you
can't win everywhere.
And the thing is: Independents,
Democrats, liberals, progressives, democratic socialists, even some
Republicans, and others want to save their fucking country from
Donald Trump and his brand of white nationalist fascism so why not
give all of those people the opportunity to do so by giving them
campaigns to work on. When the energy is there you can create
positive results beyond winning a specific seat this specific year.
And now, in 2020 when the demographics will be even more advantageous
for Democrats, there will be thousands of experienced campaign
volunteers in every single state ready to take the lessons they
learned in this election and apply them to the next one.
American Society is Center-Left
The majority of Americans voted for
Democratic governors. The majority of Americans voted for Democrats
in the House of Representatives. The majority of Americans voted for
Democrats in the Senate. Progressive values won races all over the
country, including in red states, in the form of referendums and
ballot initiatives. Medicare was expanded. Voting rights expanded.
Minimum wages raised. Gerrymandering ended. Marijuana legalized.
When you add it all up, you get a
population that is (essentially and, of course, not uniformly)
politically center-left. You get a population that, in general,
supports the social contract of the New Deal, wants to lower its
insane incarceration rate, and wants competitive elections, all of
which are core Democrat and center-left policies and ideologies. Why
red states consistently elect representatives that specifically, even
aggressively, oppose the policies the people themselves support is
one of the great mysteries of American politics (if you ask me, it's
a heady mix of good old fashioned American racism with Republican
identity politics, but that's a post for a different time) but it
still contributes to the same conclusion: by and large the American
people want Democratic policies even if they don't always vote for
Democratic representation.
The Polls Are Alright
For the most part, the election looked
like we expected it to look. Of course, there were some surprises
both for the Democrats and for the Republicans, but, by and large,
the results reflected what pollsters and history suggested: the
Democrats would take the House and make gains in other places, while
the Republicans would hold the Senate and maintain control in others.
For some reason, we seem to treat polls as though they are
predictions, when they are really just educated guesses that are
useful for assessing political strategies and interesting to interact
with in the same way sports statistics are interesting to interact
with.
When Donald Trump won the Presidential
election, defying all of the prevailing predictions, we reacted as if
the very act of polling was somehow invalidated and perhaps even
fraudulent. This is another example of jumping to a conclusion in a
moment of trauma to find an explanation (any explanation!) for what
the fuck just happened. And just like the whole narrative of the
white working class and just like the narrative of the flaws of
Hilary Clinton's campaign, once every vote was counted (more on
this soon), once we got the full story we realized that, in fact,
Trump's campaign threaded that handful of a percent needle he needed
to win. Literally tens of thousands of votes in three states.
Oh, and there was a sophisticated
foreign-lead misinformation and manipulation campaign that
(allegedly) coordinated with the Trump campaign itself to boost his
campaign. Almost by definition a
this-crazy-shit-has-never-happened-before event isn't going to be
factored into 538's latest projections.
Polls are not perfect and never will
be, and really, aren't supposed to be. They are impressions. They are
guesses. They are spectra. They are one of the many different kinds
of tools campaigns can use to strategize and people can use to
understand our country and our politics. 2016 was an aberration
because shit happened that had never fucking happened before. And
that's not the fault of polls and pollsters. That's the fault of
criminals who defrauded and conspired to defraud the United States.
Results Before All the Votes Are
Counted
At time of writing, the odds that
Andrew Gillum actually won the governor's race in Florida continue to
rise. A recount for Florida's senate seat is all but guaranteed and a
recount for the governor's race in Georgia also looks increasingly
likely. As the denser, more populated districts with more mail-in and
absentee ballots to process continue to work through their ballots,
more and more votes for Democrats are added to the totals. It's
looking like the number of flipped seats in the House will land
closer to 40 than to 30. And two of the three Big Emotional
Disappointments on election night, might actually turn out to be Big
Significant Victories.
Will that change the narrative that
Tuesday was an overall disappointing performance for the Democrats?
Even if they eventually hold on to the Senate seat in Florida? Even
as all those Democratic votes in California keep getting piled on top
of the totals?
Of course not. Once a narrative sticks,
even if it is based on data that is eventually proven inaccurate it
is almost impossible to change it. It gets even harder when that
incorrect narrative benefits those in power (Republicans) and/or fits
neatly into pre-existing narratives (the mainstream media idea that
there is something fundamentally wrong with the Democratic Party).
Just like in 2016, when we called the election and drew conclusions
from it before seeing exactly how many more votes Clinton received
than Trump and before seeing how razor-thin his margins in the
rust-belt were and before seeing the actual composition of his
voters, we are likely to continue to discuss Tuesday's election is if
it were something far less impressive than it was.
There is, of course, an easy way to fix
this: do not release the results until all the votes have been
counted. Honestly, it should be a law.
We Built the Tools, We Learned the
Tricks, On to 2020
Hundreds of thousands of Americans
learned, over the course of this summer, the amount of and the kind
of work it takes to win elections in this country. Hundreds of
thousands of us have learned to canvas, to call, to text, and to
organize. Democrats had to develop unprecedented capacities to absorb
and deploy volunteers. Progressive think tanks pioneered new data
driven fundraising initiatives, developed new Get Out the Vote
techniques, and found new ways to tell their story. They found ways
to replace Super PAC money with volunteer energy. (For example, I
was one of a mass of volunteers who did remote data entry for the
O'Rourke campaign.)
But we also know where we need to do
more work. We need to start registering voters now for 2020 and be
willing to spend the money and time to get them all through the
registration process. We need to have the resources to respond to new Republican suppression tactics. We need to be
in high schools now, because today's 16-year-olds are 2020's
18-year-olds. We need to give all those thousands upon thousands of
volunteers opportunities to keep contributing to the world they want
to see. We need to start organizing ballot initiatives that drive
Democrat voters to the polls.
And we need to keep fighting now to
even get to January. Rick Scott is calling the counting of every vote
in Florida fraud. The President is moving to end the Mueller
investigation. And I haven't checked the internet in a few minutes so
who knows what's being cooked up for the lame duck session.
But I am not exhausted. I am not
overwhelmed. I am not deterred. Perhaps the most important thing we
learned on November 6 was the work is worth it. Small donations,
grassroots organizing, and thousands of volunteers engaging with an
aware public can overcome Super-PACs, gerrymandering, and other
structural impediments to Democracy.
The work is worth it. Deep breath. On to the next
fight.
