Rozina Ali • Olivia Paschal • Lily Geismer • David Treuer
‘Are You for America?’
Rozina Ali
In the fiery lead-up to the midterm election in Michigan, mailers arrived at voters’ homes bearing the gray-toned images of a woman in a burqa and Abdul El-Sayed’s face. The leaflet, sent by a Republican-aligned super PAC, warned that the Democratic candidate’s “Sharia-compliant way” would restrict women’s rights and freedoms. Grotesque as it was, it was a small drop in the deluge of tirades about El-Sayed’s ethnicity and faith, from right-wing commentators and sitting politicians alike.
His Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, excoriated him for connections to the Muslim Brotherhood—an Islamist political group in Egypt that his mother once allegedly supported in the 1970s. Vice President JD Vance claimed that El-Sayed had “zero attachment” to the United States, though he was born and raised in Michigan. At a campaign event outside Detroit, Texas Senator Ted Cruz warned that if El-Sayed was elected and put on the Senate intelligence committee “there is a very real risk that Americans will die as a result.” The dog whistles about how the first Muslim senator would threaten the Western way of life were so incessant and absurd as to become boring. Then there were the playground taunts: President Trump poking fun at his name, Cruz calling him a “jihadist leprechaun,” Louisiana Senator John Kennedy claiming he slept in a “bin Laden jersey.”
In some ways, this anti-Muslim bigotry was perfectly in keeping with the past two decades, when Islamophobia gradually became a feature of American election cycles. As more people were arrested inside the country on terrorism-related charges, the public’s fears became fodder for a new kind of politics. In 2008 a right-wing advocacy group called the Clarion Fund sent out DVDs to millions of voters in swing states warning about the dangers of radical Islam in the United States. Two years later local governments debated adopting anti-Sharia legislation, while a manufactured national controversy about plans to open an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan—which conservative opponents dubbed the “Ground Zero mosque”—seeped into the midterm elections. In 2016 Republican candidates competed to prove their anti-Muslim bona fides, calling for a ban on immigration from Muslim countries and extra monitoring of mosques. The Democrats, too, accepted Muslims only on certain conditions. “If you’re a Muslim and you love America and freedom and you hate terror,” Bill Clinton said on the DNC stage that year, “stay here and help us win and make a future together.”
Still, this year’s Michigan Senate race was arguably the most Islamophobic in US history. In the past, politicians have seemed to preserve a dichotomy between “good Muslims”—the assimilated, patriotic ones—and “bad Muslims”: the dangerous, radical members of the faith. This time, the distinction collapsed. El-Sayed’s opponents from both parties attacked him by questioning his loyalty and arguing that he doesn’t love his country—all but saying that a Muslim should not and cannot hold an influential office in the United States. “Are you for America, or are you for these terrorist groups overseas?” Rogers asked during their second debate in October. El-Sayed’s rival in the Democratic primary, Haley Stevens, explaining her decision to switch sides and endorse Rogers at the eleventh hour, repeatedly accused El-Sayed of being “hateful.” “I’m choosing country over hate,” she announced at a press conference two days before the election. Voters were unmoved by the attacks. Despite more than $400 million spent in the Michigan race, mostly in favor of Rogers—what one journalist remarked was equivalent to a small nation’s GDP—El-Sayed beat his opponent by 7 points.
Gambling on Islamophobia as an electoral strategy was reckless: in the past, heightened anti-Muslim rhetoric correlated with an increase in anti-Muslim assaults nationwide. It was also astonishingly tone-deaf. In a moment when Americans’ medical debt has reached at least $220 billion and credit card debt is at an astounding $1.26 trillion, compounded by worsening inflation and rising gas prices, it’s not Islamic terrorism but affordability that Americans worry about.
El-Sayed was not just a Muslim candidate but a candidate who exhibited remarkable message discipline about these very points. A doctor who chose a career in public health and wrote two books about the possibility of national health care policy, he spoke exhaustively about Medicare for All. He also persistently tied the affordability crisis to the stupidity of Trump’s war with Iran and the billions going to fund Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
In this, he reflected a shifting tide: most of the country wants restrictions on aid to Israel, and a majority now favors a national health care plan. That El-Sayed’s opponents fell back on such old tropes—AIPAC spent more than $31 million attempting to cast him as an antisemite and a misogynist—was in itself a sign that they lacked substantive policy proposals of their own. In Equator, Nikhil Pal Singh convincingly argued that the midterm season’s “blue tsunami” spells the end of “9/11 as a font of reactionary politics.” After nearly two decades in which both Barack Obama and Donald Trump “rose to the top of their respective parties” by rejecting George W. Bush’s wars on the campaign trail, only to start new conflicts once in office, voters are less likely than ever to support the never-ending “war on terror.”
This is not to say that Islamophobia is dead. Attacks against El-Sayed continue. His critics charge him with being “radical”—not just in reference to his supposed “ties” to an Islamist group in the Middle East but also because he wants to upend a status quo grounded in a longtime bipartisan consensus. Like a growing number of his colleagues on Capitol Hill, El-Sayed has been unequivocal in his critique of Israel as an apartheid state and his desire to stop funding for the country. As Senator-elect he has already voiced his support for a challenger to Chuck Schumer as Senate majority leader—which inspired a joke about antisemitism from Saturday Night Live.
“I’m not running to be a Muslim senator, I’m running for the US Senate and happen to be Muslim,” El-Sayed said on the campaign trail. The line, of course, evoked John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic to be US president, who was questioned during his own election season about his loyalty to the pope versus the Constitution. It was a nimble and effective rhetorical move. But I also think of another moment from Kennedy’s political rise, when he famously urged the public in his inaugural speech to “ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” The phrase inadvertently hemmed in our politics for decades, but this election cycle’s historic and remarkable swing leftward, among struggling Americans of every demographic, marked its repudiation. If the parameters of today’s politics are love and hate, then the underlying question isn’t so much which side loves their country more but whether the government loves its people.
The Changing of the Southern Guard
Olivia Paschal
The GOP’s twenty-first century Solid South was never quite so solid as it seemed. Florida, Tennessee, and Arkansas had some Democratic statewide representation until the 2010s. Georgia’s Senate seats flipped in 2021. North Carolina, Kentucky, and Virginia all currently have Democratic governors. Nonetheless, in the Trump era, offices that partisans had long hoped would turn entirely blue had remained stubbornly red through the campaigns of candidates like Stacey Abrams, Beto O’Rourke, and Jaime Harrison. On Tuesday night the dam finally broke, not only in Texas and the swingier North Carolina but also in the apparently deep-red states of South Carolina, almost certainly Mississippi, and, very nearly, Louisiana. The states of the former Confederacy no longer move as a bloc, but it is hard to look at Democratic victories throughout the Deep South and see anything other than a repudiation of the party that has held power, in some measure, for the last quarter century.
As the national Democratic party (and national progressive funders) backed away from many Southern states, local and regional organizers dug in. Their work has made the difference. In the second Trump term, grassroots organizing around the South has confronted issues like ICE arrests, data centers, and the right to the ballot. Black voters were mobilized by the Supreme Court’s Callais decision gutting the Voting Rights Act and by the heavy-handed racial gerrymandering Republicans had undertaken across the region; groups like Black Voters Matter and Stacey Abrams’s host of voting rights organizations have been building political infrastructure across the Deep South, including Mississippi, for years. Thousands of Black students marched to the polls from HBCUs like Jackson State and North Carolina A&T, where the Guilford County Board of Elections moved a polling location a forty-minute walk from campus despite student protests. Latino voters across the region swung left again, a response to the violent detentions ICE carried out in workplaces, on the side of highways, and even, as in Western North Carolina, at a swimming hole in a national forest, often at the invitation of Republican leadership.
Record turnout in the region shows just how much ground Republicans have lost. In North Carolina, where the well-liked former governor Roy Cooper beat a lackluster Trump candidate for the state’s Senate seat, 54 percent of voters went to the polls—the most since 1990. That high turnout also helped flip the state’s House delegation. In South Carolina, the Democrat Annie Andrews beat Lindsey Graham’s sister Darline by five points in an election that also set turnout records. Texas’s turnout was 5 percentage points higher than in the last midterms.
In some places candidates who barely campaigned won their seats because of the D by their name. Democrats flipped at least one chamber in the state legislatures of North Carolina and Texas, may have flipped the Georgia House, and broke Republican supermajorities in Florida, the Arkansas House, and the South Carolina House. Public boards and commissions also swung Democratic—including the Georgia public utilities commission, long a rate-hiking monopoly—as did local elections in places like Lynchburg, Virginia, home of Liberty University. In Huntsville, Alabama, home to a vast military-industrial complex, voters sent the first trans legislator in Alabama history to the statehouse. She beat the incumbent Republican by seven points.
Assessor races, county boards, the Texas state board of education—the changing of the guard in these kinds of offices heralds shifts not just in national policy but in the state-level policy that, thanks to organizations like ALEC and the Federalist Society, the GOP has held and weaponized for nearly two decades. It is these down-ballot races that may ultimately have the most impact on policies like Medicaid expansion, local police partnerships with ICE, and data center construction.
A Democrat, of course, does not a progressive make. Many of those who won statewide in the South are centrists. Keisha Lance Bottoms is best known in many parts of the progressive left for her insistence on constructing Atlanta’s Cop City during her term as that city’s mayor. Scott Colom, who may well flip a Mississippi Senate seat, highlighted his relationship with the police in his launch video. In Texas, James Talarico softened on trans rights as the GOP attacked him and Gina Hinojosa on well-trod culture war lines. Their victories, however, should still lessen the firehose of catastrophes that on-the-ground organizers have been combatting on multiple fronts since 2024.
The statewide candidates who won had one thing in common with others around the country: the focus on affordability, economic populism, and the growing gap between rich and poor. Colom’s launch ad showed him grocery shopping with his family, and his campaign promised to raise wages and work to end tariffs. Andrews’s platform included plans to protect workers’ rights, raise taxes on the wealthy, and reopen rural hospitals. Justin Pearson also focused on inequality in his campaign for the House in a formerly majority-Black district in Tennessee that had been extraordinarily gerrymandered by Republicans. He lost by just 2,500 votes. Workers and farmers across the South have been hammered by Trumpian tariffs, decades of anti-labor economic policies, and the continuing loss of rural hospitals and health care. It’s incumbent on newly elected Democrats to show they can offer something different.
All the stars aligned this cycle—a motivated electorate, high turnout, lackluster Republican candidates. The down-ballot wins in the South have given Democrats a chance to build a bench in states where they haven’t been competitive in a long time, and opened up the space to try out a new politics. But the success of that politics depends on whether the party and its newly elected candidates show voters that they can actually offer something new. It also relies on national Democrats investing in Southern states that, Tuesday showed, could be competitive—like Louisiana, where the Democratic Senate candidate Jamie Davis lost by less than 2 percent. If the blue turn is to be sustained, national organizations and funders will need to focus resources on the South again—so that the voters and organizers who pulled Democrats across the finish line can begin to see their efforts pay off.
Revenge of the Watergate Babies
Lily Geismer
The scale of the Democratic victory last Tuesday has sent pundits in search of historical comparisons. It easily surpassed 2018 and 2006 and even 1994, when Newt Gingrich led the GOP to control the House of Representatives for the first time since the 1950s. The closest analogy seemed to be 1974, when seventy-six new Democratic representatives entered the House and the party made major gains in the Senate and governorships. The group earned the label “Watergate Babies” on the assumption that it was anti-Nixon sentiment that drove them. Anger at Nixon and Watergate certainly contributed to their electoral success, but the label was a misnomer: their main target was less Nixon than the Democratic establishment, which they considered too bureaucratic, inefficient, and beholden to the labor movement.
The Watergate Babies were predominately Ivy League-educated, white, male, and under the age of forty. Many of them came from the Sunbelt South, where they represented largely white, middle-class suburban districts. Most had never before held political office, but all promised to make government more efficient and transparent. The cohort included many figures who would become leaders in the Democratic Party for years to come, such as Paul Tsongas, Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis, George Miller, Henry Waxman, John Glenn, and Dale Bumpers. In his stump speech Hart railed against the Democrats for “throwing money at problems” by creating more federal programs or agencies. “It is time to replace the New Deal, or at least the conventional thinking which is its grandchild,” he declared.
Historians, myself included, have had much to criticize about the Watergate Babies’ influence on the Democratic Party since the 1970s: they worked, I have argued, to tilt the party toward suburban moderates and codified a market-based, tech-oriented economic policy agenda that created new forms of inequality and alienated working-class voters.1 The Watergrate Babies do, however, deserve credit for the ways they sought to check executive power, reform the institutions of Congress, and upend the Democratic establishment. The class of 1974 helped, among other things, to end the seniority system that had long dictated committee placements and chairs and to redistribute power in the House toward the elected leadership and subcommittees, where new members could assert themselves.2 These efforts were by no means perfect, but the group at least recognized that they had to make politics and government function more effectively before they could achieve their policy goals.
The class of 2026 is far more heterogenous than its historical antecedent. If these midterms are any indication, the Democrats seem to have finally taken seriously Howard Dean’s idea as chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 2005 to develop a “fifty-state strategy” focused on expanding party infrastructure and candidate recruitment in every state. The idea was quickly dismissed by party operatives like Rahm Emanuel and Paul Begala, who said it amounted to “hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose.” It turns out they can do a lot more than pick their noses. Indeed, they can shift the party away from its obsessive quest, since the era of the Watergate Babies, to win suburban moderates in swing districts, focusing instead on making the party’s electoral coalition more economically and geographically diverse.
Still, the class of 2026 would do well to heed parts of the Watergate Babies’ example. Politicians and pundits alike have wrung their hands for decades over polarization and gridlock within Congress, but the most recent session reached unprecedented heights of paralysis and fecklessness. It is time, then, to use the momentum from this election to reform the legislative branch and reclaim the institution’s power and authority. The new class can, for instance, work with existing members of Congress to reassert control of the power of the purse afforded to them by the Constitution to curb the funding of ICE as well as rein in spending on the Iran War, support for Israel’s war on Gaza, and backing for other military action around the globe. Congress can also embrace its war powers, which is another authority granted by both the Constitution and 1970s-era legislation.
Some of the most substantial changes the Watergate Babies made to the structure of Congress itself—such as providing more power to the elected leadership and reforming the committee system to give less power to the committee chair—have to some degree been a victim of their own success. In more recent decades they have had a part in calcifying the power of the Democratic leadership, allowing figures like Nancy Pelosi and Hakeem Jeffries way too much say in dictating the party’s legislative agenda. The committee structure hasn’t been reorganized since the 1970s, and a Democrat-led Congress could modernize it by eliminating committees that no longer serve a crucial function and adding those that do.3 For instance, no central committee on technology currently exists. Creating one would not only bring Congress into the twenty-first century but also serve as a means of developing and asserting tech regulation.
Reforms of this kind could help address the issues that today’s new lawmakers most urgently need to attend to, from Big Tech and AI policy to health care and immigration. An updated committee system could also redistribute some power within the party from the leadership and give more progressive members of Congress one way to shape the party’s agenda. These types of actions are not as dramatic or headline-grabbing as impeaching the president and other top officials. But they would help restore trust in our political institutions, and they would be at least a step toward showing the American people that the Democratic Party stands for a vision of government focused on addressing their needs.
The Shoreline
David Treuer
I—an Indian, a novelist, critic, historian, and Barthesian “scriptor”—am disinclined by disposition and profession to provide hot takes. I do language and I do it long-form. So it should come as no surprise that I have few thoughts about the momentous firsts—in Minnesota, Texas, Georgia, New Mexico, Michigan. There was a blue wave. A “blue tsunami,” in the words of the mealy-mouthed Ted Cruz.
But there was a Trumpian wave in 2024 (and what color was that, anyway?). A Bidenian bluish wavelet in 2020. A red wave with Trump foam in 2016. A blue tide (but no wave) with Obama. The problem with waves is that they crash and recede. I am less concerned with their pattern than what all of them, ultimately, do to the shoreline and the land beyond.
And what of the shoreline, which is nothing less than the unworthy, illegitimate, illegal republic that has imposed itself on my tribal homelands and those of my tribal relatives since its birth in 1776? The shoreline is a system that has not served me and mine since then and it does not serve us now. That violent system (made of declarations of independence and otherwise, institutions, military might, cultural hegemony, and believers in all of it—nothing less than the Republic itself) has infected and shaped and adulterated my homelands, my tribe, and has circled back to adulterate and affect even its most ardent supporters.
The outgoing lawbreakers will not be missed by me. Their current replacements—Peggy Flanagan, Abdul El-Sayed, Keisha Lance Bottoms, James Talarico, Deb Haaland, the most prominent among the new and more diverse class of clearly better leaders and better people—are wonderful and promising and promisingly wonderful. And it’s early yet (these victories are not even a week old) but my eyes are on the prize: the system remains the same and it needs to change. As I write this ICE is still on my street, Nolan Wells is still dead, Israel is still perpetrating a genocide with my money, Bears Ears National Monument is still eviscerated, and homelands are still being clawed open for nickel and oil and copper. And we still live in a nation that has been imposed on my tribal nation, and that imposer-nation is still a place where all such things are possible.
I have children. And I have students. And I have a big, wild, raucous family—some chosen and some inherited. I tell them all, every chance I get, that I was not put on this earth to console or flatter. As for my students, I tell them at the beginning of the term that we have sixteen weeks in which to read (hopefully!) ten books. And the point of those weeks and those books is not to master the information in those texts. Rather, we will work hard, we will read, we will talk, and we’ll use those books and that time to think and see differently. If literature has any power at all—and I think this is true of life as well—it is to help us to see and think differently about the world we share and the other humans in it. At the end of this short note I would like to implore our new leaders (and all of the old ones, too, for that matter) to act similarly.
Waves come and waves go. But use the years of service to which you have committed yourselves and the tools of your trade (nothing less than the nation to which you are pledged and the citizens that comprise it) to see and think differently. What, practically, could that mean? It could mean remaking the system (of laws, of thought, of practice, of culture) such that you not only vote to restore Bears Ears but change the way it is administered so that it can’t be re-smalled after you’re gone. It could mean teaching white boys to be more concerned about the killing of black boys than about supposed encroachments on their own freedom. It could mean remaking the government itself into a place where the ledger of profits from arms sales doesn’t rhyme with that of children’s deaths in Gaza, and indeed where that ledger doesn’t exist at all. Only then will the shoreline itself change, and with it the dreamy land beyond those dunes.