Just a wave, not the water

You probably already know that TODAY WAS ELECTION DAY! Voters decided key races in Virginia, New Jersey, and New York City—as well as several other state and local contests nationwide.

The bad news is that it wasn’t a general election. So the House, the Senate and the presidency weren’t up for grabs, and we’re stuck with the Trump administration in control of the federal government. But the good news is that the results were a staggering series of victories that will be key to stopping Trumpism in the U.S.

Next week, I’ll talk more in depth about conclusions from the election, what they might mean in light of U.S. and world history, and where we go from here. But today, I want to talk about the/ idea of elections and referendums, and what voting can and can’t do.

It’s easy to think that elections are the only tools that the people have at hand to make their will known or to influence government. And, as I’ll make clear later, I think elections are critical, and that people should participate.

But elections are tools, and there are many other tools. Elections aren’t the result itself—just a means to an end. Just think of how many politicians you’ve voted for who sold out a cause they campaigned on. Or how many have shifted as soon as they were in office to become more responsive to donor pressure than the public interest.

There’s a line from a Butch Hancock tune he wrote decades ago, sung from the point of view of someone whose lover tells him he’s “just a wave,” not the water. The same is true of elections.

You can use a series of elections to build on a strategy, and they do have meaning and deliver power. But in the end each election is just what happens at that moment in time. It’s easy to mistake voters in a given race for the whole public. It’s easy to imagine that voters’ preferences are unchanging. It’s even more tempting to imagine that the past group of those who engaged and the things they said mattered in focus groups somehow provide the only measurable tool to use in setting political goals.

Of course it’s true that even without guarantees for what will follow, elections can be extremely useful in achieving the results you want. They’re frequently the fastest path to new laws and expanded funding. They can make societal goals much, much easier to carry out. And if you lose them, that failure can be a significant roadblock to your goals.

But in this good-news moment, I’d like to take a second to remember that real change comes through having a set of ideals you’re committed to over time, policies that people see you building toward in concrete ways, and a connection to constituents that goes beyond riding a single wave into office and then pretending you own the ocean.

The costs of instability

In our era of oligarchs, you may have seen people point out how our current labor unions evolved as a compromise. They’re a way to mitigate the financial and human costs faced by both owners and workers during labor disagreements.

Unions have largely become a nonviolent compromise, in which the tendency to use bombs, arson, and assassinations grew less likely and got replaced by less violent strikes and bargaining. But that’s not the way it always was. (I’m thinking of the Matewan Massacre and the Battle of Blair Mountain during the coal wars in my home state of West Virginia.)

Like unions, elections are also a compromise. In a country founded on genocide, chattel slavery, and revolution, elections are the means by which the people can assert themselves over a government that has been both a comfort and an affliction to large parts of the governed across our history.

Election legitimacy

In recent years, voters have been kept from casting their ballots in ways new and old. There have been rollbacks on voting rights that had been restored. Polling places in minority neighborhoods have been shuttered. Texas announced gerrymandering to guarantee Republican rule in Congress.

As we can see from the victory of Proposition 50 in California, there’s a lot we can do to push back. But as we wrestle with our hardening authoritarianism, there may be times when elections will do a full end run around the people’s will.

Countless examples exist around the world showing the ways that elections can be directly subverted, doing tremendous harm. Just this weekend in Tanzania, incumbent Samia Suhulu Hassan was announced to have won with 98% of the vote, after disqualifying one opponent and jailing another, who’s currently charged with treason. Hassan was originally viewed as a reformer when elected in 2021 on the heels of a strongman, but she now seems uninterested in giving up power. Hundreds of people appear to have been killed in the unrest around the vote.

While we in the U.S. aren’t currently living in that particular universe, democracy-watchers at home and abroad are voicing profound concerns about our elections going forward. Still, even in the absence of outright suppression (which we have a long history of in this country), we’ve seen how often individual winning candidates have transformed the country in good ways while also carrying out tremendous injustices.

One simple example is how FDR instituted works programs and launched Social Security in the wake of the Great Depression, but also implemented the internment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II. This kind of mixed balance sheet can be done for every president the country has ever had. Elections have always been a partial answer at best.

Meanwhile, two presidential elections in the last quarter-century have hinged on electoral college victories where the popular vote went to the losing candidate. It’s an outcome clearly made possible by the U.S. Constitution, to be sure, but one that nevertheless undermines democracy as a whole.

So while elections may remain our best tool for now, it’s a mistake to see them as the only way to deepen our democracy and better protect everyone’s rights. Think about the popular demonstrations in South Korea that undermined an elected president’s attempt to overthrow democratic rule there. Think about the 1988 referendum in Chile that marked the beginning of the end of Pinochet’s rule. When they work well—and they do seem to have struck back hard against authoritarianism today—elections have the potential to be a guardrail against a more violent and unjust society. But sometimes other approaches are necessary.

Candidate vs. campaign

If we don’t understand how successful campaigns work, it’s easy to mistake what’s happening in them. In the runup to today’s vote, there was what felt to me like a strange attempt to portray Virginia candidate for governor Abigail Spanberger and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani as polar opposites with fundamentally different strategies.

In terms of backgrounds, there are definitely differences. She’s a former CIA operative from Virginia, and is more than a decade older than Mamdani. He’s an immigrant of Indian descent hailing from Uganda who’s lived in New York City since grade school.

But they have their similarities, too. Spanberger has represented the 7th District of Virginia in the House of Representatives for the last six years. Mamdani was elected to the New York State Assembly in 2020 and has been there ever since.

Spanberger has at times been quick to disparage the language used by other Democratic candidates, sometimes criticizing any appearance of the world “socialism” and calls to defund the police. Just this week, she told the New Yorker that Democrats need to be listening more.

But it seems to me that they both conducted stellar listening campaigns, not so much to find themselves as candidates but instead to understand the hopes and fears of constituents, whether they live in Central Virginia or New York City. And in truth, both candidates listened to voters and spoke to them in ways that mattered to their particular audiences. They had basic principles, as well as concrete policies to which they returned again and again, and each made their case in a way that the voters could hear.

And in some cases, as with Zohran Mamdani and New York City’s Black voters, it’s possible to see clearly the benefits of respect, time, and attention. After many Black voters made it clear in the Democratic primary that they knew and trusted former governor Andrew Cuomo more than they did Democratic Socialist upstart Mamdani, he listened and met with them. The results were visible in the Bronx and elsewhere when the map of today’s vote is compared to the June primary.

Prodded into offering criticism of her fellow Democrat, Spanberger voiced some distrust of Mamdani’s ambitious policy planks, fearing that voters would punish candidates and the party if politicians who get elected don’t deliver everything they promised. On the topic of government-run grocery stores, she said she wouldn’t campaign on that issue, “because I couldn’t ever pass it.”

But I’m not sure that they aren’t both running the best campaign they can for the electorate each is faced with. They seemed to have listened, focused on policies that will have a real impact, and to have spoken to their constituents in a language people were ready to hear. It’s a way to make elections lead naturally into new policies, which allows voting to function optimally as a tool for democracy and sound governance rather than a means by which to dupe the electorate to gain power.

Just the beginning

This election is a start, and will lock in some immediate political benefits in several cities and states. In many cases, change will still have to be fought for. In any non-presidential election year, we would expect to see a normal swing away from whatever party is in power nationwide. But my sense is that we’re seeing a real shift away from Trump and the unpopular policies he represents.

Yet we still have so much work to do. No good part of our existing system can be safe as long as civilians can be beaten on the streets by masked men, whether they’re citizens or not. We have to move past a point where a Supreme Court judge writes in an official capacity that law enforcement can stop any person for their skin color or for the language they speak, with no recourse.

We can’t allow a Court that lets immigration agents detain even U.S. citizens at will in a “Kavanaugh stop,” whether it’s for a long time, or even a little while—as if it were some harmless treat for law enforcement. We need a system that doesn’t allow a state of exception in which the president and his lackeys get to set all the rules.

My belief is that we’ve never truly dealt with our fundamental denial of rights to whole groups of people, having built a country on disenfranchisement from power for vulnerable communities from our founding forward. This is the deep abyss in our country, into which we have thrown so many people—particularly Native Americans, Black folks, and immigrants. It’s the kind of deep societal weakness that antisemitism was in Nazi Germany.

The dedicated non-voter

In the wake of last fall’s presidential election, I saw a lot of rage about people refusing to vote for Harris because of Gaza, or because they had given up on politics entirely, feeling that elections had never benefitted them. As someone who tried to persuade some people—not all of whom ended up voting—I know it’s hard to see someone refuse to take a simple action that you think might make a huge difference in their life or others’.

But for many people, elections seem like a dead end. They believe that the goals they have will never be delivered by any politician who can win in our two-party system. I have enough hope that belief might not be correct that I’m willing to participate and encourage others to—again, with the understanding that elections are only one of the useful tools available to society.

I definitely put some energy toward encouraging even reluctant people to vote. But I see a lot of people hectoring that group and blaming them for election losses. My sense is that if you’re a dedicated voter, it’s on you (and me) to make it appealing to vote, to persuade people it’s worthwhile.

Castigating them or trying to make them responsible for losses tends to be unhelpful, because it doesn’t lead to a better outcome. It’s pretty clear my demographic peers—Gen X white men and women—along with Boomers are the electoral villains in the current U.S. voting narratives. Don’t try to shift that onto anyone else. But even understanding accurately how we got where we are, I think it’s generally most helpful to focus on the place where you think you can make actual change.

And in all seriousness, some people who don’t vote are just going to be using other tools than you. You may not even know what they’re up to. They might be a critical part of a library board, or the major donor to a diaper bank, they might be organizing protests that will raise awareness of wrongs in a community, or filing lawsuits. Your anger isn’t likely to get them to vote, but your persuasion might. And if it doesn’t, there are millions and millions of other nonvoters out there on whom you can use your best arguments instead.

We should celebrate tonight’s election results. They have the potential to bring a sea change. We can look to these races for strategies in the next year and beyond. But it’s worth remembering that what happened today is just the wave. We are the water.

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