for a quick change of pace–i know we’ve all seen a thousand posts about voting, but what i haven’t seen (not yet) is one saying thank you.
thank you for those who made it out in the rain and the cold, who organized and canvassed and took on the onerous task of working with non-voting & conservative friends/family to change their stance if at least just this once. thank you for those who stood in line for hours, who had to travel because your voting place was moved, who had to jump through ridiculous fucking hoops to register, who weren’t inspired but showed up anyway for the disenfranchised and the greater good. thank you as well to everyone who voted early, absentee, and provisional.
Don’t be. You’re hearing media do what it does: harp on one person’s lack of enthusiasm and make it seem that that one opinion is held by thousands.
This race went precisely as I thought it would. Precisely.
And it was absolutely a massive success.
So let me tell you why, so that you feel better and can easily put down the annoying crowing that republicans are going to do, because they managed to cling to a few things.
If the votes fall as I believe they will, the democrats will have retaken the house by some 30 seats. This is impressive and somewhat unique in our country’s history. The GOP, upon taking the house originally, jerrimandered these districts in impressively screwball ways. Wherever that rigging has been overturned, the districts have gone blue. Which is, of course, why they did it. Democrats have the house now, 30ish flips in republican rugged districts. 15 of those being female candidates.
That is absolutely impressive.
A few key candidates to whom many people were paying close attention did not perform as people desired. Abrams, O’Rourke, Gillum. Well…I’m not surprised. Abrams faces absolute state wide fraud. Her opponent being the person also in charge of voter registration, withholding some 50k votes of which 70% were black. Voter intimidation. This is blatant corruption. And yet still…her race was very close. So too with Beto. Ted Cruz was a presidential candidate! When he took Texas, he did so with a wide margin. Last night in Texas he was fighting tooth and nail. Gillum’s goobenatorial race for Florida was a figurative dead heat. 99% of the vote in—49% Gillum, 49.7% DeSantis. These are CLASSICALLY and FULLY republican regions in which Trump took the presidency by huge margins. That these races, with all those challenges, were as close as they were PROVES that something unprecedented happened.
3-400% voter turnout increases for a midterm election. Mostly with the youth.
But let’s talk about what it means to have the house.
Now I know you’re probably concerned about the federal judgeships that are about to pop up for consideration, and it’s true that the Senate was needed to stop approvals of those candidates, but…
Control of the house means that Democrats now take hold of some critical committees. These committees are the very ones that will be overseeing corruption allegations. Ways and Means, energy and Commerce, Financial Services, Intelligence, appropriations, foreign affairs, armed services, judiciary, transportation and infrastructure, and…government reform.
How do you feel now?
The worst political fallout of a GOP controlled government, the worst sound bites that weren’t Trump’s, the worst slaps across the face? All came from footage of those very same committees. Those committees now belong to Democrats.
Massive policy shifts also occurred in many classically conservative states—legalizing marijuana votes, Florida giving the vote back to former criminals who’ve served their time thus giving the vote back to a HUGE portion of the African-American Community that has been held in check by a racist and classicist policing method, then there were upsets in many small ways too.
I promise you…this is all excellent and it will have truly important and forceful impact. In 2020, if we can keep that same enthusiasm and rage, the entire government will shift. But that can only happen if we keep moving forward, if the candidates who won keep their noses to the grindstone and push back hard, if you and I and everyone on the ground continues to talk about this and force out bigots and greed.
Do not be discouraged. I promise you…this was an amazing election. Don’t focus on a few bright stars and think that all is lost because they fell. There is a great deal happening here, and one thing I know from being at sea—when a wave is building, there is first a terrifying shift, as the water level begins to rise. The ship will first dip, surrounded by walls of water, and then of a sudden, the swell. The ship raises and passengers suddenly realize that they are much higher than before, with an incredible view. Then the wave crests and takes the ship with it.
We didn’t see a wave crest tonight. So what? That means it’s a much larger wave than we realized. It will crest in the future. But only if that fluid pressure is maintained.
This is good. It is. So long as everyone keeps working. This is good.
Calm down. Have a glass of champagne. A cup of tea. When they Trumpet all their noise…say nothing. Nothing needs to be said. You’re higher than you were with an excellent view of the ending. So relax. Don’t fret.
“You can make it better. Better is always worth fighting for.”
—
Barack Obama, 7 September 2018
Better is good. I used to have to tell my young staff this all the time in the white house. Better is good. That’s the history of progress in this country. Not perfect, better. The civil rights act didn’t end racism, but it made things better. Social security didn’t eliminate all poverty for seniors, but it made things better for millions of people. Do not let people tell you the fight’s not worth it because you won’t get everything that you want. The idea that, well, you know, there’s racism in America, so I’m not going to bother voting, no point, that makes no sense. You can make it better. Better is always worth fighting for. That’s how our founders expected this system of self-government to work. Through the testing of ideas and the application of reason and evidence and proof, we could sort through our differences, and nobody would get exactly what they wanted, but it would be possible to find a basis for common ground. And that common ground exists.
Samantha Bee’s 1st segment last night hit home the truth about the prevalence of antisemitism in America.
Trump speaks in dog whistles and anti-semitic coded language with the greatest of ease. It is second nature for him. He sells white victimhood just as easy.
On Tuesday, voters will make a decision in what is the purest midterm referendum on a sitting president in modern times:
Will we take a step, even a small one, back from the ugliness and the race-baiting that has engulfed our country?
Or will we affirm that we are really the intolerant and frightened people Donald Trump has made us out to be?
If we choose the latter, 2018 will in some ways be more difficult to take than 2016. This time, we don’t have the luxury of saying we didn’t really know what Trump would do.
I keep saying this: history doesn’t just happen. The world isn’t a story that someone tells, and we all ride along inside the narrative, unable to affect it in any meaningful way.
I am 46. I was raised in an America that claimed to be The Land of Opportunity, a place where all people are equal under the law, and anyone who was willing to do the work could make something special for themselves and their families.
That is painfully not the America we are living in now, and that didn’t just happen. This America, this country that is so xenophobic, so profoundly unequal, which treats nonwhite lives like they are disposable, which is currently lead by the most despicable, dishonest, openly racist and misogynist man to ever hold the presidency … this America didn’t just happen. This America was slowly and deliberately built by people like Ronald Reagan, John Bolton, Dick Cheney, George Bush and his idiot son, Newt Gingrich, The Koch Brothers, The Mercers, Fox News, Stephen Miller, and their malignant voice of hate and fear, Donald Trump.
Taking a look at my 46 years in America, it starts to become clear that, at least at the national political level, presidents like Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter are not our norm, as much as I wish they were. Looking at just the last 25 years, we see two presidents who were not elected by the majority of Americans, and we see a Senate that continually and gleefully abuses its anti-Democratic power to keep shaping America further and further away from the ideals of freedom and equality and opportunity that America at least claimed to stand for when I was a child.
What we are witnessing now is a fight for not just the future of America, but for her present, and for the rest of my life. Will America continue her march toward open civil war between the revanchist, paranoid, bigoted army of racists who make up the incredibly small but powerful Republican base, and the majority of Americans who are not bigots, white nationalists, and misogynists? OR will we send a clear message that our voices, which are the overwhelming majority, will not be silenced, and we will not allow ourselves to be governed by Trump and people who support him?
Dana Milbank is correct in his column and in his assessment: our eyes are wide open now, and we know exactly what we get when Republicans are in power.
This election is powerfully and unambiguously clear: you are with us, or you are against us. You are with Trump and his hateful, violent, paranoid, racist values, or you are against him.
History doesn’t just happen. Every election matters and every election helps decide what our country is going to look like not just for us, but for our children and for the future.
It may seem like one vote doesn’t matter, or one election doesn’t matter. It may seem like “they’re all the same” or “there’s no difference between the parties” but I want you to consider that there is one group of politicians in America (and their supporters) who don’t have a problem tearing a child away from its parents, who claim to be good, honorable, God fearing moral Christians whose deeds consistently hurt the poor, the marginalized, people of color, and immigrants. There is one group in our political system who has, at every opportunity, disenfranchised the voices of Americans who they view as an impediment to even more wealth and power, for people who already have so much wealth and power, they can’t even use all of it in a single lifetime.
There is another party that doesn’t stand for these things.
Every election in America is a choice between these two parties. I know it shouldn’t be that way. I know that we should have more nuanced choices. But the reality is, we don’t. We can choose between a party that will tell nonwhites that they don’t matter and don’t have basic, fundamental, human rights (that are also their Constitutional rights, by the way), and a party that says their lives and their rights and their families matter.
History doesn’t just happen. Elections have consequences.
On Tuesday, we all vote with our eyes wide open, and we have a chance to grab the pen that’s writing our history. Don’t let anyone tell you that your vote and your voice doesn’t matter.
The point of voting blue in 2018 isn’t to make the US perfect. We cannot accomplish that in one fell swoop. There’s gerrymandering, voter apathy, voter suppression, and generations of older party-line fucks we have to deal with.
Voting blue in 2018 is to make it lessimmediately threatening for PoC, LGBT+ people, the disabled, and any other marginalized demographic. It’s a stopgap against Republicans who are aligned with Nazis, white supremacists, and sexual abusers.
Correcting politics in the United States is going to take decades of new voters staying on top of politics and not falling prey to apathy, like our predecessors.
People telling you not to waste a vote on 3rd Party this midterm aren’t saying “never vote 3rd party.” Republicans have united behind one utterly heinous front.We need to unite behind Democrats, for the time being.
Repeating this key sentence:
“Voting blue in 2018 is to make it less immediately threatening for PoC, LGBT+ people, the disabled, and any other marginalized demographic [WOMEN]. It’s a stopgap against Republicans who are aligned with Nazis, white supremacists, and sexual abusers.”
Reblogging in the memory of everyone who said to me, 2 years ago, “how much damage can he do?” and “it’s like choosing the lesser of two evils” and “you’re overreacting” and “he won’t get elected it’ll never happen”.
