I share the pain of those who are deeply disappointed that Americans have chosen, for the second time, an unhinged, misogynistic, racist strongman for president.
A majority voted for a former president described as a “fascist” by his own former staff members, who has promised “mass deportations” of the millions of undocumented immigrants, who has vowed to reinstate his misbegotten Muslim ban, who intimates that he will hand Ukraine over to Russian President Vladimir Putin and allow Israel free rein in Gaza.
I will leave the election post-mortems to people whose jobs it is to figure out how and why Vice President Kamala Harris and other Democrats failed to make their case, and what the party must now do to regain the trust and votes of the frustrated working-class Americans and others who have deserted them in droves.
As a mother, grandmother, aunt, friend and proud Californian, my assignment now is to look forward, and to help those I love find some shards of hope in this dark moment.
After all, some good things happened Tuesday night.
For starters, this interminable campaign is finally over. Many of us may hate the results, but at least we won’t have to listen to four more years of President-elect Trump’s whining, wheedling and lies about who won.
California’s Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), who led the first successful impeachment against President Trump, handily won a seat in the U.S. Senate. Not that his Republican opponent, former professional baseball player Steve Garvey, ever really stood a chance, but it’s comforting to know that such an outspoken Trump antagonist won in a blowout, and will become one of the highest-profile Democrats in Washington. When the wildfires come and Trump once again plays politics with federal relief dollars, California will need someone who can play hardball.
In other good news, American voters delivered yet another rebuke to the Supreme Court’s terrible 2022 decision that ripped away the 50-year-old constitutional right to abortion.
Ten states had measures ensuring access to abortion on their ballots on Tuesday. Voters in seven — Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada and New York — supported amending their state constitutions to protect that fundamental right.
Voters in only three — Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota — did not. But even in Florida, well over half the electorate — 57% — voted in favor of preserving the right to abortion to the point of viability. Unfortunately, the threshold for amending Florida’s constitution is 60%, so the state’s ban on abortion after six weeks will remain in effect.
Now we will learn whether Trump and his Vice President-elect JD Vance were telling the truth when they repeatedly claimed to oppose a national abortion ban. Personally, I think they will do everything in their power to appease their right-wing Christian base by working to restrict access to medication abortions, which involve a regimen of pills, not surgery. The good news is that there will be a healthy resistance to this move, and an already well-developed underground medication pipeline will grow. As they have since the Dobbs decision, women will continue to end pregnancies they do not wish to carry, even as the government threatens them.
I know it’s popular to pooh-pooh identity politics; Harris, smartly, never overplayed her hand as potentially the first Black and South Asian woman to become president. But sometimes identity not only matters — it’s worth celebrating.
For the first time in history, two Black women will simultaneously serve in the U.S. Senate: Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware. Also in Delaware, voters elected Democrat Sarah McBride, 34, as the first out transgender member of Congress. This is more than symbolically important at a time when Republicans such as Trump have ginned up fear with outlandish, untrue stories about children going to school in the morning and coming home in the afternoon having received gender transition surgery.
Blessedly, North Carolina Republican Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, who reportedly called himself a Black Nazi and declared that slavery was not bad, was trounced for governor by his Democratic rival, Josh Stein.
In Florida, Democrat Monique Worrell, the reform-minded African American state attorney who was ousted by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in a blatantly partisan move, was reelected: Fifty-seven percent of Florida voters repudiated DeSantis, who had accused Worrell of pursuing lenient sentences and declining to prosecute certain charges.
“No governor’s petty political maneuvers and no amount of dark money can silence the voices of thousands who demand a fair, smart approach to justice over the failed, outdated policies of the past,” Worrell said in a statement released by her campaign.
I refuse to give up hope because our country’s electorate so often functions as a self-correcting organism. When politicians go too far, voters slap them back toward the center.
It won’t take long for Americans to tire of the inevitable chaos and cruelty of a second Trump administration. They may be temporarily lulled by his promise to continue the tax cuts that promised to help the middle class but overwhelmingly benefited the rich.
But once they realize that his tariffs will have raised prices they think are already too high, his mass deportations will have left thousands of employers stranded and vegetables rotting in the fields, that inviting Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries will have undermined America’s role as a superpower, they will sour on him. Just as they did in 2020.
It may take four ugly years, but trust me, the pendulum will eventually swing back toward normal. It always does.
