Because we have to celebrate every victory.
So there will definitely be time in the upcoming weeks to dissect the parts of the last election that didn’t go the way that we wanted them to. There will be a lot of time to address and be angry about voter suppression, and races where Republicans ran unopposed, and the fact that Steve King is still a powerful Iowa Nazi. But for just a brief moment, I want to acknowledge the good things that happened.
1. We took the House. We took the goddamn House. Maxine Waters is now going to be a committee chairwoman.
2. A record number of women are going to Congress.
3. Of that record-setting number, we got a lot of firsts and bests. Sharice Davids and Deb Haaland will be the first Native American Women in Congress (Davids is a member of the Ho-Chunk nation and Haaland is Laguna Pueblo). Davids is also openly gay and has some guns that put Van Damme to shame. More like Van Daaaamn. (I only partially regret that.) Ayanna Pressley, from my temporary home in Boston, will be the first Black woman to represent Massachusetts, while Rachael Rollins will be the first Black DA for Suffolk County (aka the county that Boston is in). Jahana Hayes will be the first Black woman to represent Connecticut. Rashida Tlaib and Ihan Omar will be the first Muslim women in Congress. Cindy Axne and Abby Finkenauer will be the first women to represent Iowa in the House, and Finkenauer will share the honor of youngest women ever elected to Congress with the Latinx badass Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Ocasio-Cortez will continue to rep millennials everywhere by sharing the name of the awesome red lipstick she wears (“Beso” by Stila, which is also the color I wear, which makes me feel cool by proxy) and by not really having the money to live in DC despite having just won a Congressional race. Janet Mills will be the first female governor of Maine. (My own state’s Mary Throne unfortunately lost her attempt to be Wyoming’s second ever female governor.)
4. Jared Polis because the first openly gay governor.
5. There are now a record number of Black Lieutenant Governors. (I admittedly don’t totally know what Lieutenant Governors do. Wyoming doesn’t have those.)
6. Massachusetts protected rights for trans citizens.
7. Multiple states took action against gerrymandering.
8. Colorado fully outlawed slavery. Yes it’s 2018, yes it only passed with 65% of the vote, but maybe you didn’t know that slavery is still legal in many parts of America as a punishment and prison labour is a billion-dollar industry.
9. Florida restored voter rights to roughly 1.4 million former felons. This is insanely huge, metaphorically and literally—that is almost three times the population of Wyoming. That includes nearly 400,000 Black citizens (again, almost the population of Wyoming).
10. Voter turnout for the midterms was at 49%, which hasn’t happened since the 1960s.
Like I said, later I’ll let myself be depressed by the bad stuff, and start stoking my anger for the things I need to be angry about. But for tonight, for maybe a whole week, I’m going to let myself be happy about what we accomplished.
Signed: Feminist Fury
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