I’ll bet I’m not the only person thinking about the late, great Congressman John Lewis. He was known for urging us to do what he’d been taught – get into good trouble. For him the way he could make the most good trouble was doing everything he could to expand not just the right, but the ability for everyone to cast their vote. How I wish he’d lived to see what has happened this week. Call me crazy, but as he was beaten savagely beaten on the Edmund Pettus bridge on Bloody Sunday the title picture is EXACLTY what he dreamed of.
To be sure, if you go with the traditional red/blue state map there are patches of red to be seen. But that wide swath of red west of the Mississippi, those mountain and blue states that had so little blue now has states that if not permanently (yet) are now blue. Iowa and Kansas now have a Democratic Senator and Governor! Texas, freaking TEXAS now has a Democratic Senator and at the state level Democrats in the top five statewide offices. AND control of the state House and when all is done maybe the state Senate too?
There is soooooo much to go in to I won’t bother doing so here. You can check out Multistate Elections’ most recent update (about a half hour before I started writing this) to get details. We have won or, once final tallies are done in some close races where we’re in great shape have won in a lot more red states and/or red districts in blue/purple states than most of us ever dreamed would happen. The GOP mid-cycle gerrymander boomeranged and bit them in the butt. Black voters said “Oh Hell NO” and not just in the south and a lot of us white folks were outraged too. For all Team Trump’s plans, we overwhelmed them! We were told that’s what we’d have to do and by grab we did it.
And it’s not over! In Mississippi of all places Scott Colom, a black man who would be a sitting federal judge right now if Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith hadn’t used the ‘blue slip’ process to block his appointment is going to beat Cindy Hyde-Smith! That’s some serious karma folks. There are simply too many ‘WOW – that’s awesome’ races to go into here but there’s one more I can’t resist mentioning. Bobo – aka Lauren Boebert is almost certainly going to lose her seat in Congress too!
Even in places where we didn’t win both federal and state races we shifted the total vote in our favor. Florida managed to eke out wins for Senator and Governor but it was a lot closer than expected and took a lot longer than normal to finally call those races. Their reaction is more ‘Whew – that was too close for comfort!’ than the type of bragging you’d expect to hear. It’s literally easy to see why if you look at the title picture. Even though DeStantis and the GOP still control the state government and Florida has two Republican Senators there is only one, tiny dot of red to be see there! That I might add is with Democratic candidates being pretty much on their own. There was minimal help from the national Party and organizations until the last couple of weeks.
I suggest if you can, download that image and mail, not just email but old fashioned snail mail (or UPS/FedEx) to every GOP elected official on Capitol Hill. And some of your state level ones too. If, as used to be the case some intern from the Lincoln Project still monitors Politizoom please pass it up so they can make an ad with it, and better yet get pundits and hosts on national media outlets to keep putting this up and talking about it.
I’ll guarantee you that map will terrify every GOP politician and strategist. Yes, some are saying their gerrymanders didn’t work this time but will next time. They say this election, the mobilization of Democratic voters and so many Independents joining us won’t be repeated. Sure, we have to keep up our drive, our enthusiasm but it was similar enthusiasm in 2006 that produced stunning results for us. It would take another twelve years and another screwup GOP President but in 2018 we blew the doors off the polling stations. And again in 2020. And in 2022 we showed up in strong enough numbers to do achieve the rare instance of keeping the President’s Party from losing seats in a midterm!
Now this. We can’t let up, but those GOPers who say our determination to vote will fade are in my opinion whistling past the graveyard. Ten bucks says a lot of the GOPers saying that are the same ones who smugly said of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe there’d be a burst of anger and then Democrats would, if not get over it bitterly accept it. How’d that work out guys? There’s still anger, and not just from women that factor into voting. Ask Susan Collins who finally had to pay the bill for Kavanaugh.
Again, all that blue doesn’t mean we won big races in some of those states. But Montana and Utah will have Democrats representing them in the House. In addition to other wins I mentioned. Everywhere that’s even only light blue means a shift towards Democrats. I’m no John Lewis. I want to honor him by extending the kind of forgiveness he gave even the worst of his opponents including those who beat him on Bloody Sunday. I know I can never be as great a person as he was. What I can however do is try to carry on his work. Do what he said to do and ‘stand in the way’, ‘make good trouble’ as Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King taught him starting when he was in his mid-teens.
What just happened is as I said exactly the kind of thing John Lewis devoted his life to making happen. And not all the races have been called. We already have 54 Senate seats for sure and once the counting is done in Mississippi it will be 55. Alaska isn’t quite as certain but there’s a very good chance once the ranked voting process is complete it will be 56. Over in the House we already have a minimum expected count of 255 Reprentatives and it’s likely to grow higher. That’s what making good trouble by voting can do. And deep down I believe with all my heart that John Lewis was the catalyst.
In that spirit I want to let you hear from the man himself. Till the day I die I will remember him laying in State at the Capitol and Speaker Pelosi’s remarks. She concluded by saying she was going to use her Speaker’s privilege to one last time ‘yield the floor’ to her (and ours whether you ever met him or not) friend and mentor. (You should watch it all but if your time is limited go to the six minute mark)
Friends, I know everyone begs you for money. I promise, among all those asking for spare change, we are the smallest and the hardest working. We’re a group of old, disabled people, except for one writer in his mid-50s. The rest of us are in our sixties and seventies, and this is a labor of love. All we’re asking for is the chance to keep telling the truth about Trump and help ensure democracy survives. If you can help, please do. Thank you. Ursula
