Hope is infrastructure
Democrats won big in the midterms yesterday, and some of the biggest wins came from two states a lot of us (myself included) had given up hoping for out of fear of getting our hearts broken again:
- In Texas, James Talarico beat Ken Paxton to become the first Democrat to win a Senate seat there since 1988, Gina Hinojosa unseated Governor Greg Abbott, and down ballot races helped flip the state House.
- In Georgia, Jon Ossoff was easily re-elected, and Keisha Lance Bottoms won the governor’s race—making her the first Black woman elected governor in American history.
Change always takes longer than we think, and the people who build for it rarely get the credit on the night it finally shows up.
Stacey Abrams founded the New Georgia Project in 2013 to register young voters and voters of color. She ran for governor in 2018 and lost by about 55,000 votes, then lost again in 2022 by a wider margin. You could read that as a story about losing, but the voter lists, the trained organizers and the habit of showing up in counties Democrats had taken for granted had a lasting impact.
In 2018, Beto O’Rourke campaigned in all 254 Texas counties and lost to Ted Cruz by less than three points. He lost a presidential run after that, and then lost to Abbott in 2022. This year he spent the cycle helping Talarico and Hinojosa.
A deeply unpopular president and strong candidates did a lot of work last night. But when a blue wave came, there was beachhead in Texas and Georgia for it to land on. Abrams, O’Rourke, and countless others built roads they didn’t get to drive on first.
Hope is a practice: building the infrastructure for a future you might not get to see. If you’re in the middle of something important that hasn’t paid off yet, keep going.