A week on, and I still can’t really wrap my head around it. A clean sweep of statewide offices for Georgia and for Texas – TEXAS, which hadn’t even elected a Democrat at the state level for decades. Democratic Senators elected from North AND South Carolina AND, today, Mississippi. Mississippi! Which hasn’t had a Black Senator since 1881. There’s a Black man in James Eastland’s seat. There’s a woman in Strom Thurmond’s seat. There’s a Black woman in Lester Maddox’s seat. The Democrats are on track for 56 seats in the Senate and well over 250 in the House, a commanding lead, and there are already rumblings that at a minimum, Chuck Schumer isn’t going to make it to MLK Day as Senate Majority Leader because the new kids want to fuckin’ SCRAP.
I thought we’d probably take back the House. I thought maybe we might win the Senate if things broke just right. Not in my wildest dreams did I think of 56, or of Georgia and Texas going full blue. The number of asshole tech bros who left the oppression of California only for Texas to turn on them…their tears are like Pappy Van Winkle drunk out of Halley Atwell’s brassiere. This is more than just flipping Congress and putting the last two years of the Trump Administration into the Contraption. This is a torpedo at the waterline of the Solid South, of the Republican base of the last fifty years, because if the Republicans can’t hold Texas in a Presidential election, they cannot win, full stop. They would have to do away with the Electoral College to have a prayer.
About that…there are enough state legislatures that flipped blue that it’s now possible to actually pass the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which would bind all its members’ state electors to voting for the winner of the popular vote. Which means that if states totalling 270 belong to the compact, we have done an end-run around the Constitution and make it possible for one person, one vote to choose the President. And if Texas looks like slipping away, you might even get Republicans to go along with it, because otherwise they could be locked out of the White House for a lifetime. Florida and a bunch of square states aren’t gonna get them over the hump.
So many deplorables went down to defeat. Vivek got his shit kicked in by Ohio, the latest VC to realize that money won’t buy you the love of rural white people or those who aspire to be no matter how much you try to coconut it up, as a friend once said. Max Miller, domestic abuser: down to defeat. Ken Paxton, the embodiment of deplorability in the modern GOP: done. Greg Abbott, almost as bad: done. Mike Collins, actual neo-Nazi meme billionaire: absolutely slobber-knocked by a whole Jew, in the state that gave us the Leo Frank lynching a century ago. Up and down the ballot, back and forth across the nation, the public reacted to the vast amalgam of 4Chan bullshit and warmed-over Jim Crow that passed for Republican governance these last two (ten? Thirty?) years, and responded to what they’d been overserved by unswallowing it. Violently. The Epstein class and its amen corner of holy rollers and Reddit bigots is reeling like a Paul brother who just walked into an Anthony Joshua punch.
They not like us.
At long last, the American public finally showed some indication that they’re able to distinguish between they and us. Between people who work for a living, people who can’t make it with diesel at $9 a gallon and the prices that drives up, people who have been squeezed so hard so far up the ladder that the Opportunity Vanderbilt financial aid program is awarding to households with as much as $199K in total income, people who realize that no high school transgender volleyball player ever charged them $100 to fill up their car…and the VCs and AI junkies and “Onward Christian Soldiers” lobby from AIPAC and the basement dwelling keyboard jockeys who can’t conceive of a woman with a lightsaber. The weird ones. The people who thirty years ago were rejected out of hand instead of being handed power.
We might be on the verge of saying no to them at last, for good.
Wouldn’t that be something.