Holy shit, last night.
The pundits can call it politics.
They’re wrong.
It was Michael Flatley in steel-toed boots, Riverdancing on the Republican ballsack.
A historic, motherfucking tsunami that tore across the map and left the Republican Party looking like a yacht-club orgy capsized mid-thrust, a hundred Thurston Howells bobbing in the chop with their Nantucket reds around their ankles, fighting over one monogrammed life vest.
Democracy didn’t knock. She came through the kitchen window, jacket torn, lipstick crooked, one shoe missing, a rotisserie chicken under one arm, and said, “You assholes start without me?”
You could feel it as the numbers hit the screen. Group chats detonating. Phones lighting up dark bedrooms. People sending voice messages that were just sobbing, snorting, and “ARE YOU FUCKING SEEING THIS?” Somebody’s Aunt Deb in Parsippany, who has never once found the caps lock key on purpose, was finally using the correct tone.
The air had tasted like dread for two years. Now it tasted like possibility, cheap tequila, and Republican flop sweat.
Blue wave, my entire ass.
It was a comeback with bloody knuckles and somebody else’s veneer embedded in one of them. A voice scraped raw from screaming into the wind, finally hearing an answer. It was anguish finding an outlet, outrage finding its legs, a country hauling itself up off the linoleum, one hand on the Formica, and saying, “You thought we were finished? Oh, honey. We haven’t even taken our earrings off.”
There’s that line, “Hope has two beautiful daughters—anger and courage.”
Those girls just pulled up in a stolen Buick LeSabre, carrying bolt cutters and a fucking battering ram, and one of them had already keyed a Cybertruck on the way in. Anger because we’ve seen enough. Courage because we’re still here. You could tell Hope had raised these two felons on Entenmann’s and spite.
Hope’s been gone so long I figured she’d run off with a pool hustler in Reno, changed her name to Crystal Chandelier, and bought a questionable houseboat with a man whose business card just says “Opportunities.” Last I heard, she’d joined a pyramid scheme selling chakra-enhancing windshield wipers and tried to settle a parking ticket with a Bed Bath & Beyond coupon and a loosely supervised ferret.
But around nine o’clock, she came rattling up the driveway in a borrowed Honda, sequins in the cupholder, a gas receipt stuck to her cheek, clutching a convenience-store rose. We pulled her inside and put the kettle on. She ripped down the blackout curtains, opened every window, lit a Virginia Slim, and told us this place was getting some goddamn air.
She’s a catastrophe. She smells like truck-stop perfume and secondhand cigarette smoke. But she’s back. And for the first time in ages, we can imagine her staying a while.
Because this wasn’t a one-off. It wasn’t a fluke. Across the country, up and down ballots, we were winning seats we hadn’t held in decades. James Talarico wasn’t even born the last time a Democrat won a Senate election in Texas.
Two years ago, we watched the map change color and felt the future closing around our children. Last night, I watched it change again and caught myself imagining their lives without immediately rehearsing what I would have to protect them from. The same country that had broken our hearts was giving us reasons to believe in it again.
But we’ve always known no superhero was going to swoop in and hand our country back to us.
No one was ever coming to save us.
It was always going to be up to us.
We were the heroes we were waiting for. Every door knocked, every call made, every exhausted person who found one more conversation in them. We did this.
The wins hit like church bells after a siege.
Texas. Kansas. Iowa. North Carolina. South Carolina. We flipped the fucking Carolinas. Maine. Ohio’s Senate seat. Democrats won the House AND the Senate.
Texas went blue from the Senate seat and governor’s mansion through the statewide offices and all four Supreme Court seats on the ballot. We got rid of fucking Abbott.
And Mississippi, friends.
Mississippi’s Senate race is still too close to call.
Mississippi.
Governorships flipped in Georgia, Ohio, Iowa, Texas, and Nevada. My own home district, New Jersey Seven, threw Tom Kean Jr. out and elected Rebecca Bennett.
And Amy Acton beat Vivek Ramaswamy. Honestly, that was the one I wanted most. After the way he treated her, watching Ohio choose her to govern them? Oh, that is some exquisite, eat-shit-and-call-her-Governor gratification.
Talarico’s win was satisfying for the same reason. He ran on love, decency, empathy—everything Trumpism tries to humiliate out of us. In Texas, of all places, love fucking prevailed.
We elected our first Black woman governor, first Muslim senator, first openly gay male senator, first Native American woman governor and senator. Texas elected its first Latina governor. New York elected its first Palestinian American state legislator.
That’s Jimmy Carter’s beautiful mosaic, coming alive before our eyes.
Different names. Different prayers. Generations of people who belonged here long before this country could bring itself to say so. Somewhere, a child heard a room full of strangers applaud a name that sounded like theirs. I hope that sound stays with them longer than anything cruel anyone ever says about it.
Every single one of those victories was democracy dragging herself out of the ditch, gravel in her palms, a broken heel in her hand, a ballot clutched against her chest, and yelling, “Nice fucking try, motherfuckers.”
For Republicans who campaigned on making us afraid of one another, the MAGA brand has gone from carnival bark to contagion. They rolled in Trump like dogs in something dead. Turns out the smell doesn’t wash off on Election Day.
They even lost districts they gerrymandered themselves.
Any Republican who still thinks clinging to him is a survival strategy might as well be using a bowling ball as a flotation device. The country has had enough of these congressional crotch-sniffers treating our lives like collateral for his ego.
Winning just feels good, doesn’t it?
After the last election, I couldn’t look half my town in the eye.
Every school event, every supermarket checkout, every familiar face came with the same question. How could you? How could you hear the same man I heard and decide he deserved more power?
The distance between us was enormous, even when we were standing shoulder to shoulder.
But today? I want eye contact. I want to walk down the street looking for somebody wearing this same ridiculous expression. To say, “Did you see?” and watch them start smiling before I finish.
And yes, I want MAGA to fucking choke on it. I can believe in our common humanity and still want the people who laughed at our distress to spend today rage-refreshing the results until their thumbs cramp. They called us hysterical. They told us to cope. Well, sweetheart, look at me coping. Absolutely fucking flourishing. How inconvenient for you.
Because this time, we won. After the degradation, the callousness, the contempt, victory tastes like salvation. And I’m drinking that shit straight.
I can laugh about Republicans getting their asses handed to them all day. But there’s a reason Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s victory speech keeps bringing me to tears, and it goes back to the morning that changed my life.
My son found me crying on the bathroom floor after the 2016 election and asked me one question: “How did this happen? You said the good guy would win.”
Donald Trump was so clearly the bad guy even my little boy could see it. And the moment he saw me, he knew. The bad guy had won. He didn’t understand how that could happen. How could he? There I was, trying not to frighten him, trying to pull myself together enough to be his mother, to explain something I couldn’t make sense of myself. I didn’t have an answer for him. I couldn’t find one for me.
That question changed the course of my life. I wanted to right the wrong that was Donald Trump, to show my son that everything I’d taught him about kindness and decency still meant something in the world beyond our front door. That doing the right thing was worth it. That the good guys could prevail. I’ve been working toward that ever since that morning, when my little boy needed an answer and all I could give him was a mother determined to help make it true.
So when Dr. Abdul El-Sayed said, “Let them know tomorrow that the bad guys lost,” I heard the words I’d spent ten years wanting to say to my son.
Every time I hear it, I cry. And it feels so fucking good to cry tears of joy for a change, doesn’t it?
My son is older now. I can’t give him back those years, or reach across a decade and lift us both off that bathroom floor. But I can show him what we’ve done.
That’s the country I want him to know. The ugliness people will excuse has been gut-wrenching, but I don’t believe it’s the whole of us. We are contradictory, cantankerous, capable of astonishing generosity and breathtaking stupidity. Still becoming.
We have more in common than they want us to believe.
This restored something in me. Something I’d kept defending even when I couldn’t quite feel it anymore.
I can’t tell you exactly how we rebuild. I don’t know how to braid hair. I don’t know how to shuffle cards. I still can’t pump my own gas—thanks, Jersey. But I know how to start again with shaking hands. I know how to gather what’s left and make a life from it.
For so long, loving this country has meant grieving what was happening to it. Last night, love had somewhere else to go.
Thomas Paine wrote, “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.”
And my God, does this triumph feel glorious. Glorious like hearing a familiar voice call your name through the rubble. Like warm water running over hands you hadn’t realized were freezing. Like the first full breath after the doctor says the thing you were terrified to hope for.
We are still surrounded by damage. Trump is still president. The work is waiting. But we are here—hoarse, tear-streaked, almost giddy with the discovery that we can still surprise ourselves.
Now the Democrats need to take those fucking gavels and use them. Expose the corruption. Release the Epstein files. Restore the healthcare and food assistance they gutted. End this war. We didn’t claw our way here to give Democrats nicer offices. We gave them power. They owe us results.
This isn’t the end. Today, we begin the long, hard work of pulling a country I love with every fiber of my being back from the brink. Tomorrow, we keep going.
We ride this momentum like a mechanical bull in the last bar standing in the Oklahoma panhandle on a Friday night—wild, unrelenting, loud as hell, and hanging on for dear life. But we have to hang on when the music stops, too. Democracy does not protect itself. It requires our participation every single day, in big ways and small.
That’s the responsibility in those first three words: We the People. We proved that the power of the people is stronger than the people in power.
For two years, they’ve gotten to write this chapter of our history, and we’ve had to live every fucking word of it.
Now it’s our fucking turn to write what happens next.
And if you’ll excuse me, my Soros check just cleared, and I’ve got to dye my hair blue, get my second abortion of the day, and enroll my son in a girls’ swim meet, all before dinner.
We’re so back, baby. 😂
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