In this issue
Well, friends, what a week.
Unsurprisingly, I’ve been thinking a lot about the strategic lessons we can take from this election, and wanted to share a few of them with you. But first, let me congratulate the people who made this possible: the organizers, the volunteers who stepped into their power, the staffers, the donors at every level, the newly registered voters (and the people who motivated them to register). This didn’t happen because a pollster finally found the right talking point, or a clever video went viral, or Democrats solved their brand problem (they didn’t), or a candidate hit the right podcast. (Just think of it, El-Sayed won without even going on Joe Rogan, imagine that!) These results are the culmination of work that, in many places, has been years in the making.
And that work is not over: as just one example, the race in Mississippi is still going. (The groups that are doing that work—including the MS NAACP, Black Voters Matter, the ACLU of Mississippi, OneVoice, Mississippi Votes, among others—are working hard to help cure flagged ballots before next Tuesday’s deadline. To support, you can follow, amplify their work and actions, and donate.)
There's probably a headline this week that fills you with even more joy than the rest: the biggest House majority in a generation; Democrats winning every single statewide race in Texas; the first Native American woman in the Senate (and she’s progressive!); the great-great-granddaughter of an enslaved man, becoming Georgia's new governor, the first Black woman ever elected governor in American history.
Before getting into actionable takeaways below, let me first name a few striking results that give me joy right now:
They challenged what I call The Status Crow: policies from the Jim Crow era that still shape our lives today. As recently as 2016, more than one in five Black Virginians couldn’t vote because of racist disenfranchisement laws established in the state’s 1902 constitution.
The drive toward criminal justice reform is alive and well. And criminal justice reform is both a driver of democratic participation and a necessity for it—a lesson we should never ignore.
Next week, I will be sending out a deck that outlines some of the deeper takeaways and action steps I think we all need to keep in mind as planning for these coming years gets underway, whether as advocates, funders and investors, or media makers and communicators.
For now, three quick takeaways:
This has always been our path to progress: Black Americans, women, and young people fought their way into our democracy and, by doing so, changed what was possible.
But over the last ten years, it's the MAGA political machine that has understood this lesson best. Trump's movement pulled millions of people out of the bleachers and onto the field, giving new people new ways to participate. It completely changed who we think can hold power and what they can do with that power—to the point that a weekend cable host now runs the Pentagon. (I write about this idea in the intro to my book, From Presence to Power: read the intro here for free.)
Many of the winners on Tuesday are people who were not recognizable names just a year ago. Many ran for a big position for the first time, and very few of them came up through the traditional party machinery. Troy Jackson, a replacement nominee, beat Susan Collins. Abdul El-Sayed won the Senate race in Michigan, despite over $200 million in outside spending against him. It’s instructive.
But it’s not just new people in established roles that will keep our momentum going and turn electoral wins into policy wins. It’s new people in new roles: ways of participating in shaping how society works that can break new ground. We must always believe in those bold, previously unimagined possibilities. We must also see them emerging and invest in them, actively welcoming those new roles—rather than being threatened by them.
Yes, there are big wins for governors, senators, members of Congress, state legislators and mayors. But there are also the district attorneys, attorneys general, secretaries of state and sheriffs. And even a Texas railroad commissioner: Bo French, who called for deporting 100 million people and complained online about South Asian students cheering at a Longhorns game, lost to Democrat Jon Rosenthal, the first Democrat to win a seat on that commission in 32 years. In Ohio, Democrats won the attorney general's office for the first time since 2008. Michigan's hard-fought AG race was also a major win.
Some of this is the result of a decade of work by our movement to show people that positions like local prosecutor really matter—and show what can change when we redefine those roles and put a new kind of person in them. Some of it, of course, comes from right-wing movements putting extreme people into obscure jobs and forcing voters to notice.
Either way, investing in voters learning about these roles and seeing how good people can use the power of those positions to accelerate positive change, as I write in my book, is essential for winning big change in the era we’re in today.
There will be a lot of talk in the coming weeks about swing voters and independents, and about whether movement energy really mattered. I'd ask us to remember that over the last decade, from Black Lives Matter to what people did in Minneapolis this year, we have been getting people to practice participation. And that’s been essential.
Whether or not anyone realized it, all of it was a dress rehearsal for this year. Even marches that didn't seem to change much at the time have had an impact now. They taught people how to show up and how to bring their friends, neighbors and families along with them.
Early voting was up by nearly 10 million compared to 2022 in the days before the election. When organizers keep finding ways to get people engaged, through dry runs and dress rehearsals for participation, they create moments like this. It doesn't come out of nowhere.
Of course, the counterfactual is also true: as great as these wins are, there were also some narrow losses that could have been wins with more investment in the infrastructure of participation that has proven to make the difference in close races.
In places like Mississippi, the Senate race between Scott Colom and Cindy Hyde-Smith is down to roughly a thousand votes, with thousands of affidavit ballots still to be counted. Not enough national money went into that state because it was seen as a lost cause, so there isn't the same infrastructure on the ground to fight for each vote right now. The groups that are doing that work—including the MS NAACP, Black Voters Matter, the ACLU of Mississippi, and Mississippi Votes—are working hard to help cure flagged ballots before next Tuesday’s deadline.
But wherever people are practicing participation, we should step in to support them. It can lead to moments like this, when “long shot” campaigns can be carried across the line by communities that have been rehearsing engagement and turnout for years.
Exactly ten years ago, after voter suppression and other terrible factors and mistakes led to Trump being declared president-elect in the 2016 election, many people didn't know what to do next. I created a “Mediators, Fighters and Winners” strategy framework, which helped guide the co-founding of the Fightback Table.
The framework aimed to help our movement make sense of that moment’s birthing of a new political era and to see the shifting roles each of us would need to play during a Trump administration. It also outlined how we needed to focus on the enablers of Trump in order to weaken his power; going after the administration directly in the hopes it would listen to us, as we had been trained to do for eight years while Obama was in office, was never going to work
I’m reminded of the framework this week because this election reinforced its core point. The roles we choose to play matter just as much now as they did then, and so does what we do with them.
Friends demand as much accountability work as enemies, if not more. We are not a party and so we should not declare victory quite yet. Our victories come when we are able to get people in power to do what we sent them into their offices to do. We are now in the position of continuing to fight the Trump administration while also fighting the tendencies of liberal elected leaders to miss opportunities to use their powers, abandon their commitments to the communities that elected them, fail to be savvy players, or develop a dependency on corporations and an addiction to the carrots they feed them.
Rashad
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