I’m going to start with what *I* learned: When my wife’s right, she’s right.
I spent hours in front of the TV with my list of key races and ballot issues and didn’t go to bed until late. When I did, I felt a modicum of relief: The Dems had done what they absolutely needed to do. They had pulled the country at least one step back from the abyss. But a lot of key races I’d targeted went red, and when I went to bed well after midnight, I was feeling a lot more relief than excitement. Kind of “meh,” in other words.
My wife, on the other hand, went to bed around 10, saying, “Let’s just wait and see what’s under the tree tomorrow morning.” At the time, the returns in were largely from Trump country, and I wasn’t feeling so great about things. The Blue Wave, from what I could see, largely hadn’t materialized.
And then I woke up today. And started reading. And, well, the longer the day went on, the more good news started trickling in. And, long story short, had I done what my wife did, I’d have gotten the same good news she did without all that stress.
And there was a lot of good news.
The first thing we learned was that the Democrats had taken the House and, with it, the specific power of subpoena and the general power to hold a largely lawless administration accountable. That HAD to happen if we were not going to proceed farther down the same road Germany traveled in the 1930s. And praise God, it did.
Not only that, we picked up a number of governorships, although the big prizes in Georgia and Florida remain contested for the moment and it looks like, win or lose, Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp will have been allowed to at least try to steal his own governor’s race. That can never be allowed to happen again, in Georgia or anywhere else.
We also learned that a lot of small miracles can happen overnight. Lucy McBath, whose valiant effort to oust the despicable Karen Handel in the Georgia Sixth looked DOA at midnight, now appears to have pulled through. Same with Joe Cunningham in the S.C. First against Katie Arrington, whose concession speech has to be seen and heard to be believed: She’s a narcissist to rival Trump, and I don’t say that lightly.
We learned that this election was even more of a referendum on Trump than a lot of people had thought. And I learned this because our six-term Republican sheriff, who faced a Democratic challenger with some nontrivial baggage, lost. Nobody around here, and I mean nobody, saw that coming. He’d been a perfectly good sheriff for a long time — I didn’t like him personally, but with the possible exception of his high-speed-chase policy, which he finally agreed to change after a pursuit-induced wreck in which five people died, I couldn’t really point to anything wrong that he was doing professionally that would make people vote against him. The only thing I could think of to make that many people vote against him was his support for Trump.
That said, we also learned that sometimes all politics really IS local. Trudy Wade, perhaps the second-vilest human being in the N.C. Senate behind GOP leader Phil Berger, had spent the past few years shitting on Greensboro out of spite. Karma’s a bitch.
If you doubt that, ask Kim Davis, the Kentucky Republican who made national news by refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage a few years ago. One of the men whom she had tried to deny a marriage license ran against her and whipped her like a rented mule.
What else did we learn?
We learned, those of us who didn’t already know, that the Green Party is just a bunch of Republican tools. They may have cost Democrat Kyrsten Sinema the U.S. Senate race in Arizona — the vote totals for the Green candidate well outweighed the difference between Sinema and Republican incumbent Martha McSally. The Green candidate in the New York 19th was taking money from a big GOP donor while attacking the Democratic candidate from the left.
We learned that voters feel very differently about issues versus candidates. In Florida and Missouri, to name just two, voters approved progressive ballot measures by significant margins — but voted for the politicians who oppose those measures. Part of that might just be due to racism, particularly in Florida. But there’s something else there that Democrats need to tease out and address.
Speaking of Florida, after the passage of Prop 4, which restores voting rights to most felons who have served their time, we learned that the Florida electorate could look very different, and much more Democratically inclined, in 2020. Prop 4 restores voting rights to about 1.5 million people. If Dems can get even 15% of those people to register and vote in 2020, they’ll find they have significantly more breathing room than they’re used to.
Speaking of voting, we learned that Americans are tired of vote suppression. A number of states passed initiatives to make it easier to register and vote and/or to prevent partisan gerrymandering. Here in N.C., unfortunately, we passed a state constitutional amendment requiring voter ID, but the measure is pretty much identical to a law the 4th Circuit overturned last year, with SCOTUS declining to hear the GOP appeal. I think the same thing will happen, and I am cautiously optimistic that there might not even be four votes on the high court to hear the same appeal again. The court traditionally has thought of itself as being a lagging indicator of political mood; what happened in this arena last night should signal to the court that, surprise, people want to vote, want their votes to count, and do not want to be messed with while voting, and that it should adjudicate accordingly because these are reasonable requests.
We learned that Republicans are perfectly willing to re-elect congresscritters who are under indictment (Chris Collins and Duncan Hunter) or who have been credibly accused of, at the least, knowing about the sexual assault of young men and refusing to do anything about it (Jim Jordan). Collins and Hunter, at least, are unlikely to serve their full terms.
We learned, AGAIN, that electronic voting systems are unreliable and should be replaced with paper ballots.
We learned that white women voters have some ‘splainin’ to do.
We learned that young adults really CAN turn out for a midterm election.
We learned that gerrymandering remains a huge problem in North Carolina: “In Congress, Republicans won 50.3% of the overall vote but 77% of the seats (10-3). That’s the power of gerrymandering.” But in 2020, districts will have been redrawn so that Democrats will have at least a fair shot at real representation in that year’s U.S. House races.
We learned that after three and a half years, the national media largely still have not learned how to do their jobs without providing an echo chamber for Trumpian propaganda and bigotry. Funny how completely the refugee caravan, which had loomed so large on the media agenda these past few weeks, disappeared without a trace in news coverage this morning.
Here’s one huge national lesson, particularly for Democrats: Put the best people you can at the top of the ticket, and then contest every single downballot race. Every. Single. One.
Beto O’Rourke narrowly lost his battle to take the odious Ted Cruz’s U.S. Senate seat in Texas. But O’Rourke built a campaign so organic and powerful that although he didn’t quite win his own race, he’s probably responsible for winning dozens of others. Not only did the particularly stupid tool Rep. Pete Sessions get ousted, but so, also, did every Republican judge in Dallas and Houston. (One of them actually pitched a temper tantrum in court this morning.) O’Rourke’s campaign likely also is responsible for the fact that Democrats won 31 of 32 contested Court of Appeals races, taking 17 seats from GOP incumbents. That changes the legal/justice landscape of Texas overnight. And Texas was just one state; it’s now looking as if Stacey Abrams’s campaign for Georgia governor helped the aforementioned Lucy McBath across the finish line in the Georgia Sixth as well.
And we learned, finally, that we as a people can say, “Yes, Trump is crazy, but look at all this AMAZING stuff we can do if we don’t let ourselves be defined by his craziness and if we show up on Election Day.”
So, no, we didn’t accomplish everything we were hoping for this time last night. But we got a glimpse of what we can accomplish, if we all show up and all keep working. So everyone take a deep breath, and then let’s get to work on 2020 and the ongoing struggle to create a more perfect Union.
