The World Feels Different Today

Every demographic shifted left, and this election was about the soul of America.

Yesterday morning I woke up at 5:30 for no particular reason. I think I was just feeling that anxiety about the election. Not about the results of the election, because I was feeling pretty optimistic about that, but we have all been living for months with a real tension and very real concerns about what Donald, in particular, and his henchmen in the executive branch, at the DOJ, the FBI, ICE, et cetera, were going to do on his behalf to make it harder for people to vote on election day. There was the worry about intimidation, threats, closed polling places, and ICE agents showing up at polls, et cetera, et cetera. That was a real worry. In addition, there were the incredibly anxiety inducing concerns about what might happen after the election, especially if Democrats won but did not win decisively enough to settle the issue.

Was Donald going to try to incite another insurrection? Was Mike Johnson going to refuse to seat the new Democratic majority in the House? How much litigation was there going to be? How much disinformation about the election was there going to be? So, despite the fact that I was pretty optimistic about the election, I was clearly a little unsettled.

As for the results, a couple of days ago I said that I believed the Democrats were going to get a 240 seat majority in the House and 53 seats in the Senate. That was obviously incredibly bullish. I was partially going on polls, but partially just going on instinct, and yet it did not really seem real. I did not take it in. It all seemed so theoretical, again, because of the concerns about whether there was going to be violence, whether ICE would invoke violence, and whether Donald would invoke violence either before or after the election.

And then last night happened. It started happening very early on, and the results started cascading in a way that I could barely keep up with. I was very tired yesterday. As I said, I woke up at 5:30, and at one point during the day I said, “You know what? I don’t even want to watch the returns. Nothing I could do about it. The results will be the results. I can wake up and deal with it on Wednesday.”

Guess what? I became riveted. I finally went to bed around 1:30 when I realized that the Mississippi Senate race was too close to call, with more than 95 percent of the vote in. The Democratic challenger, Scott Colom, was about 0.01 percent over the incumbent Republican, Cindy Hyde-Smith. It was pretty clear that the race was not going to be settled in time for me to get a decent night’s sleep.

Of course, Alaska had Peltola up 3.3 points over Dan Sullivan, but only 73 percent of the vote was in. That result was not going to be known for some time. So I went to bed, but I was euphoric.

When I woke up, it felt like the world had changed. We went outside to take Millie to the vet, and the sun felt different, the air felt different, and I felt different. I have never experienced anything like this in my lifetime. This was not just about politics. Some Democrats who shall not at the moment be named would have you believe that this election was about affordability. I am not saying it was not also about affordability, but to say that this almost incomprehensible election was only about one thing, in this case the economy, is to miss the point entirely. This election was, I believe, about the soul of America, about who we are and who we refuse to allow ourselves to become. It was a tipping point. It was a massive rebuke. It was a wholesale repudiation of every single thing Donald, the Trump regime, and the Republican Party stand for.

So here we are. Every single demographic group, every single one, whether by gender, age, religion, education, and on and on and on, shifted left, sometimes by double digits and sometimes by over 30 points. Whites without college degrees were the only group that voted for Republicans, by a 54 to 45 point margin, but that was still a massive 14 point shift toward Democrats. It turns out my prognostication was off. I was not nearly optimistic enough, because as we know, right now the Democrats have a 54 seat majority in the Senate, or maybe I was right about that because of John Fetterman, but we still have the potential to pick up two more Senate seats, giving us a 56 or 55 plus Fetterman majority.

In the House, NBC News is currently projecting that Democrats will hold a 258 seat majority in the House of Representatives. No wonder Mike Johnson has said that he is fleeing the jurisdiction and will not be the Republican leader in the next Congress, because that, my friends, is an 81 seat margin in the Democrats’ favor.

There were a lot of races I was watching last night, and I want to talk about a couple of them, because I think they exemplify how foolish it is to say this was only about one issue. They also show how thoroughly and comprehensively this election gives Democrats the kind of mandate this party has never had and must seize upon.

Florida was very disappointing, obviously. We had two very good candidates. We had a Democrat running for governor, David Jolly, who was a good candidate, and we had Angie Nixon running for Senate, who was a phenomenal candidate, a generational talent.

They both lost by less than a three point margin. In the last gubernatorial election, the Republican running for governor, Ron DeSantis, won by over 20 points. In the 2022 Senate election, Marco Rubio also won by over 20 points. The margins narrowed considerably thanks to those two excellent Democratic candidates. Unfortunately, that does not mean we have a Democratic senator and governor in Florida. However, because they ran their races so well and performed so strongly by comparison, Democrats were able to pick up congressional seats that Republicans had tried to gerrymander out of democratic reach.

Again, this shows us, as do the massive wins in Texas, that this is not politics as usual. This election was not about policy. This election was not about politics. This election was not about Democrats versus Republicans. This was about the American people finally saying enough and no more.

The two races that most exemplified that this was an existential election, to me, were the gubernatorial race in Ohio and the Senate race in Michigan. Ohio is a very red state, and it is a very gerrymandered state, and yet Dr. Amy Acton was elected. Why? Because her Republican opponent, with the support of Donald and Vice President Baby JD Vance, ran the most vile, despicable, inhumane political ad in modern American politics, or American politics, full stop.

People in Ohio said, “No, we will not participate in this, because if we vote for a man who ran that ad, we are complicit in his cruelty and his inhumanity.” In Michigan, after a very contentious primary, Abdul El Sayed, who will be the first Muslim man to serve in the United States Senate, ran against Mike Rogers, who ran a despicably Islamophobic campaign. Despite half hearted support from national Democrats, and despite the fact that his primary opponent, Haley Stevens, decided to endorse the Republican as if that made any sense, El Sayed won his race because Michigan voters refused to take the bait. They refused to allow the Islamophobia to stand unchallenged, because if they had voted for a man who engaged in that kind of bigotry, they would have been complicit, and this is not who Americans want to be.

It is extremely difficult to describe how I feel about this election. The simplest way to put it, as I said earlier, is that the world feels different today. I feel like we are unbound from the trauma that has been inflicted on us for over a decade. I feel that we are freed from the pressures that have been exerted upon us from all angles. We are released from the multiple unending stressors we have been subjected to. It is as if we were held hostage for so long that we had forgotten what it was like to be free, and now we are free. We are not free from the work or from the challenges, because the next several months and years will be difficult ones, but we are free, finally, and I think for the first time, to choose a better path. We have the momentum, and we have the right people in power. We need more like them.

We need to get rid of those who will not understand what is at stake and what is possible. We have the mandate to demand that our leaders make the fundamental changes we need, so that we can finally be a democracy that does not simply give lip service to the idea that we are all created equal, but makes that a reality. One of the most extraordinary things about those elected last night is the extent of their diversity. The people who represent us finally look like the people they represent. They finally look like America, and that gives me hope that, at long last, America is going to become the multicultural democracy it has always needed to be.

So, to everybody who has worked tirelessly, ceaselessly, and sometimes without any hope in sight, knocking on doors, writing postcards, making phone calls, showing up, getting to the polls, and helping other people vote: thank you for making this happen.

I am fully confident that if we keep showing up, we will continue to have the kind of leaders who create with us the kind of country we all deserve. Thank you so very much.