Anti-Trump Fervor Can’t Fully Explain What Happened This Month

Anti-Trump Fervor Can’t Fully Explain What Happened This Month

Anti-Trump Fervor Can’t Fully Explain What Happened This Month

Democratic candidates ran on bold, progressive ideas that inspired voters.

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EDITOR’S NOTE: Each week we cross-post an excerpt from Katrina vanden Heuvel’s column at the WashingtonPost.com. Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

After Republican candidates got clobbered this month in Virginia and elsewhere, a new narrative quickly took hold. It was all about the president, as usual. “It’s hard to have Trumpism if you don’t have Trump,” The New York Times concluded. “Trumpism without Trump didn’t work,” CNN concurred.

Clearly, President Trump’s historic unpopularity less than a year into his presidency hurts his party’s electoral prospects. It’s also encouraging that Republican gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie failed to win over Virginia voters with Trump-style rhetoric and naked appeals to racism. Yet while the notion that anti-Trump fervor doomed the Republicans may be tempting, particularly to Democrats who would rather avoid debates about the party’s direction, that’s an incomplete explanation of what happened this month in elections across the country. This wasn’t just a Democratic wave fueled by opposition to Trump. It was specifically a progressive wave fueled by bold, progressive candidates down the ballot, working with grassroots activists and organizations, who inspired voters with campaigns based on economic fairness and social justice.

Take a closer look at Virginia, where most of the attention has gone to Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam’s win and transgender woman candidate Danica Roem’s incredible triumph over longtime delegate (and the state’s self-appointed “chief homophobe”) Bob Marshall. In an election with the highest turnout for a gubernatorial race in two decades, Democrats flipped at least 15 seats in the House of Delegates. Twelve of those races were won by women, including the first two Latina women elected in the state, Hala Ayala and Elizabeth Guzman. Ayala, a single mother and former welfare recipient, ran on Medicaid expansion, contraceptive access, and higher teacher pay, and beat a Republican who ran unopposed just two years ago. Guzman, who emigrated from Peru, likewise campaigned on expanding Medicaid and increasing the minimum wage.

Read the full text of Katrina’s column here.

We cannot back down

We now confront a second Trump presidency.

There’s not a moment to lose. We must harness our fears, our grief, and yes, our anger, to resist the dangerous policies Donald Trump will unleash on our country. We rededicate ourselves to our role as journalists and writers of principle and conscience.

Today, we also steel ourselves for the fight ahead. It will demand a fearless spirit, an informed mind, wise analysis, and humane resistance. We face the enactment of Project 2025, a far-right supreme court, political authoritarianism, increasing inequality and record homelessness, a looming climate crisis, and conflicts abroad. The Nation will expose and propose, nurture investigative reporting, and stand together as a community to keep hope and possibility alive. The Nation’s work will continue—as it has in good and not-so-good times—to develop alternative ideas and visions, to deepen our mission of truth-telling and deep reporting, and to further solidarity in a nation divided.

Armed with a remarkable 160 years of bold, independent journalism, our mandate today remains the same as when abolitionists first founded The Nation—to uphold the principles of democracy and freedom, serve as a beacon through the darkest days of resistance, and to envision and struggle for a brighter future.

The day is dark, the forces arrayed are tenacious, but as the late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”

I urge you to stand with The Nation and donate today.

Onwards,

Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation

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