I don’t have anything positive or reasonable to say about the election because I’m not a journalist — so I don’t have to be objective — and I’m not an optimist — so I don’t have to put a happy face on anything.
I let myself hope yesterday and that’s so not in my character. I don’t even know where it came from! I was actually LESS hopeful during the 2016 election, and when Trump won, I was largely unaffected. I assumed Clinton would win, because all y’all’s polls kept telling me so, but when she didn’t, I said “whelp, that’s just White America being the White America I always knew they were” and I left it at that. I went about my Wednesday after the election like nothing ever happened.
I don’t know where this hope came from last night!
There were no upsets or surprises. Republicans were leading in the polls in every race they won, and they had been leading the entire campaign. At no point did Gillum, O’Rourke, or Abrams have a lead over their Republican competition. At no point did the Senate map look favorable for a Democratic takeover in any way whatsoever.
So I don’t know where this hope came from!
Still, I am absolutely crushed. Even though the election played out exactly the way it was going to from the start, I actually let myself hope for a surprise victory, a referendum on hate and bigotry and Trump that would prove to me that this idea of a better America was attainable. I’m tired of seeing them win, even though I thought I’d grown out of this infantile notion that Good Triumphs Over Evil or the vague universal notion of karma. You don’t reap what you sow, not in the way we’d like to believe. You plant seeds, and either they grow or they don’t, and it has nothing to do with how “good” you are, only how good you are at watering the seeds.
The United States is founded on bad seeds and there is more than enough water for each and every one of them. I wanted a surprise victory the way they got their surprise victory in 2016, but we haven’t planted enough of those seeds to counterbalance the harvest of hate the GOP is currently reaping.
I can’t speak for everyone in my age bracket, but for me, I knew logically that this wasn’t a great country for most of my life. I could see it in the statistics, in the rhetoric, in the “democratic” process, but I became an adult during the Obama administration. I got to vote for a Black man with a Muslim name TWICE and he won TWICE on a platform of hope. I was wearing these rose-colored glasses for my entree into political engagement. 2016 took them off and 2018 stepped on them. I grew up a queer Black atheist in the rural South, so at no point in my life did I ever feel like this country was for me or that I was welcome here. I always felt like I was barely clinging to the American ladder, holding on to one of those lower rungs by my fingertips, but under Obama, I felt like I had a whole palm on it! It was like I too could feel proud to be an American. I didn’t have to be a Straight White Christian to feel comfortable in the US because this Black man with big ears and a Muslim name was the PRESIDENT!! and he got elected twice. Now I’m back to my fingertips, growing out my nails for extra traction so I don’t slip off completely.
We picked up the House seats we knew we would, and we lost the Senate and governors’ races we knew we would, but I wanted America to surprise me. I wanted to know that blatant lies and racism and bigotry and misogyny and VIOLENCE! were all so abhorrent, that people would be so enraged at what’s happening in the country, they’d overcome the voter suppression and misinformation to send a firm message to the Republican party that we refuse to accept this as the new norm. But Conservatives still outvoted us. They said “we like where the country is going” and I don’t know how to process that right now because I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I can’t physically drag people to the polls. If what they’re seeing isn’t enough to get them off the couch, I don’t know what I’m supposed to DO to convince them that the only way to correct course is an enormously massive and unprecedented turnout so we can fix the easy problems immediately and set to work on the big ones. We need to redraw voting districts fairly and a federal voting holiday and automatic registration when you turn 18 and paper printouts of voting confirmation so people have faith in their vote. These are things we can fix immediately if we take control and wield that power the way Republicans have.
But that’s in the future. Today, right now, in this moment, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do in order to feel good about this country or what I’m supposed to say to myself to feel like we have any hope in 2020.
Now that you’ve gotten this far, go read some balanced reporting about how difficult it is to flip the House when the economy is strong (we did that), about the number of women joining Congress, about Ohio and Michigan and what those races say about Trump’s (possibly diminishing) strength in the Midwest, about felons in Florida getting the right the vote, about subpoenas and investigations into this administration, about potential prospects for 2020 now that the race has basically kicked off, about energized young people all over the country ready to buckle down and do even better next time. Go read all those things because giving up is obviously not an option.
(If you wanna take a couple of weeks off that’s fine though. I’ma finally bust through some of this Netflix queue I’ve stacked up.)
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