A blue wave, they said. Then a tsunami. By midnight, I was researching whether there’s any such thing as something bigger than a tsunami. (There is: it’s called a megatsunami, and the tallest ever recorded in history took place in Lituya Bay, Alaska in 1958, producing a maximum run-up height of 1,720 feet.)
Usually a wave like that leaves wreckage. People wake up the next morning to count what’s gone. This morning I woke up and counted not only what came back, but the longest list of historic firsts this country has ever seen.
Keisha Lance Bottoms, former mayor of Atlanta and a senior adviser in the Biden White House, is now the first Black woman ever elected governor of any state. Also consider what she was up against: her opponent was Rick Jackson, a billionaire who put more than $200 million of his own money into the race. Perhaps it was his promise to govern like “Trump with a Southern tone” that helped undermine that spend. At their only debate, she told voters, “I’m not running to be his favorite governor.” She won by more than EIGHT POINTS, and she’s also the first Democrat to win the office in Georgia since 1998.
She also finished what Stacey Abrams started. In 2018, Abrams came within about 55,000 votes of the governor’s office, and has worked tirelessly in years since registering voters and fighting the purges intended to keep them off the rolls. Bottoms is the third Black woman in a row to top the Democratic ticket in Georgia. This time, the ending changed.
In New Mexico, Deb Haaland became the first Native American woman elected governor, on land her people called home well before anyone thought to draw a state line around it, rip it from their hands, and tell them otherwise. She was already the first Native American to lead a Cabinet agency, but New Mexico has also NEVER had a Native American governor before her. She won her primary with 72% of the vote, and raised so much money that her campaign finance reports crashed the Secretary of State’s website.
Gina Hinojosa grew up in the Rio Grande Valley, started out as a civil rights and labor attorney, and spent nearly a decade in the Texas House fighting for public schools. She drew the most primary ballots any Democratic candidate for Texas governor has ever received. Greg Abbott was chasing a historic fourth term and kept dodging her requests for a debate, so she showed up outside the Governor’s Mansion with her own podium. The race was supposed to be another comfortable Republican win. Texas voters had other plans and wrote a very different ending to that story. Now she’s Texas’s first Latina governor and the first Democrat to win the office since Ann Richards.
In New York, Adrienne Adams is the state’s first Black woman lieutenant governor. She comes from Southeast Queens and was the first Black woman to serve as speaker of the New York City Council. A year ago she ran for mayor and lost. New York’s first woman governor Kathy Hochul picked her anyway, and dropped her own sitting lieutenant governor to do it, making up New York’s first all-woman ticket. And they WON.
And Colorado sent Melat Kiros to Congress as the state’s first Black congresswoman and the first Gen Z woman elected to Congress anywhere. She’s 29, came to this country from Ethiopia as a baby, calls herself a “recovering lawyer,” and in the June primaries, she unseated Diana DeGette, a 15-term incumbent who’d held the seat since before Kiros was born.
Also a resounding F YEAH for Dr. Amy Acton, who grew up in Youngstown, worked her way out of poverty and into medical school, and ran Ohio’s health department through the first wave of COVID. Acton is not only the first woman elected governor of Ohio, she’s also the state’s first Democratic governor since 2011. And last night, her victory was even sweeter because of the absolute piece of shit she beat: Vivek Ramaswamy, the Trump-endorsed former presidential candidate who’d won his primary with 82% of the vote and apparently assumed the rest of Ohio would fall in line.
Guess again, asshole.
Two weeks before Election Day, Ramaswamy put $4 million behind an ad starring Acton’s estranged mother, who lost custody decades ago after Acton’s stepfather was indicted for sexually assaulting her as a child, only to have her own mother call her daughter a liar. Acton hasn’t seen her in nearly fifty years. Republicans, even outgoing Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, told him to pull it. Ramaswamy eventually did, without apologizing.
Bet he’s real sorry now.
Dr. Annie Andrews is a pediatrician who has spent more than fifteen years caring for South Carolina’s kids. She ran for Congress in 2022 and lost, then turned around and took on the Senate. When the Graham family tried to hand the seat down like an heirloom, Trump threw his weight behind Lindsey Graham’s sister Darline, appointed to her late brother’s seat, and told her, “Run, Darline, Run.” South Carolina told her to keep running… as in, do not pass GO, do not collect the Senator title. And it should also be noted — no, shouted — that Andrews is the first Democrat South Carolina has sent to the U.S. Senate in nearly three decades.
Amy Klobuchar is Minnesota’s first female governor. She won the state’s first governor’s race with women at the top of both tickets, and she gave up twenty years and a leadership post in the U.S. Senate to do it. When federal immigration agents shot three people in Minneapolis in January, killing Renée Nicole Good, and Alex Jeffrey Pretti and wounding Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis at his own front door, Klobuchar spent the months that followed pressing federal agencies for answers they still haven’t fully given. Those families are still waiting for justice. Now they have a governor who will continue demanding it.
Chris Pappas of New Hampshire is the first openly gay man ever elected to the U.S. Senate, and only the third openly LGBTQ+ person to serve there. He’s a four-term congressman, a small business owner and the grandson of Greek immigrants. He beat John E. Sununu, whose last name has meant Republican politics in New Hampshire for decades, with both his father and his brother as previous governors. Sununu wanted back the Senate seat Jeanne Shaheen took from him in 2008. It went to Pappas instead.
In Georgia, Bentley Hudgins won House District 90, becoming the state’s first out transgender and nonbinary lawmaker. Hudgins is a longtime organizer and former Georgia state director for the Human Rights Campaign. According to the LGBTQ+ Victory Fund, they’re also the first Japanese American member of the Georgia General Assembly. Early returns had them winning 94 to 6, in the Deep South.
Xavier Becerra is California’s first Latino governor, and David Crowley is Wisconsin’s first Black governor. Bobby Pulido, a Latin Grammy-winning Tejano singer, flipped a congressional seat in South Texas, which is the most Texas thing that happened on a very Texas night.
Oh, and Democrats took both chambers of Congress. Not squeaked by. Took. Make that, tooketh.
Seven Senate seats flipped (and as of right now, because we’re still counting). Adam Hamilton is the first Democrat Kansas has sent to the Senate since 1932. James Talarico is Texas’s first elected Democratic senator since 1988. Sherrod Brown took Ohio back, Roy Cooper flipped North Carolina and Josh Turek flipped Iowa. In Maine, Troy Jackson retired Susan Collins, who has been at it for decades.
Then there’s my home state of Michigan.
Jocelyn Benson beat John James for governor, so the office Whitmer built stays in good hands. It’s also the first time since 1960 that Michigan has elected a Democrat to succeed a Democrat. Benson won her primary with 84% of the vote and campaigned on a promise to be a governor who answers to “the people, not corporations, not the DeVos family, and not Donald Trump.” Last night it wasn’t even close.
Dr. Abdul El-Sayed knocked Mike Rogers out for the open Senate seat, also making him the first Muslim elected to the United States Senate. He’s the son of Egyptian immigrants, a doctor and former Wayne County health director who lost the governor’s primary by double digits eight years ago. This time he won his primary by about a point, then survived massive outside spending against him and a president who called him a “jihadist” (among other things). Two days before the election, Haley Stevens, the Democrat he beat in the primary and who had pledged to support him, went to church with Mike Rogers and endorsed him instead. It didn’t work. That race cost more than $243 million, the most expensive in state history.
El-Sayed had a parting message for his opponent:
“Mike, enjoy your retirement. You chose hate, and Michigan chose hope.”
And in my current state of Nevada? (Never thought I’d be typing that sentence, but here we are, a year and a half in…) Four years ago, Joe Lombardo was the only Republican in the country to unseat a sitting Democratic governor. Last night Aaron Ford returned the favor. He’ll be the first Black governor in Nevada’s history, in a state once nicknamed the Mississippi of the West. Sandra Jauregui flipped lieutenant governor too.
The soundbites are calling it a seismic shift. A once-in-a-generation realignment. Americans making their voices heard coast to coast. A stinging rebuke. And one that is coming to collect for all the incredible corruption that has occurred. Robert Garcia, incoming chair of the House Oversight Committee, said it best in his official statement on the new Democratic majority. It was two words long:
“Lawyer up.”
For the first time in years – no, in a decade – I had the news on last night (ALL night) and again first thing today, while simultaneously following the conversation on social media, and my chest didn’t tighten. No doom. No bracing for the next alert, no closing the laptop to go stare at nothing. Just one race after another getting called, and every one more sweet than that last.
Instagram also introduced me to a new term that accurately describes the vibe: hopescrolling.
Today, we celebrate. We hopescroll. And then the work begins.
This morning, with the results in, Stacey Abrams put it this way:
“The victory we seek is not merely an election, it is a reclamation of our power and our voices — and that requires bold action by our newly elected leaders and persistent, lasting engagement by the Americans who voted in the millions for change.”
Last night we showed up. Lasting engagement means we keep showing up, at every level. The statehouse. The school board. The county commission. Even when there’s no map on TV turning blue.
XO,
SG
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