Weekend Hot Take: Can You Hear Me Now?
They ran on us.
They ran on trans kids.
They ran on abortion.
They ran on "trafficking" every time they needed a villain and a press release. They ran on "radical leftists" and "weird" candidates and the eternal menace of people living lives Republicans didn't approve of.
And last night, they lost. Not narrowly. Not "pending recount." They lost the House. They lost the Senate. They lost in places they swore could never, ever go blue.
So, to every strategist who spent this cycle convinced that the road to power runs through other people's bodies: Can you hear me now?
The scoreboard
Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress. Here is what that looked like on the Senate side alone:
Maine: Troy Jackson beat Susan Collins.
Ohio: Sherrod Brown is back, after defeating Jon Husted.
North Carolina: Roy Cooper beat Michael Whatley.
South Carolina: Annie Andrews flipped the seat.
Kansas: Kansas. Adam Hamilton flipped it.
Iowa: Josh Turek beat Ashley Hinson.
Texas: James Talarico beat Ken Paxton, the first Democrat to win a Texas Senate race since 1988.
Meanwhile, Georgia kept Jon Ossoff, Minnesota sent Peggy Flanagan, and Michigan elected Abdul El-Sayed, the first Muslim U.S. senator. In Pennsylvania, Brian Fitzpatrick, the GOP's favorite "moderate," lost his seat to Bob Harvie.
Elon Musk, who spent the last two years treating the federal government like a hobby he got bored of, posted that "data centers in space" were looking pretty appealing. We'll help him pack.
The culture war was the pitch
Watch what Republicans actually said when they thought it would work.
The Senate GOP's campaign arm described Talarico as a radical leftist who "thinks God is nonbinary." The President called him "weird." Also a vegan. That was the case. That was the whole case.
Texans had a choice between a man accused of using his office for himself and a man accused of an unusual theology and no brisket. They picked the theology.
In Missouri, Republicans tried something cleverer. Amendment 3 bundled two things into one ballot question: repeal the abortion rights voters approved just two years ago, and write a ban on gender transition care for minors into the state constitution. The theory was obvious.
Hitch an unpopular abortion ban to a trans panic and let the panic pull the wagon.
The wagon didn't move. Missourians voted it down, roughly 55 to 45. They also threw out the gerrymandered congressional map the legislature drew for itself last year.
Nevada voted to lock abortion rights into its constitution. So did Virginia.
This is the part the consultants will spend the winter refusing to learn: you can only scare people with their neighbors for so long before they notice that the neighbors are fine and the groceries are not.
About those groceries
Let's be honest, because we always are.
The exit polls say this election was about Donald Trump, the cost of living, and corruption. Trump headed into the night with what CBS called the lowest midterm approval rating on record for a president. Roughly nine in ten voters said corruption was a major factor in their vote, about the same share who said cost of living.
That isn't a contradiction. It's the point.
The Republican Party had two years of power and a country that couldn't afford eggs. It spent that time on bathroom bills, book bans, ballot measures about other people's medical records, and hunting for "radicals" under every pulpit. Voters asked for relief and got a morality play. They noticed.
The culture war didn't just fail to save them. It was the tell. It told voters exactly what this party thinks government is for.
Don't pop the champagne yet
Now the part nobody else will put in their victory lap.
In Colorado, the same night all of this happened, voters passed Proposition 133 with about 61 percent of the vote. It mandates life in prison without parole for child sex trafficking, and it broadens the definition to include knowingly exchanging anything of value to buy or sell sex with someone under 18.
The legislature had already rejected it. So its backers, Protect Kids Colorado, took it straight to voters, alongside two other propositions aimed at transgender kids.
It was opposed by the Colorado Coalition Against Sexual Assault, the Rocky Mountain Victim Law Center, and more than a dozen other groups that work with victims, including anti-trafficking organizations. Their reason is one we know by heart: young people who are trafficked are routinely coerced into recruiting or managing other young people. Under Prop 133, a victim who is convicted for what she was forced to do can now die in prison.
That is what "saving children" looks like when nobody asks the children.
And it passed in a blue state, on a blue night, by twenty-plus points. Voters who threw Republicans out by the busload still voted to lock up trafficking victims until they die. The carceral savior industry didn't lose an inch. It never does, because it doesn't belong to one party. It belongs to whoever wants to look tough without having to know anything.
Also worth noting: Ohio and North Carolina wrote voter ID into their constitutions. Idaho's abortion-rights measure failed. A wave is not a cleanse.
A special shout-out to the "feminists" who carpooled with the GOP
No election update would be complete without checking in on our friends in the gender-critical and "abolitionist" feminist movement. You know the ones. The women who discovered that the fastest way to protect women is to hand Republicans a list of which women don't count.
This year, groups like the Women's Liberation Front were working the halls of the Capitol and making inroads with Republicans, selling the same package they always sell: trans women are a threat, sex work is "commercial sexual exploitation," and the state should get to decide who counts as a woman and what she's allowed to do with her own body. Bodily autonomy, but make it conditional.
They picked their friends. Last night their friends lost the House and the Senate.
It turns out "we're protecting women" is a hard sell when you're standing next to the party that just tried to repeal abortion rights in Missouri. Voters looked at the coalition and noticed the coalition.
But let's not pretend they went home empty-handed. In Colorado, a ban on trans students playing on teams that match their gender identity (Prop 134) and a ban on gender-affirming surgery for minors (Prop 135) were both narrowly ahead on election night. Both came from Protect Kids Colorado, the same outfit behind Prop 133. Jennifer Sey, who helped lead the Prop 134 campaign, called it a watershed and urged other Democratic-led states to follow.
So, to recap: they lost the Congress they lobbied, and they may have won the right to make Colorado schools figure out how to verify a kindergartner's "biological reproductive system" before soccer practice.
The measure leaves the how to the schools. Good luck to the gym teachers. Congratulations on your watershed.
And look at who was on all three measures. The same organization that wants trans kids off the field wants trafficked kids, including the ones forced to recruit other kids, in prison for life. That's not a coincidence. It's the whole philosophy. "Protecting women and children" has always meant protecting the idea of women and children from the actual ones. Trans girls, sex workers, the girl who got coerced into recruiting her friends: none of them were ever who these campaigns had in mind.
We were. As the problem.
To the new majority
Congratulations. Here's your inbox.
You won by running against people who used marginalized communities as campaign props. Don't turn around and do the same thing with "trafficking" bills in January.
If you want to prove you heard voters, start with the laws that were sold as protection and delivered as harm.
FOSTA was passed with bipartisan applause in 2018, and sex workers have spent every year since documenting what it actually did: pushed people offline, away from screening tools, and into more danger, while doing next to nothing for trafficking victims. Look at it. Look at the data. Then do something about it.
Fund reentry. Fund housing. Fund harm reduction. Stop funding the arrests that make all three necessary.
And when someone in your caucus wants to introduce another mandatory minimum because it polls well, remember Prop 133, and remember who it was written to punish.
Can you hear us now?
We've been saying it for years. You can't police people into safety. You can't legislate people out of existence. And you can't run a country on fear of the people who live in it.
Last night, a lot of voters said it too.
We heard them. The question is whether the people they just elected did.
