I got a call from a friend in Washington who knows more about political polling than anyone in America. He was almost breathless with excitement.
“It’s gonna be a landslide,” he said.
“In which direction?” I joked.
“Hillary’s going to win in places we haven’t won in years – Georgia, Nevada, Arizona. She’ll take the entire West, the whole East Coast. Trump is sinking like a stone.”
“So do we get the Senate back?”
“You bet.”
“Sixty votes?”
“No, but a nice majority.”
“And the House?”
“We won’t win it back, but Democrats will get 14 of the 30 they need. So still a Republican majority, but far weakened.”
“And what about the states?”
He paused. “The states?”
“Will we take back the states?”
“No. The GOP will remain in control in most states.”
“So the only part of government that will change hands is the U.S. Senate, and not even by enough to overcome a filibuster?”
“Yes,” he said, as if I had taken the air out of his balloon.
“And what about all the people who’ll be voting for Trump?”
“What about them?” he asked, cautiously.
“After Trump loses, they’ll still be out there, right?”
“Of course.”
“And they’ll be madder than hell, poisoned with Trump’s venom. They’ll be a ready-made constituency for the next demagogue.”
“Bob?” he asked.
“What?”
“Remind me never to phone you again.”
“Sorry,” I said.
This is why complacency is not an option, and why we must continue fighting *even harder than we are now* after Trump is defeated. It’s going to take at least one more election cycle – the mid-terms, when Democrats just historically don’t turn out – to get the House back and get past 60 votes in the Senate, and it’ll take even longer to get the states back.
This isn’t something that will be over in a single election. It’s really, really important to remember that, so we stay engaged and keep fighting, because you can bet your life that the neo-nazis who are the GOP base now will be fighting just as hard, convinced that they and their ideas would have won if they’d had a better candidate.
Landslide
Published
Meg's Mumbles 