It’s taking me some time to absorb what happened on Tuesday. I don’t feel that anything I say here will be sufficient, but it looks like We the People finally woke up and saw what we were facing, and we made our voices heard in no uncertain terms.

Late polls suggested that two major issues drove the electorate: affordability and corruption. I have no doubt they were factors, and clearly Donald Trump did his level best to ensure voters that he cared about neither. But I don’t think that is all there is to it. It does not really explain that we now will have an African-American woman as governor of Georgia, an Hispanic American woman as governor of Texas, or a woman governor in Ohio. It does not explain how we may be on the verge of getting an African American senator from Mississippi. It does not fully account for the overwhelming – indeed, stunning – margins of victory from coast to coast.

In addition to appealing for relief about affordability and accountability about corruption, there are some other factors. This is not very empirical — but here we go:

• Voters rejected the efforts by Trump and his lackeys to shape the election to their advantage through gerrymandering and voter suppression. African Americans in the South in particular stood up to this challenge. In effect, Trump, SCOTUS and the Republican Party said to them, “We are going to disenfranchise you,” and African-American voters said, “The hell you are!” That same response came from college students, who faced disenfranchisement efforts in many districts; women, whose enfranchisement had been threatened by the SAVE act and similar measures for years now; indeed, by Kansans who said (according to a friend who used to live there), “Don’t raise the price of diesel and threaten to import beef and expect our hard-working cattle ranchers to support your ass.”
• Voters (finally) rejected the indecency and cruelty of the Trump Administration – cruelty directed at immigrants, at the poor, at our allies like Ukraine, and, indeed, at decent, hard-working Americans of all kinds. I’m not saying that the Blue Wave means that Americans suddenly overwhelmingly favor, or even understand, for instance, trans rights. But I do think they are tired of the fearmongering and hatred-spewing, and they no longer wish to be implicated in it. In the sleepless night after the 2024 election, the one thing I could not get out of my mind was a sense of betrayal – that we the people, willfully or blindly, had voted in favor of a man so blatantly and unabashedly cruel. I am glad we are back.
• I think that voters, at various levels of consciousness, voted to restore government of the people, by the people, for the people. Our agency, not that of the rich and powerful; our right to the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our children envisioned in the Constitution’s Preamble, not the grift and graft of oligarchy; our national and public inheritance, which the government holds in stewardship, not as the private preserve of one Donald J. Trump. (Interesting that one of Trump’s first official acts since Tuesday was to attempt by fiat of executive order to ensconce his gauche gold alterations to the Oval Office in perpetuity.) Perhaps we the people have rediscovered that political participation actually matters.

This is a time for celebration, relief and awe at the fact that, after all, Americans’ commitment to democracy is a lot deeper than we feared. Still, there are no guarantees that we can deliver on all that we need to deliver on. The wonderful Masha Gessen has a great, cautionary piece in the Times today.

It feels like a fever has broken. For ten years, the MAGA Right, with virtually all Republicans as willing abettors, has worked to foist massive unreality on the American people, presenting a nightmare world in which up is down, falsehood is truth, fear is courage — indeed, hate is love. We have woken up, at least for now. And finally, the fight we fight can be to reinvigorate our collective work toward a “more perfect union.” As Lincoln supposedly said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” And as Ted Lasso said, “Don’t fight back, fight forward.” I believe we have shown we are ready for that fight.