We had high hopes for this week’s midterms, but we’ve had our hearts broken before. So instead of looking at the polls or preemptively celebrating, millions of Americans put their heads down and kept doing the work.
Extremists and the ultra-wealthy poured billions of dollars — literal billions — into this election. The only way to counter that was by going as local and personal as possible. Real people across the country had conversations with the people in their lives. Red Wine & Blue members alone contacted more than 250,000 people about voting.
And it worked.
It didn’t just work — it worked on a scale we’ve never seen before. It’s true that we saw a blue wave in the 2018 midterms, but as our guest Jess McIntosh this week said, “This has never happened before. Don’t let anybody tell you that this is anything close to politics as usual.”
Democrats swept the South (Texas! Georgia! Both Carolinas! We might even get a Senate seat in Mississippi!?!), but the victories go even farther than that. We flipped Congressional seats and got a Democratic governor in Ohio. We flipped the Senate in Maine, Iowa, and Kansas (Kansas!). We got a blue trifecta in Pennsylvania. We broke records for women (and particularly women of color) being elected to statewide office. And that’s not even getting into school boards, State House races, and all of the other amazing results from Tuesday.
And you know what else? In race after race, suburban women were the determining factor.
Katie actually started Red Wine & Blue after the good news of 2018 skipped Ohio. She saw that the suburbs had underperformed and knew that suburban women held an untapped power. And this Tuesday, Katie’s gamble paid off. Her home state now has a Democratic Senator, a Democratic woman as Governor, and a Congressional delegation that’s changed from 10 Republicans to 5 Democrats to an 8-7 Democratic majority!
We’ll be celebrating these wins for a while, but for now, we just want to say thank you. Thank you to the suburban women — and everyone else — who did the uncomfortable thing and had those conversations about voting. The future will be different now because of you.
It won’t be perfect. The work isn’t done. But right now, it’s time to celebrate. Throw a party this weekend to thank your friends and neighbors in person for everything they’ve done to get us here. It’s important to feel the joy.
Tuesday’s results may have been a first, but if we keep doing the good work, they won’t be the last.
