There’s No Such Thing As Losing
Underlying so much liberal angst since November 9th, 2016 has been an identity question: Is this really America? No. It can’t be. “This can’t be America!” the collective center-left coalition shouted.
And to prove it, we marched. We rallied. We called Congress. We showed up to committee hearings. We knitted hats. We raised money for our demographic Other. We showed kindness where the narrative expected division. We made Town Halls real discussions. We reached across the aisle to principled conservatives. We did everything we could to show — by our numbers — that the real America wasn’t reflected in the results of November 9th. The real America was dormant and needed to be ‘woke’. And now we we’re awake!
Throughout our collective refusal to normalize This “President” we rumbled and grumbled that we wouldn’t simply show solidarity with the afflicted or be roadblocks to this Administration. We would translate our collective force, our rage, fear, sympathy, faith — translate our mood and mindset — into a quantifiable result at ballot boxes across the country. Grassroots and institutional organizations, each focusing on a niche of the American election system or form of democratic engagement were either created or saw an explosion in donations and participation. We will take our country back, we said. We will fight and we will win like never before.
But we won’t. Or at least, we might not. We might not win Congressional races that have been in GOP hands since 1979. We might not win races that Democrats won in 2006 or 2008 but haven’t held since. We might not win state house seats that the GOP won with 60%+ of the vote. We might not win districts where Hillary won, but the GOP down ballot candidate also won and outperformed This “President”.
Why not? Because elections aren’t narratives. Because districts are gerrymandered. Because old people love to vote in midterms. Because voting is (usually) on a day that most Americans work. Because the poor don’t get paid time off to vote. Because in some places, people hate Trump, but love their local GOP.
Winning elections — in this new American era — is not the point. There’s tons of strategic reasons why winning these upcoming elections doesn’t matter as long as we fought tooth-and-nail until the polls closed. In doing so, we forced the GOP to spend money and fight everywhere like never before. We spread our message to every corner of America and gained new participants. We stand to gain more seats from pushing everywhere than not trying at all. Though even these strategic outcomes are beside the point.
We fight and we organize and we resist because it’s the right and moral thing to do. We don’t take righteous action only because of the outcome. We don’t try to protect our Muslim and immigrant neighbors solely to spite Trump — we try to protect them because it’s the right and moral thing to do. And if we try to protect them and it doesn’t work the first time we don’t just give up. We try to protect them again because it’s the right and moral thing to do. We don’t stand behind, amplify and support women and PoC as they organize to be heard because we’ll be getting something in return — we do it because it’s the right and moral thing to do. And if our attempts at intersectionality bring discord do we give up and cast each other out? No. We try again, smarter, and more earnestly because it’s the right and moral thing to do.
We mobilized for candidates outside of our neighborhoods because we want them to win, sure, but we also mobilized because in today’s political era it is our moral imperative to organize and resist. Whether we win or lose in any district has no bearing on whether we should or shouldn’t have been there working for change. We never have to ask ourselves whether it was a lost cause because we did what was the right and moral thing to do.
I say this because we are likely going to take many more losses along with many gains We’re fighting for seats in special elections and regular elections that have varying chances of flipping. We’ve got 10 Democratic Senators up for re-election in 2018 that not only serve Red States, but are also being threatened with primary challengers. We’re fighting multi-term incumbents in entrenched GOP districts in Congress and State Legislatures. Simply put, we’re fighting an uphill battle in many parts of America. The outcomes over the next two years should never discourage us from waking up each day and finding the drive to ask more questions, talk to more people and engage more citizens.
And there is a very real chance that between now and 2020 we will suffer some painful losses in Congress and potentially at the State Legislature levels as well. This thought should never stray far from our minds. It should sit beside us, reminding us that we didn’t organize and act only to win. Morality, honor, patriotism — whatever the internal motivation for our resistance — doesn’t push us to act only if we can win. It pushes us to act because it’s the right and moral thing to do.