The 2018 Midterm Elections Proved That Change Must Happen from the Ground Up
Now that the midterm elections are mostly over and we know how the majority of contests shook out, we can take a look at the results and start to make sense of how the political landscape has changed and how it’s stayed the same in the two years since Donald Trump was elected president.
I’m seeing writers, analysts, pundits, and regular folks tweeting and posting about the election and framing the results as a referendum on President Trump, as though the indicator of whether America rejects the agenda of the president is the number of seats Democrats are able to secure in the House and Senate. And while it’s good news that the now-majority Democrat House is more diverse than ever, that’s not the full story.
The most important takeaway from this election is how it exposed the multitude of voter disenfranchisement issues endemic within our current system.
The midterms came five years after the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act allowing nine states, mostly in the south, to change their election laws without federal approval. This led, among other things, to the closing of hundreds of polls. In multiple states, Republican leaders engaged in increasingly blatant attempts to suppress voters, the vast majority of whom were people of color. Suppression tactics included gerrymandering districts, shutting down polling locations, purging voters from the rolls, and creating poll taxes in the form of voter ID laws.
While pundits, activists, and “get out the vote” enthusiasts alike emphasize the engagement of the non-voter as the key to making democracy work—which, of course, is part of it—I think the greatest hindrance to the flourishing of democracy is not the non-voter, but the power structure that suppresses and denies the right to vote to those who want to participate. We saw it again in this election:
A new North Dakota law required voters to present IDs with a street address, which meant that Native voters in the state, many of whom live on reservations where street addresses are uncommon, were potentially disenfranchised.
In Georgia, Brian Kemp, who resigned as secretary of state last week, purged the voter registration rolls and put 53,000 voter registrations on hold (70 percent of which belong to Black Georgians) by enforcing the so-called “exact match” requirement; in October, advocacy groups filed a lawsuit against him, claiming that the enforcement contributed to unfair voter suppression. Numerous people and organizations, including Barack Obama and the NAACP, have accused Kemp of engaging in voter suppression. The president of the NAACP, Derrick Johnson, said that Kemp engaged in "textbook voter suppression," using tactics "aimed at silencing the voting power of communities of color in the state." Voters there also dealt with long lines and broken machines on election day. Kemp's opponent, Stacey Abrams, refuses to concede until all remaining votes are counted in that very close contest.
In Kansas (the “epicenter of a national voter-suppression crisis”, per an article in Columbia Journalism Review), residents were required to provide documents that proved their citizenship in order to vote, which meant that potential voters who had registered to vote when obtaining their driver’s licenses (provided for by the “motor voter” law) as long as they provided proof of residence were required to show citizenship documents many didn’t have on hand.
These are just some examples of what people experienced as they sought to participate in the most basic building block of democracy, the right to vote.
And then there were the violent acts and threats leading up to the election that contributed to an environment that left many voters, in particular people of color and members of minority groups, increasingly disempowered.
While all this was happening, the president used Twitter to threaten potential voters that law enforcement was watching for “illegal voting” and that “anyone caught will be subject to the maximum criminal penalties allowed by law.” This climate of fear was accented by a string of terror attacks leading up to the elections, many with racist motivations. First, a man mailed bombs to well-known Democrats and critics of Trump. Some of those he targeted, like George Soros and Representative Maxine Waters, have both been targeted by people on the right with racist rhetoric (Trump himself echoed anti-semitic rumors that Soros is paying people to illegally enter the country, and he referred to Representative Waters as a “low-IQ person,” in what has been described as racist dog whistling). The mail bombings were quickly followed by the murders of two Black shoppers at a Kroger in Kansas by a man who had been heard making racist remarks and had reportedly tried to enter a predominantly Black church before going to Kroger. Shortly thereafter a gunman entered Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue, shouting anti-semitic slurs while killing 11 Jewish worshippers. The perpetrators in all three cases espoused views that mirrored white nationalist talking points, many of which have found their way into talking points of rightwing candidates and elected officials. This type of violence is not new but resembles other periods in American history when Black Americans in particular would press for racial equality and voting rights only to be met by intense, violent backlash from whites.
Meanwhile, the 2018 midterm elections also showed us that candidates championed by white nationalists are viable candidates.
In fact, election results also show the persistence of hate and white supremacy in America. Far from rejecting Trumpism, the majority of white voters in the south again embraced Republicans, some of whom either directly or indirectly, overtly or in coded ways, espoused racism. Voters in Louisiana’s first congressional district re-elected Steve Scalise, who has reportedly described himself as “David Duke without the baggage.” In Iowa’s fourth congressional district, Steve King, who endorsed a white supremacist for mayor of Toronto, won his election. King, according to reporting by Vox, “conducted interviews with alt-right outlets, attended events alongside far-right European groups with Nazi ties, and even kept a small version of the Confederate flag on his desk.” In other races, the candidates championed by white nationalists also earned a disturbing portion of their districts' votes. For example, when I started writing this, Ron DeSantis seemed to have won the gubernatorial race in Florida. At one point, DeSantis’s campaign was supported by a white nationalist group, which sent out racist robocalls against his opponent, Andrew Gillum, who is Black. (DeSantis's camp denounced the calls, but they were at the very least indicative of who his campaign appealed to.) DeSantis also told voters that if they elected Gillum, they’d be “monkeying the situation up,” which many took as a racially coded warning. As of this writing the Florida vote is being recounted.
In North Carolina, a House candidate named Russell Walker, who said “God is a racist” and Jewish people “all descend from Satan” received 37 percent of the vote. In Illinois third congressional district, Arthur Jones, a Holocaust denier and former leader of the American Nazi Party, earned 26 percent of the vote in his election. In other words, candidates whose views are, in theory, counter to our country’s ideals, were remarkably viable candidates in 2018.
Even in these conditions engineered to override the will of people, however, there were a few bright spots to celebrate last Tuesday.
I’m not surprised that a system that’s rigged and able to be manipulated to override the will of the people would wear down citizens who feel increasingly disempowered. And yet the people still did the work. In fact, all evidence points to people being more engaged and active than ever before; significantly more people turned out to vote in the 2018 midterms than in previous non-presidential elections. In fact, the turnout in the 2018 midterm elections was higher than the turnout of any midterm election in more than 100 years. Closer examination of what happened in many state and local elections reveals success on the part of grassroots organizers who’ve been working steadily year round to activate and empower the disenfranchised and oppressed. Some examples:
In Florida, organizers succeeded in passing the largest expansion of voting rights in a decade, restoring the right to vote to 1.5 million people with felony convictions.
Voters in Louisiana overturned a Jim Crow-era law that allowed non-unanimous juries to convict people.
In Massachusetts, voters passed a referendum to maintain a 2016 law that extends nondiscrimination protections to transgender people.
In North Carolina, where I live, we are successfully breaking the Republican grip on power while simultaneously building independent Black political power. We've been dealing with Republicans who took over the state legislature in 2010 and began attacking voting rights in the state, as well pursuing a conservative agenda that included included reducing spending on public education, rejecting Medicaid expansion, cutting unemployment benefits, passed billions of dollars in tax cuts, and rolling back hundreds of environmental regulations. The 2018 midterm election reflected years of progressive organizing in the state. I'm not simply referring to the Democratic Party but to the strong network of progressive and revolutionary organizations across North Carolina. We successfully broke the Republican super majority this election cycle and also gained seats on the state Supreme Court. We also elected seven Black sheriffs across the state.
Across the south, new fusion movements similar to those that formed during Reconstruction are emerging and calling for an end to white supremacist systems, the expansion of democracy, and a national policy agenda that serves the working majority and not the wealthy few.
If the midterm elections tell us anything, it’s that our democracy, such as it is, is imperiled, and that there’s as much work to do as there has ever been to ensure that enfranchisement is truly the law of the land.
The reality is that we don’t need to look at the results from this election to know how most Americans feel; after all, the majority of Americans did not vote for the current president. What the election results do show us is the extent to which people were able to organize and mobilize in great enough numbers to overcome the massive voter suppression tactics being utilized against them.
As demographics shift and the nation becomes increasingly Black and Latino, the Republican Party finds its overwhelmingly white base of support to be a shrinking share of the electorate. Is it surprising, then, that we’ve seen so many instances of voter suppression tactics that actively undermine what semblance of democracy the nation does have? On top of that, as an activist, I’ve seen that a lot of the work of combatting voter suppression by getting those most affected by voter suppression efforts to the polls and engaged in elections falls on grassroots organizations. While the Democratic Party says they have a plan to fight voter suppression going forward, they weren't able to prevent it leading up to this election, despite some work they did in the courts in 2016, filing lawsuits aimed at voter suppression in 2016. This, combined with Representative Nancy Pelosi’s predictable calls for “bipartisanship” with a president who calls a reporter’s question about support for white nationalism by the Republican party “racist”, in my opinion, the only hope for future democracy is an organized people’s movement that builds from the local level.
No matter what the outcomes, the confluence of issues that have led the nation to be in the highly polarized political state we find ourselves in today could never have been resolved by the election on Tuesday. These are issues that have existed since the nation’s founding, including the central conflict between the ideology of white supremacy and the ideal of democracy. But numbers simply don’t lie, and those who wish to maintain white domination of America’s wealth and institutions know the numbers are against them. Their only recourse is to engineer a white apartheid system similar to how many southern governments operated during Jim Crow, where Black populations were denied the vote while being subjected to the rule of white people. I don’t believe they will be successful in this, but if the past is any indication, we can expect them to fight the changing tide with every ounce of hate they possess. The standoff between the past and the future continues, but the 2018 midterm stands as an important marker of where we are at this moment in the continued struggle for freedom in America. While the midterms resulted in Democratic control of the House and more Dems in office, if these elections showed us anything, it's that there's still a ton of work to be done on our democracy, such as it currently is. Our work as activists and organizers continues.
Bree Newsome is an artist who drew national attention in 2015 when she climbed the flagpole in front of the South Carolina Capitol building and lowered the confederate battle flag. The flag was originally raised in 1961 as a statement of opposition to the Civil Rights Movement and lunch counter sit-ins occurring at the time. The massacre of nine Black parishioners by a white supremacist at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston reignited controversy over South Carolina’s flag. Bree’s act of defiance against a symbol of hate has been memorialized in photographs and artwork and has become a symbol of courage, resistance and the empowerment of women. Follow her on Twitter here.
This column is the opinion of the writer and does not necessarily reflect the views of SELF or SELF editors.
