THE ROAD AHEAD

Let’s f ace it: We did not have the election we all wanted to have. The road ahead is going to be hard.

We left it all on the field. We gave more money than has ever been given. We built the biggest grassroots machine that’s ever been built. We wrote more postcards, made more calls, whipped off more texts and knocked on more doors than ever before. I’ve worked in professional politics; I know what a good campaign looks like. This wasn’t merely a good campaign, it was a great campaign. There wasn’t one thing Kamala Harris and her people did from July 21 to last night, that I would have said “No, do it this way instead.”

And yet the great campaign, the perfect campaign, underperformed the 2020 Biden campaign everywhere. Including in the places both won. Overall, this campaign came up 2-3 points short everywhere. There was not one place where it was different.

We. Lost.

I still think many Democrats and the Party establishment simply do not understand the true nature of the conflict we find ourselves in. Trump and his global anti-democratic allies are playing a different game, inventing a new, deeply illiberal game with new pieces on the board and rules to follow. We have been slow - dangerously! recklessly! - in seeing how the rules of the game have changed. There’s blame enough to go around to all of us.

Let’s take a look at what little good news there is to look at from last night:

Josh Stein was elected Governor of North Carolina.Democrats did very well in the state except for the top of the ticket.

Abortion rights measures had a good night. Montana, Colorado, New York, Maryland, Nevada, Arizona and Missouri, which all approved measures that either protect abortion rights or repeal strict limits. So we were kinda right that it was a powerful issue. More: CNN

Vouchers for charter schools lost in every state they were on the ballot; in Kentucky, they were crushed.

Also in Kentucky, the first Black woman was elected to the state Supreme Court, moving the court to the left a bit.

Atlanta DA Fani Willis won re-election, despite the Trump goons doing everything they could to fuck her up.

It’s likely that Ruben Gallego will become the Junior Senator from Arizona. Kyrsten Sinema is gone.

Andy Kim, who swept up the trash in the capitol on January 6, wonelection to become Junior Senator from New Jersey. Goldbar collector Robert Menendez is gone.

The woman in North Carolina called for the execution of President Obama lost her race to lead the North Carolina schools.

Even though we lost control of the Senate, Maryland’s Angela Alsobrooks and Delaware’s Lisa Blunt Rochester were both elected to be United States Senators. This is the first time the Senate has ever had two Black women serving together. They are also only the fourth and fifth Black women U.S. Senators ever.

Delaware state Sen. Sarah McBride won the state’s only House seat, making her the first openly transgender person elected to Congress,So there’s that.

Trump won, and he won by a big margin, taking the popular vote by nearly 3 points at latest count. .

He ran a racist, sexist, idiot campaign; that’s what the voters of this fucked up country decided they wanted.

We could have had decency and freedom and hope and instead we got the dumbest, meanest piece of shit on the fucking planet.

Kamala Harris and Tim Walz ran a great campaign.

This is who we are as a country: we’re not the good guys we thought we were, who I write about. We’re not as smart or decent as we said we were. We’re bad and about to get much worse.

The American People chose this. This, grotesquely, is democracy in action. We should brace ourselves for immense depravity; Adam Serwer was right when he pointed out that the cruelty is the point. That’s why it’s important the good people (like you reading this) don’t give up. Now let’s just hope and pray Trump doesn’t kill us all.

From Dahlia Lithwick: “This campaign was run on the explicit promise to inflict maximal suffering on a lot of disfavored and marginalized people. I trust them to keep that promise. Try to keep your heart soft because that will be the work. Take care of yourself because you will do that work again.”

From Ruth Ben-Ghiat in her book, “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present,” in a chapter on resistance: “Individual actions designed to be seen by the public break through the screen of official media and offer models of resistance that can be transformative. They seed the terrain for the mass nonviolent protests that can grow in response to state repression … For millions, acts of resistance have been a path to the recovery of the self and the reaffirmation of dignity, empathy and solidarity — all qualities the strongman seeks to destroy in his people.”

David Kurtz is right. Writing in TPM’s Morning Edition, he says:

“You might be taken aback by me finding silver linings in this result but I do think there are two of them. First, the dark path ahead was chosen clearly and unequivocally: With 51%, Trump is on track to win a majority of the popular vote. Second, Trump will win without undue reliance on the quirks of our 18th century anti-majoritarian constitutional structure.

“There is clarity in that result. This is who we are. Not all of us, but a majority of us. It presents a stark picture of America in 2024, without sugarcoating or excuse. It makes it harder to fool yourself about the task at hand, which is an enormous cultural one more than a political one.

“If politics is merely a reflection of culture, then we get to see that reflection clearly and sharply as the sun comes up this morning. If you don’t like what you see, don’t blame the mirror.

“For those of us who believe in the rule of law, a pluralistic society, and standing up to unkind people who engage in hurting others as public blood sport, we’re going to have to take a long view toward promoting those principles in all aspects of our culture so that they are ultimately reflected in our politics in a way they simply are not now.

“The challenge before us is enormous. It is not a challenge any of us signed up for. It’s been foisted upon us.”

“At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
--Lyceum Address - January 27, 1838

As for Yours Truly, I’m not going anywhere. I agree with the old saying that “It’s better to die on your feet than live on your knees.” There’s going to be a lot of fine messes to deal with.

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