Here is what usually happens after a high profile election. Individuals and institutions with a vested interest in maintaining power and influence drone on about how—regardless of where the votes landed— they were either correct and/or directly consequential to the outcome. This is mostly just vainglorious puffery, but it’s also a not-so-virtuous cycle. They brag, the narrative of their excellence circulates, and they get to keep their fancy jobs and standing invitations to power lunches.
Brace yourself for quite a bit of that business.
You will hear, in the next few weeks, that the Democratic landslide was due to candidate recruitment, or message discipline, or just dumb luck. You will be told that this only happened because of the economy, or because Trump kept shooting himself in the foot, or because that’s just how Midterms work. Men with Excel spreadsheets and very strong opinions about their own intelligence will use the word “thermostatic” far too much.
Some of the back-patting and opinion-validation will be correct, no doubt. The economy is quite bad. Trump is incompetent at all aspects of his job, including being a strongman. But writ large, all that punditry risks divorcing the vast majority of us from this monumental outcome. When you say that a landslide election was primarily due to external pressures and high level strategy, you’re telling millions of activists that we don’t matter that much at all.
To hell with that. There is a time and a season for everything, including trumpeting our tenacity and empathy to anybody who’ll listen. If the pundits and consultants can take more credit than they deserve, the rest of us can accurately name what got us to this precious and unexpected milestone, one that felt so distant less than two years ago.
We made the winds blow.
The we who were told in January of 2025 that there was a vibe shift, and that Trump had a mandate to do whatever he wanted— to our lives, to our government, to the frayed threads that connected us to one another.
The we whose protests were, in the beginning, far too small. Ten people in front of a Tesla dealership. One lonely woman picketing a building that Doge was gutting. A handful of friends keeping watch on snowy overpasses.
The we who were told that we were out of step with the new order, that cruelty had conquered over care, that we had now entered the era of slurs and self-reliance.
The we whose crowds grew into the millions, but were still discounted.
The we who called the Congressional switchboard a million times, even though we knew we were being ignored.
The we who tended to food banks, mutual aid collectives, child care swaps and prison visitations.
The we who gathered in living rooms, balancing plates and sups on our laps and asking “what can we do?”
The we who kept thousands of tiny fires burning.
The we who wiped away tears.
The we who showed up in Minneapolis (and Chicago, Los Angeles, Lewiston, a thousand other places, but especially Minneapolis), who stared down the gun thugs by day and ran clandestine grocery deliveries by night.
The we who responded to a million action alerts, even when we had no idea their efficacy.
The we who knocked doors and wrote postcards, even when we wondered whether any of it helped.
The we who were radicalized, first slowly and then all at once.
The we who couldn’t shut up about fascism: not at holidays, not at school drop-off, not at work, not on dates, not ever.
The we who yelled at Republicans as they declared war on everything that makes us human.
The we who yelled at Democrats who stood by and watched it happen, countering authoritarianism with sternly written memos.
The we who consciously reminded ourselves about why all of this (the gorgeous places we live, and the people with whom we share it) is worth it.
The we who didn’t heed calls to triangulate or throw our neighbors under the bus.
The we who are as far to the left as possible, and the we whose politics and blood runs cooler.
The we who won’t always stand side-by-side, but whose mutual efforts have contributed to this moment.
The we who fed each other when an economy bloated by greed revealed the lie of independence and solitude.
The we who chained ourselves to data centers and ICE facilities.
The we who realized that we don’t need the robots as much as we need each other.
The we who dodged tear gas canisters and rubber bullets.
The we who know that Trump is still in power, and a very good Midterm election doesn’t change much of anything in and of itself, and who will wake up tomorrow overwhelmed by how much work remains.
The we who know that we are bound up with one another globally, and that we sure as hell aren’t yet free.
The we who deserve to celebrate anyway.
The we who voted for the first time, and the we who have been at it for decades.
We did all this. Crucially, we did it as a messy, frequently inchoate collective. And we need to claim it. Both because it’s true and because what a tragedy if we didn’t.
We need to look in the mirror and see a nascent organizer.
We need to look at the ground below us and spot the first seedlings of solidarity poking through the dirt.
We need to whoop it up, not just because it’s what our hearts need now, but for six months from now, when there will still be living rooms and church basements and the work will feel like a slog again.
This Election Day wasn’t the end of our story, but it was one hell of a chapter.
Spread the word around. This was us. And it could be just the beginning, if we don’t let up.
