In May, I talked to Atima Omara, a political strategist, who told me that Black women in particular saw the Supreme Court decision that gutted voting rights as an existential threat. When the G.O.P. and right-wing activists targeted Claudine Gay when she was the president of Harvard University, Black women saw a warning that no amount of education would protect them from the same treatment. Then Elon Musk’s purge of public sector jobs and D.E.I. initiatives pushed so many Black women out of the labor market that it helped trigger a near-recession in Black America. Black women channeled their rage into building local political power.
That echoed what I saw in my own life. Friends fired from USAID and scientific research laboratories and universities and Fortune 500 companies dusted themselves off and put their skills to work saving the democracy that had abandoned them. To do it, organizers across the South brought together voters on the Black left and the center, mostly without media attention or philanthropic support. In the hours after Colom’s win, Omara wrote to me to say that Democrats and progressives “must commit to learning from and supporting Black voters, organizers, strategists, particularly the leadership of Black women.”
I saw that energy in Angie Nixon, who ran for the U.S. Senate in Florida. When I talked to her in October, she said she held town hall meetings in every county and was not afraid of red counties or rural counties or the white and Latino voters who make up the state’s Republican base. Nixon was once a labor organizer, and brought that approach to her Senate campaign. She lost, but by less than 3 percent in a race no one predicted would even be close.
Other, similar, losses across the South suggest more trouble ahead for the G.O.P., should the Democrats find the wherewithal to invest in durable, progressive firewalls. The Republican Party held on to its dominance in Alabama but surprisingly lost the Second Congressional District, which was drawn after the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act to allow the G.O.P. to win. In Louisiana’s race for the Senate, the Democrat Jamie Davis came within two percentage points of the Republican Julia Letlow. The possibility of progressivism isn’t dead below the Mason-Dixon line — it’s just waiting to be nurtured.
In Texas, new kinds of Democratic candidates were rebuilding the coalition that once elected Ann Richards. The blue wave in the Lone Star State may not have all of the left-progressive signifiers of wins in other states, but that reflects the region’s diversity. James Talarico did not reject the oil industry, but he did offer a compassionate religious position on reproductive rights. Gina Hinojosa will become the state’s first Latina governor, in part, by proudly embracing her cultural heritage. Winning big in the South, with candidates who look and talk like voters whom it had become cool to dismiss as “Woke 1,” suggests that the Southerners aren’t the ones living in echo chambers.
