Measured Hope Gained from the 2018 Midterms, but We Still Need to Work!

I need to do a better job of recognizing that a Twitter thread would be better as a blog entry (like I'm doing now).

As reminded by an episode of FiveThirtyEight Politics, 2016 was the first US Presidential Election after the 2013 SCOTUS judgment on Shelby County v Holder, which struck down Sections and 5 and 4(b) of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which allowed for Federal oversight of certain state's elections and the criteria to determine which jurisdictions require oversight. The Act aimed to reduce racial discrimination in voting.

When it comes to election history since 2013, the 2014 midterms and 2016 POTUS Election further confirms the animus that remains in the United States against racially marginalized people. Take away oversight, then blatant voter suppression along with racists, anti-semits, and Islamaphobes become more brazen.

Despite the momentum from the above setbacks, the activism to fight voter suppression, the activism for special elections in 2017, and the 2018 midterm elections have been heartening. Even I hoped this past Tuesday night that the Democrats might maintain or even gain a couple seats in the Senate. Some of those contests still have some work to go through to resolve, but the Republicans will still hold the Senate, which sucks to me.

Nonetheless, the chance of Democrats getting the majority in the Senate had remained small ever since the Midterm campaign started. The Republicans had 3 seats open for contest. The Democrats had 22 seats with 3 to 4 of them being Red State Democrats. The numbers just weren't there for the Democrats, and Nate Silver's projection that the Democrats had a 1 in 5 chance of gaining control of the Senate sounded reasonable. 2020 will give us an interesting Senate year, though, because the number of party affiliation seats up for grabs will just about flip, making the numbers more in the favor of the Democrats.

The gains for the Democrats in the House and gubernatorial races, however, provide me hope. Before the 2018 Elections, Republicans had 34 governor seats while the Democrats had 16. At this point in the Election calculations, Republicans have 26, Democrats have 23, and two states, Florida and Georgia, still need work to figure out their final results. If you don't know the significance of governors on a national level, they play a large part in negotiating on the state level the division of the state into electoral districts (which contributes to the electoral makeup of choosing the delegates who make up the Electoral College). Governors can also make some major decisions for the state, like whether to accept expanded Medicaid funds from the Affordable Care Act to, in Florida before November 6, deciding whether or not felons can get their voting rights back.

In the House, the Democrats had 195 seats and now have 226, the Republicans had 229 and now have 198 seats, with 11 TBD. Even if the Republicans get all 11 of those currently undetermined seats, the Democrats still maintain a good amount of control in the House, as they get to seat the Speaker of the House, determine who gets the majority of seats in committees, who gets to head those committees, and have a majority of the votes.

I'm also gratified by the bunches of firsts that came from the 2018 Midterm Elections:

• Two Native Americans will be the first Native Americans in Congress
• Two Muslim Women will be the first Muslim Women in Congress
• Massachusetts and Connecticut will send black women to Congress
• Arizona will send their first women to the Senate
• Colorado will have its first gay governor
• Florida and Georgia are still determining whether they will have their first black governors

All this feels gratifying after receiving this Tweet from who I believe is some type of social conservative arguing with me:

Lol. Strange. Last time I checked the majority of governors were GOP. The majority of senators are as well. Voted on by...wait for it...the entire state :)

— Zor-El (@Adam4004) November 4, 2018

The Democratic party doesn't act as a great stand in for a society for inclusiveness, diversity, and pluralism. After all, the Economic Progressives probably would rather sweep those issues under the rug, seeing them as a distraction that gets in the way of their Economic agenda that "serves all the people" (which, arguably, I likely agree with the economic agenda, but such an agenda means squat to me if one person, let alone the many now, have to face prejudice, bigotry, and marginalization for simply being who they are and wants to contribute to the betterment of society in a way that encourages acceptance and community). The focus on the economy agenda definitely frustrates me because that's what the Southern Democrats argued during the 1800's to retain the loyalty of white yeoman farmers and other white people in the economy. The Democratic party also has plenty of middling to conservative members who feel loyalty to the Democratic Party because of the aid it provided for bettering their labor conditions but not necessarily to the betterment of relations between the different communites of the United States.

For the most part, though, the Republican party has chosen to align itself with a social conservative program of bigotry, destruction of the climate, and dysregulation of the banks and big business. Third parties have little to no influence in national elections at this time. I won't even get into the possibility of third parties draining votes from other parties. Arguably, people who vote third party may not have voted to begin with. In some sense, I feel that third parties should get some recognition for getting non-voters to vote. I may not vote with these people or agree with their overall philosophy in voting in US Elections, but I appreciate their participation and vote.

Since the Republican party has decided to take a path of destruction, bigotry, and domination, however, siding with the Democratic party provides the most viable available choice at this time (which I argued on Facebook back in 2015 and 2016 when people supposedly didn't take Trump seriously). I make this claim despite the Democrat party's current big tent includes some people who believe and argue things that I wouldn't normally agree with. Even though most states will allow anyone to register as a Republican, the party structure and personnel have decided to go all in with a restrictive definition of what it means to be Republican, that people that don't fit the social conservative criteria have no place in the Republican party and, to the Republican, no place in the United States.

The Republicans choose both such a restrictive identity of people who can participate and an identity so reprehensible since it focuses so much on hate, on anti-science and anti-climate, and on greed. The Democrats, on the other hand, maintain a big tent approach. The Democrats frame their platform around

• The people in it
• Aiming the tent at their perception of the American people,
• On some level, also including diversity and pluralism under the big tent because
  
  • An ostensible valuing of the dignity of human beings
  • That momentum of history that we need to keep pushing values for the dignity of human beings (and all living creatures, if I had full control over the platform)

Obviously, some in the Democratic party screw up in this platform. Part of me wishes that the Democratic could be broken up in the future to provide a system that might more proportionally represent the views of the American population.

Nonetheless, with the intolerant socially conservative Republicans in power, purity politics become a luxury that can threaten the United States. With the Republican party as an existential threat to the United States and its soul, the Democratic party remains a hope to keep this fight in politics and off the battlefield (which is ironic considering the last all out war battle field that occurred in the United States came about largely because the Southern Democrats wanted to secede so they could continue to enslave black people).

With all the above in consideration, the results of the 2018 Midterm Elections gives me hope. To start, these elections reached a 50-year high for midterm elections, reaching 47% turnout or more than 110 million voters made their voice heard. That turnout reaches almost Presidential Election level. The 2016 had a turnout of 58.1% or 138 million voters, though 2016 probably had one of the lowest voter turnouts in a long time. Not a surprise considering 2016 had two of the most hated Presidential candidates ever.

These turnout numbers give me hope and pride. I still don't think these numbers go far enough, though (skip to 8:51 for the relevant part that leads me to this conclusion and disheartens me).

We need our young people to vote. They have their future on the line. The Millennials right now have the power to determine their present and future waiting for them. I don't blame them for for their lack of participation, though. Us older people have to do more to help them understand that

• Their vote counts
• They have a lot of power when they vote
• They deserve to be inspired to vote

We can only complain so much, blame the victim so much, and keep getting minimal results. These young people might not be victims, per se, except for maybe global extinction because of climate change. Nonetheless, when young people don't vote, they abdicate their own power and ability to mold their government, their society, and their future. We need to get our young people inspired, get them to care, and get them to believe in the power that they have in their hands. Let's get these young people empowered!

And alas, we still have a lot of work to do for preventing voter suppression and turnout suppression, both of which I blame on our politicians.

The results of the 2018 Midterm Elections have also turned the balance back to the mean. We've given power back to the Democrats in the House, in the States, and we've set up for redistricting in 2020. Theoretically, some kind of balance will be returned to the voters for the makeup of the House and the Electoral College.

I acknowledge that these results or the actions from these results will not create strict balance. In one state, power will go toward the Republicans while power will go to Democrats in another state. This result creates more of a macro-level return to balance than a micro-level. One side of the scale will gain more power in some areas while the other side will gain power in other geographical areas. On the individual level, some voters will become more significant while others will become less significant.

On some level, we all wish politicians would stop gerrymandering and all our individual votes could actually have more weight than the weight given to it by particular politicians in power at a certain time. Then again, in a decade in which the Repulicans gerrymandered a large part of the country to their advantage and killed the ability of various populations to vote by a million little cuts, we the people have fought back to bring some kind of balance to the geography of the country.

Hopefully this regression to the mean has more to do with ideals, however, not just a social phenomenon that is simply a trait of human nature. If that were true, would that make Donald Trump just part of that phenomenon? We had a black man with dignity become the President of the United States, then we put a boorish racist white guy tearing apart the social and political norms of the United States.

I've also seen in discussions these days about how people balanced their own votes in 2016 and possibly earlier to try encouraging the checks and balances in our governments rather than allow the checks and balances to occur naturally as we all have different ideals and sentiments.

I hope the tumultuous time that we've had since 2016 and which I expect in the next few years (if not longer) shows us that we

• Need to get involved
• Need to participate
• Need to keep our guards up
• Need to act out Gandhi's phrase that Obama says a lot, "We must be the change we want to see in the world"
• Need to value ideals like pluralism, acceptance, and our instinct of fairness in a way that brings true justice to the world, not just impacts the world to the benefit of rich, straight, Christian, cis-gendered, white human males

If we're not careful, we could end up seesawing between boor to dignity to boor to bore, a chaotic flopping back and forth without consistency other than constant changing back and forth between liberty and pluralism to bigotry and demagoguery. Let's decide to do the best that we can be as a country of kind and fair human beings then lets push to make it reality.

Thus the results of the 2018 Midterm Elections give me hope that the future can turn out better than the hate and destruction that the United States and that the world has steered itself toward. A dominant group of people have done a lot to grab onto power in the United States and to try keeping their grubby hands on that power, or at least in the hands of those in the group that these powermongers identify with. Nonetheless, a collection of us have gathered together and pushed back against that creeping evil bigotry and disdain for life in the last couple years with the culmination of these elections. We can't relent in this fight for

• Life
• Kindness
• Empathy
• Pluralism
• True fairness

I'm one to talk. I've been fatigued with all this crap since August after an a relaxing and joyful vacation away from most of this BS. Right now, I've had a fractured heel and have had to take it easy. Once I get healed up and 2019 gets into gear, though, I want to get revved up and jump into the fray to making the country and the world a better place. I'd like you to join the fight, too. Are you willing and able?

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