John,
Last week’s midterm elections were, frankly, a mixed bag. Around the country, Democrats held the Senate, defeated election deniers, and flipped state legislatures. They outperformed expectations nearly everywhere—in fact, other than here in New York–where we lost the House and saw one of the closest statewide elections in two decades.
There are a few key lessons worth taking from the rollercoaster results last week, but none more important this morning than this:
We are capable of defeating right-wing extremists. We’ve done it before. And we’re going to do so again.
Yes, Donald Trump is running again. Yes, he kicked off his campaign spewing lies about his electoral defeat, calling for the elimination of all early voting, absentee voting, and electronic voting machines, and demonizing immigrants. Yes, we have our work cut out for us.
But the midterm elections showed us that we can join forces to defeat extremist candidates who seek to undermine our elections, strip away civil rights, and destroy our fragile democracy. We saw it in John Fetterman’s win in Pennsylvania, in the defeat of candidates like Blake Masters in Arizona, and in Democratic secretary of state victories in Michigan and Nevada. And we saw it in the defeat of Lee Zeldin's fearmongering agenda for New York—where progressives like the NY Working Families Party showed up big to help hold the Governor's office in a race that became far closer than it should have ever been.
Right now, the best thing we can do to support Democrats on the federal level is support Reverend Warnock in his runoff. So please, if you can:
We the people—who care about building a multiracial democracy that can deliver for all our communities—are the majority. And when we organize, we can win. We need bold candidates who fight for that future. We need infrastructure to build our shared political capacity. We need a government that can deliver on that vision.
And we are capable of that.
I’ll be sharing further reflections in the coming days on what the midterms show us about where we go from here. For now, thank you. For everything you did this election cycle, and everything to come.
Brad
