Mourn, Yes. Freak Out, No.

Credit: Lorie Shaull, 2020

We Democrats are all, rightfully, still in mourning over Donald Trump being president again. The election results were of course terrible for all of us who care about our country and our people. Donald Trump and the Republicans in Congress are going to try and take a steamroller to all we hold dear as they work to Make America 1896 Again. I won’t for a moment minimize the scary things they will try to do, or tell people they shouldn’t take the time to grieve for our country..

But grieving doesn’t mean giving up. We still have the power to fight them. Even if the Trump DOJ and Supreme Court start taking our rights away, we still have the power to fight them. Even if they start deporting people and arresting people who disagree with them, we still have the power to fight them.

I have to admit that I do get very weary of some of my fellow liberals panicking, talking about how our democracy is finished, saying we will never come back from this loss, we will never win another election.

Get some steel in your spine, friends. Frederick Douglass had been a slave, and he helped Lincoln abolish the institution of slavery. Rosa Parks and MLK had no rights in the South, were faced with the constant threat of violence and jail, and defeated Jim Crow. Alice Paul had no rights and was imprisoned, but she and others delivered suffrage within a few years. We need to buck the f**k up, friends.

Yes, the worst might come. That means progressive folks will just have to meet the moment, do whatever it takes to defeat Trump’s worst. And keep in mind that Donald Trump ain’t exactly competent or organized or focused. 

Nor are his policies popular. Mass deportations, tax cuts for the rich, repealing the ACA, ending investments in factory jobs, raising prescription drug prices for seniors, stomping on labor unions… this stuff will piss people off. We can make fights over these issues, and win a lot of people over.

There is also the likelihood that Trump’s policies could be a massive fail. Remember how he messed up building the wall and getting Mexico to pay for it? That’s going to look like a crowning success compared to the utter mess of his attempt at mass deportation. Letting Wall Street, AI, and the crypto industry run wild could crash the economy worse than the 2008 financial crisis. Lots of economists are pointing to the variety of ways inflation could get worse under Trump’s policies.

Many of Trump’s voters are going to turn against him, just like they did in 2018 and 2020. He is going to remind them of all the reasons they voted against him and his party before. We will have to fight Trump’s desire to never have another election, but we always can take heart and have hope. 

Yes, we Democrats have some big problems to fix, but that is up to us to fix.

Silly Season

After every lost election, people rush to conclusions and make sweeping statements based on, well, who knows what? Maybe their existing biases, or maybe one tidbit of shaky partial data.

Here’s the deal, as President Biden would say: beyond knowing that we lost, and knowing the still sometimes partial returns from counties, we don’t have enough data yet to have a definitive analysis of what happened in this election. We still don’t have complete returns, there are still some votes not counted, especially out West. Exit poll data on sub-groups are notoriously unreliable. There is no voter file data yet to look at, and won’t be for a long time. 

So all the pundits talking so confidently about their brilliant insights are talking out of their ass. Take everything you are hearing and reading with a very big grain of salt. 

What I would like to encourage everyone to be is calm. Breathe deep. This was always going to be a tough election -- people are in a very bad mood after the trauma of covid and post-covid inflation. Incumbents all over the world have been losing re-election. We had a tough situation, and yes, made some mistakes, but all the finger pointing and histrionics about being forever doomed are not helping.

Yeah, in retrospect, I wish Joe Biden had decided not to run, too, but how does it help anyone to say this was all his fault? 

Yeah, it’s a challenge to run for a woman of color, but she came close in a tough environment. We are not forever doomed if we run women candidates.

Yeah, we have a lot to fix as a party, especially among working-class and non-metro voters, but the recent history of American politics is that parties come back from losses pretty quickly.

Donald Trump will do some serious damage to our country as president, but our response needs to be steady and strong. We will overcome this awful moment.

Take heart, friends. Standing together, we will survive and come back stronger from this moment.