a blue wave six inches deep
Nov. 5th, 2026 09:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jazzfishHeather Cox Richardson has annoyed me this morning.
Context for anyone (me) reading this from the future, or who's been under a rock with no internet service, and credit where due: the US midterms on Tuesday were nothing short of astounding. Voters all over the country looked at the results of the last two years of Republican kowtowing to Trumpian misrule and said "nah." The Democrats won Senate races in places like Iowa, South Carolina, and very likely Mississippi and Alaska. Texas, which has been "going Democratic this election for sure" for literally the last twenty-two years, the entirety of my politically-aware life, got their act together and elected a Democratic senator, governor, and railroad commissioner. It's nice to see some electoral good news.
It's a pleasant counterpoint to BC last month. The NDP has been governing with increasingly right-wing-money tendencies for a nominally progressive party (working against unions, cutting disability and hospital supports, fast-tracking resource projects, getting in legal trouble with First Nations, etc etc). They called a snap election in the hope of taking advantage of the BC Conservatives' perennial failure to organize their way out of a paper bag, and proceeded to face-plant their way to a twenty-seat loss. (Obligatory "screw the Green Party," who in February removed their support leaving the NDP with an even slipper majority, and then proceeded to vote-split somewhere between five and fifteen ridings depending on how you want to count. Not enough to make a difference, and the NDP have been well below replacement level, which is why this is less full-throated aggravation and more a resigned "in a first-past-the-post system you vote for the left-most of the top two candidates, the general election is the wrong time to go all purity pony, why is this hard.")
But that's beside the point. Back in the US, HCR this morning is on about how this is an historic election, a staggering rebuke to Trumpism and to the strain of US conservatism that really found its feet under Reagan. And just, no. It really isn't. One midterm election doth not a realignment make.
I've, we've all, been here before. In 2006 and 2008, voters so decisively repudiated Reagan/Bush/Bush conservatism that the Democrats *checks notes* lost significant ground in 2010, lost the Senate and any chance at the Supreme Court in 2014, and lost the Electoral College to Donald Fucking Trump in 2016.
Nothing has changed in the intervening ten years. When three people vote for pizza and two people vote to kill and eat Frank the pizza guy, even if you end up getting pizza you have a significant problem. And the US has a strong pizza-guy-cannibal streak. I've known that since 2004, when the majority response to "we are torturing people at Abu Ghraib" was "cool, we should be doing more of that." I've known it personally since this past winter, when my folks' response to "here are some first-person accounts of how illegally deployed ICE agents in Minneapolis are illegally and immorally detaining and killing people" was "that's not really what's happening, and if it is then they deserved it."
What happened Tuesday was just a bog-standard, if high-magnitude, "throw the bums out" election. Republican/Trumpist policies had exactly the consequences anyone paying attention knew they would, and Republican voters love those consequences when they fall on other people but get annoyed when they're part of the collateral damage.
So, no. Tuesday wasn't a harbinger of some great sea-change in American attitudes. A complacent belief that it is contributes to exactly why it isn't. The work is not only never done, it's not even really started. This is not even Churchill's end of the beginning. It's harm reduction. It's a necessary precondition, yeah. It is, at best, the middle of the beginning.
I still don't know how to convince people (conservatives, though lefties certainly have their/our blind spots as well) that you should care about other people. And without that piece there will be no great repudiation of modern Republican "i got mine fuck you" conservatism. There will only be the perpetual pattern of "Republicans break things, Democrats half fix them, repeat."
Context for anyone (me) reading this from the future, or who's been under a rock with no internet service, and credit where due: the US midterms on Tuesday were nothing short of astounding. Voters all over the country looked at the results of the last two years of Republican kowtowing to Trumpian misrule and said "nah." The Democrats won Senate races in places like Iowa, South Carolina, and very likely Mississippi and Alaska. Texas, which has been "going Democratic this election for sure" for literally the last twenty-two years, the entirety of my politically-aware life, got their act together and elected a Democratic senator, governor, and railroad commissioner. It's nice to see some electoral good news.
It's a pleasant counterpoint to BC last month. The NDP has been governing with increasingly right-wing-money tendencies for a nominally progressive party (working against unions, cutting disability and hospital supports, fast-tracking resource projects, getting in legal trouble with First Nations, etc etc). They called a snap election in the hope of taking advantage of the BC Conservatives' perennial failure to organize their way out of a paper bag, and proceeded to face-plant their way to a twenty-seat loss. (Obligatory "screw the Green Party," who in February removed their support leaving the NDP with an even slipper majority, and then proceeded to vote-split somewhere between five and fifteen ridings depending on how you want to count. Not enough to make a difference, and the NDP have been well below replacement level, which is why this is less full-throated aggravation and more a resigned "in a first-past-the-post system you vote for the left-most of the top two candidates, the general election is the wrong time to go all purity pony, why is this hard.")
But that's beside the point. Back in the US, HCR this morning is on about how this is an historic election, a staggering rebuke to Trumpism and to the strain of US conservatism that really found its feet under Reagan. And just, no. It really isn't. One midterm election doth not a realignment make.
I've, we've all, been here before. In 2006 and 2008, voters so decisively repudiated Reagan/Bush/Bush conservatism that the Democrats *checks notes* lost significant ground in 2010, lost the Senate and any chance at the Supreme Court in 2014, and lost the Electoral College to Donald Fucking Trump in 2016.
Nothing has changed in the intervening ten years. When three people vote for pizza and two people vote to kill and eat Frank the pizza guy, even if you end up getting pizza you have a significant problem. And the US has a strong pizza-guy-cannibal streak. I've known that since 2004, when the majority response to "we are torturing people at Abu Ghraib" was "cool, we should be doing more of that." I've known it personally since this past winter, when my folks' response to "here are some first-person accounts of how illegally deployed ICE agents in Minneapolis are illegally and immorally detaining and killing people" was "that's not really what's happening, and if it is then they deserved it."
What happened Tuesday was just a bog-standard, if high-magnitude, "throw the bums out" election. Republican/Trumpist policies had exactly the consequences anyone paying attention knew they would, and Republican voters love those consequences when they fall on other people but get annoyed when they're part of the collateral damage.
So, no. Tuesday wasn't a harbinger of some great sea-change in American attitudes. A complacent belief that it is contributes to exactly why it isn't. The work is not only never done, it's not even really started. This is not even Churchill's end of the beginning. It's harm reduction. It's a necessary precondition, yeah. It is, at best, the middle of the beginning.
I still don't know how to convince people (conservatives, though lefties certainly have their/our blind spots as well) that you should care about other people. And without that piece there will be no great repudiation of modern Republican "i got mine fuck you" conservatism. There will only be the perpetual pattern of "Republicans break things, Democrats half fix them, repeat."
no subject
Date: 2026-11-05 05:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-11-08 09:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-11-06 02:09 am (UTC)Georgia. Georgia just elected its first Female Black Woman governor, who is the great great granddaughter of an enslaved man. Not only that? Every single position in Georgia's government went to Black Women. On top of that everyone elected is democrat. This is Georgia. Georgia is below the Mason-Dixon Line. This is no small thing. Consider that the Republicans gerrymandered Georgia and Florida and Texas. And they lost all of the districts they tried to gerrymander to Democrat candidates.
Kansas. I lived in Kansas. It's been a Republican Conservative State as long as I can remember. And in the 1990s it turned social conservative with a vengeance. Occasionally it gets Democrat Governors, but that's it? Kansas elected a Democrat Senator for the first time in 94 years.
Alabama? "Democrat Allison Montgomery unseated Republican incumbent Rep. Phillip Rigsby in Alabama House District 25 on Tuesday, becoming the first openly transgender person elected to the AlabamaLegislature." - per Fox News in Alabama.
[You know that the Republicans ran on an anti-transgender platform and that the Southern US was allegedly anti-trans?]
Oh, and Native Americans were elected in various states. A Native American Woman was elected Governor of New Mexico.
US politics works very differently from Canadian politics. The States have a lot of say. And what is staggering in this election is how many Conservative Red State Legislatures and Governors flipped. And which ones. Pennsylvania did. Pennsylvania is notoriously conservative. Texas - you have no idea how huge what happened in Texas truly is? Texas threatened to leave the US when Obama got elected. Yes, it had a Democrat as Governor in the past but not for a very long time. It now has a Latino Female Governor - I never thought I'd see that.
Florida flipped seats - Florida never flips seats.
NY State has an all female slate of officials, with one man. Two of the women are Black. And it elected it's first Native American congress woman.
Heather Cox Richardson is a political historian - specializing in US social and political history - and what she's picking up on is how diverse this election was. MAGA is pushing white male supremacy, the electorate voted for the exact opposite. Think about it for a minute? In 2020 we had Black Lives Matter Protests. Now we have Blacks running for office and more importantly, winning.
Not only that? Women. Two Female Admirals fired by the Trump administration, got their act together, ran for public office and flipped the seat and won. That's historic on multiple levels.
It's also important to look at who is running - then as compared to now? In 2006, and 1994, and all those previous years, it was mainly straight white boys and white girls getting those seats, with a few notable exceptions. Now, not so much.
They are also all much younger. Gone is Lindsey Graham. Gone is Suzanne Collins. Younger people have replaced them, more vibrant people. I never thought South Carolina would flip Blue. It did.
Richardson is right - it's a historic event. Now, what happens next year - I don't know. It could go status quo? But I don't think so? I'm encouraged by the character of so many of the newly elected congress folks, that I have hope?
It's just not going to happen immediately. The new Congress doesn't start until January and there's a lot of new blood involved. Also government is organized chaos. No one agrees, and there's a lot of divisions on the what, why, and how. But this election is a big deal and very different than any that mid term that has proceeded it - not necessarily because of a Blue Wave per se, but because who, the actual individual candidates, the people elected on every level of government, and the huge turnout.
no subject
Date: 2026-11-08 09:40 pm (UTC)I guess my main point of disagreement is that I don't think it matters much that the individual candidates aren't old-straight-white-dudes. Sure, it matters some that former R voters were willing to pull the lever for a Black woman with a D next to her name. And maybe it'll be easier next time. Or maybe they'll say "they had their shot" and go back to voting R, like with Obama to Trump.
The turnout -was- amazing. Hats off to campaigners and organizers, they did an amazing job.
I would love for this to be a sign that the US electorate is getting more involved, and less white-supremacist, but I've been burned enough times that I'll believe that when I see it. So, ask me again in four years.
no subject
Date: 2026-11-09 01:48 pm (UTC)I understand the burn out? I've been feeling that too? But when I looked deeper - there's some weird things or very different things about this election than the previous ones.
1. The young people who protested in the Black Lives Matter Movement during the pandemic stopped coming out in droves as protesters. Instead? They found a way to run and get elected to office. I don't know if you remember this? But in 2020 - a lot of the "elected officials" and various others told the younger folks asking for systematic change that the best way to ensure it - is to pick an elected office and run for it - at the local, state, and federal levels.
And they actually did? Not only that they got elected? Instead of spending their resources protesting - they went out and campaigned, listened and ran for office. They may have still protested but not that much.
Meanwhile the older adults (45-85) came out in droves protesting, and volunteering to get the younger ones elected. They were out in the streets protesting.
2. Republican senators and congressional reps, many who had been in a while, started retiring, leaving their seats, or in the case of Lindsey Graham dying. Some of the seats lost by the Republicans were due to that.
And yes, yes, this has happened before. But what was different from last time?
They felt betrayed by their party, and DJT. Marjorie Taylor-Green discovered who DJT truly was and decided not to run again and stand against him. She was one of his main supporters. Why? The Epstein files.
3. The reason the Republicans are freaking out right now - is that the reason those seats flipped is not the Democrats came out in full force this round and won. It's that Republicans voted for Democrats and shifted parties.
I know they did, because many of them were protesting in 2025-2026. Die hard Republicans jumped ship.
Why? They felt the Republican Party betrayed them.
These three signs are encouraging.
***
The US isn't as White Supremacist as the internet thinks it is? If it was, no POC would be elected. We wouldn't have commercials with POC. Or television series. Or movies. Or POC in power at the local levels.
I remember the 1970s-90s - and POC were barely in commercials or on television at all. It was hard to find them. Now, that's not an issue. Heck when I entered the work place in the early 1990s, it was really hard for a Black Woman or Man to get very far if at all. I had maybe three-four coworkers who weren't white, and most of my coworkers were white men. There was one black man in power position, and he'd been passed over for chief multiple times. In 2020 - that changed. It started changing before then. Now I'm surrounded by People of Color, the diversity is the highest it's ever been - and that's granted New York. But I've noticed that the graduating class of my old high school in Kansas (which was all white when I graduated in 1985) is now 45% Black. It's not segregated any longer.
It's important to look at everything not just who is in the White House.
no subject
Date: 2026-11-10 07:09 am (UTC)I'll get a bit Hegelian Dialectic up in here (thanks to my AP History teacher) and say that I think the real answer is that this is a historic election and still requires serious work to make sure that the moral arc of the universe keeps bending.
Take a bit of time to luxuriate in the feeling of hope...but then it's time to get out of the bubble bath and go to work again.
no subject
Date: 2026-11-10 03:37 pm (UTC)