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The experts are already crunching the numbers that show young people, Latinos, and women coming out in huge numbers and voting for Democrats all across the country. When you’ve won in South Carolina and Kansas and Iowa, and Mississippi is still in play, something is up.
We had excellent candidates -- Talarico and Hinojosa in Texas, El Sayed in Michigan, Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia, Colom in Mississippi – I could name many more – all gave voters somebody they wanted to vote for.
We had good issues to run on – data centers, abortion rights, affordability, the war on Iran, gas and diesel prices that hit farmers hard in places like Iowa and Kansas and North and South Carolina and Mississippi.
But I think this election turned on something bigger, and if I can say so, warmer, that bent some otherwise unreachable voters away from MAGA and Trumpism. To put it plainly, many, many Americans are fed up with the cruelty and corruption and criminality of Donald Trump and his party. When people in this country think of immigration, they don’t think of masked men carrying automatic weapons dressed up like they’re going to war grabbing families with children out of their cars and throwing them on the ground and handcuffing them and spiriting them away to cages and off to foreign countries shackled to the floors of airplanes. People don’t think of immigration as an issue that leads to American citizens being killed in the streets by masked men.
The outrageous cruelty of Trump’s ICE tactics have had a ripple effect through the public at large. More Americans than Republicans counted on have been wondering why there can’t be a system that comes up with documents for undocumented immigrants so they can stay in their jobs, pay their taxes, keep their kids in schools, and work toward citizenship. In the blizzard of election coverage, it was easy to miss the stories about school closures because a lack of students and a disappearing tax base makes them too expensive to maintain in small towns. There were the same sort of stories about small colleges that cannot recruit enough students to stay open, so they’re closing, too. When schools and colleges close, small and medium-size towns lose the teaching and administrative jobs that keep people on payrolls and businesses open.
After two years of watching Trump cover the walls of the Oval Office with goldleaf gimcrackery and dig holes in the ground to erect monuments to himself and close down beloved institutions such as the Kennedy Center out of pique that he can’t put his name on its building, people have seen the rank corruption and ugly ego behind his moves. Two years of stories about Don Junior and Eric and Jared Kushner jetting around the world enriching themselves had enough of an effect on people that some of them decided to change their votes or stay home.
Story after story has been published about January 6 criminals pardoned by Trump who have committed new crimes, all the way from murder to domestic and child sexual abuse, to burglary and grand theft. Just this week, a man pardoned by Trump was accused of threatening the lives of federal judges. Other stories have exposed the dozens of pardons Trump has handed out to wealthy people who essentially bought their pardons. People see it as the pattern it is. Most Americans believe in the rule of law. They don’t believe that there should be one set of laws for them, and another set of laws for rich people who have political connections.
It took almost two years, but this stuff broke through. Even with issues like Trump’s attacks on NATO, his denigration of our neighbors and long-time allies such as Canada, and his overt cozying up to dictators who have included Vladimir Putin, people didn’t recognize the United States they grew up in, that many of them served in the military, for which many of their ancestors fought in World War I and World War II.
I have hated the phrase “this is not who we are” for years. It is usually uttered by a politician attempting to deny something that proves he is exactly who he is.
But yesterday at voting booths across this country, people took their ballots and cast votes that said it out loud. This is not who we are. We are better than this. We are going to vote for people who will stand up and act like we are better than this in Washington D.C. and in state houses across the country.
We have thought for too long that Trumpism is entrenched so deeply, it cannot be beaten; that MAGA voters are unreachable. It’s not. They’re not.
It’s been almost 100 years since Kansas elected a Democrat as their Senator. Kansans, confronted with the cruelty of Republican Senator Roger Marshall, an OBGYN doctor who sued his own patients and drove many of them into bankruptcy and jail, voted a Democrat, Adam Hamilton, to represent them in the Senate. This wasn’t just a political change. It was an earthquake, and it happened over and over across the country in states that Democrats have thought were lost to them.
They’re not. Americans live in those states. They said loud and clear that the corruption and cruelty of Republicans is not who they are. They went into the voting booth and said, we’re better than that.
They are. We are. It’s a new day in the United States of America we’ve been all along. We aren’t “great.” We need some work to get better than we are. But after yesterday, we’re getting there.
