God Bless America! Our big, pluralistic, complex multi-dimensional nation showed yesterday what kind of character and intelligence it really has. I am so proud of our country.
What a sweeping blue victory wave for the public interest. What a blast furnace of hot red rebuke for Donald Trump and his politics of cruelty, incompetence, and corruption. We gathered here in northern Michigan for an election night party. Our close friends from this community of doers who’ve made such a difference for the good here. It was an assembly of determined progressives simultaneously nervous and hopeful, just like tens of millions of other Americans.
As the polls closed in the East and Midwest, though, and as reports of voting results flowed in the electric charges of one Democratic victory, and then another, and another lit the room with more than excitement. We quickly learned that every region of the country participated. America was engaged in a coast-to-coast pivot. Voters even turned the once solid red South mostly blue. Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and especially Texas, the largest and until yesterday the most Republican dominated state in the country.
What happened is that MAGA died last night. The extinction level event killed Republican political careers up and down the ballot in over 30 states. It exposed MAGA’s supporters as a beleaguered army entranced by a coarse and vulgar president. And it revealed Trump as an old, tired, embattled man whose filter has failed. Good riddance to it all.
I really had no convictions about the results of this election. I hoped for the best, of course. But after being so enthusiastic about Kamala Harris’s chances, and seeing her candidacy dashed so easily, I removed myself from the realm of political prediction.
What I did tell people who asked what I thought was this: No one is a bigger homer about America than me. No one. I know this incredibly capable country has always brought order out of disorder when it’s challenged. That is our history and our national character.
How Trump managed to get elected twice confuses me. He is so unworthy of his position. But Trump and his allies erred grievously. They pushed Americans into positions and corners that I was convinced would produce a cultural and political backlash. We saw it in Minneapolis. We saw it in the heckling at his shrunken rallies. We saw it in the prosecution and persecution of his enemies that federal judges and grand juries rejected and dismissed. And we saw it in the quality of the Democratic candidates running for senior offices against such impoverished and inferior personalities running as Republicans.
Last night America struck back, punched really hard, and sent MAGA and Trump reeling. It was so sweet to be part of that. Good years lie ahead. As I say again, God Bless America!
— Keith Schneider
