Nauseously Optimistic
This Is It. Is This It?
“Women are not without electoral or political power.”—Justice Samuel Alito, Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022)
I thought about writing a “full circle” kind of post, how when I started this Substack experiment in March I wanted to do x, y, and z, and in the end I learned blah, blah, and blahdeblah. Then, the famed Des Moines Register presidential poll came out on Saturday. I’m not a poll believer by a long shot, but after years of listening to pundits and experts talk about how this poll is the “gold standard” and how Ann Selzer’s polls have mirrored actual electoral results time after time since before Obama was elected, to see Kamala beating Trump 47% to 44% was an earthquake to me. To the point where I started to cry.
I didn’t cry because I think this poll is singularly predictive of what’s going to happen, as much as I want it to be. I cried because what I saw in these results affirmed what I’ve been feeling, what we’ve all been feeling, for so long now. Women are fucking furious post-Dobbs—and in the case of this poll, particularly white women over 65—and our rage is finally, finally being recognized. Saturday night, I decided to allow myself to feel hopeful for the first time since November 7, 2016. And it was overwhelming.
Earlier this week I encountered the phrase that I used as today’s headline, and it sums up how I’ve been feeling in the hours since Saturday. I’m still not ready to let myself feel completely hopeful; God knows there is enough uncertainty surrounding the election that I will remain on edge and nervous until long after the fat lady sings. But I’m allowing myself to revel in the knowledge that I wasn’t making it up, that I haven’t been trapped in a liberal bubble, that I haven’t been fooling myself. Something is happening, and it’s palpable, and it almost feels like a vindication.
I say almost because the truth is that even if we prevail tonight (I say knockknockknocking wood all over the place), the worst of the right wing won’t be going away anytime soon. Just like the proverbial cockroaches in the wake of a nuclear winter, the Don Juniors, the Sean Hannitys, the Steve Bannons, the Stephen Millers and their crews of vile election-deniers and insurrectionists and Christian/white nationalists will endure, if only to claim “fraud” tonight and work tirelessly to overturn legitimate results and distrupt the certification process. The cadre of horrible elected figures we’ve all come to loathe—like Mike Johnson, Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and their ilk—are on track to win their races today and they will live on to haunt our nightmares for at least the next two years. Then, there’s the groundwork that the right has been meticulously laying down since 2016. As some examples, while researching the abortion measures being voted right now, I learned what other ballot initiatives were being put forward in different states and I noticed a few trends. One of the most prevalent is the movement to enshrine “only Americans vote” language into the constitutions of eight states. Despite it already being illegal for non-citizens to vote, the endgame here is to slowly change the the meaning of “citizen” so that more people can be disenfranchised in the future. Another theme can be found in the number of ballot proposals that aim to amend the rules surrounding getting these kinds of initiatives in front of voters, so that it would be much more difficult to do so in the future. tl;dr: There are ballot initiatives about getting rid of ballot initiatives. This is not to mention the Supreme Court and the cases on their docket this term and beyond, which are just plain scary. And there will be the continued attacks on women’s rights which don’t seem to be letting up.
Regardless of the election outcome, we need to remain vigilant and not let our collective guard down. We have to keep working to get Dems elected everywhere, particularly at the state level, in every election large and small, from today forward. With this in mind, I’m going to keep at this newsletter/blog experiment of mine. Whatever has happened in the past year can’t just become lightning in a bottle. We need to keep this moment, and movement, alive, and not ever give another inch to these people. I hope you’ll stay with me. I have Tums.
But for today, let yourself feel some hope. We deserve it.
