Gobsmacked and delighted by election results

 I was as gobsmacked and delighted by last night’s election results as any person who detests Donald Trump and believes that the populist right is a threat to the American experiment. That sounds partisan, but the truth is that it is difficult to imagine how one can be a progressive without embracing the partisan opposition to Trump, MAGA, and their constituent movements in the red states. This includes our state—although I would no longer characterize it as red. 

Welcome, at least for a time, to Blue NC. (Hat tip to the writers James Protzman and Steve Harrison who ran a very fine blog of the same name in the Bush era, when hope for a Democratic North Carolina was beginning to dawn.) I’ll offer some numbered thoughts about the election, concluding with a touch of hope. 

1. This was a devastating rejection of Trump that will probably be recorded as a significant moment in American history. Democrats not only swept the traditional swing states, as Trump did to much acclaim in 2024. They cut deep into the heart of Red America, with victories in South Carolina, Texas, Kansas, and perhaps Mississippi—states that weren’t considered competitive even in 2008. Politically, Trump is finished. 

2. I was deeply moved and amazed by the changes we saw in the South. I am hopeful that Democratic victories in the “Old Confederacy” (a moniker I hope we will soon retire) reflected a willingness by voters in this region of all races to cross the color line and vote for the party of civil rights. There has always been a party of white supremacy in America, and there has always been a party of civil rights. The South nearly always preferred the white supremacists, but last night that ugly history ground to a stop. 

3. Consider Georgia. Georgia was one of the most brutal Jim Crow states. Jimmy Carter wrote about growing up in an atmosphere of crushing racism, which he eventually abjured in the process of becoming one of the great champions of human rights. Last night, Georgia elected a Black woman as governor. She was the first Black woman ever to hold that office in the South. 

4. And Mississippi. Mississippi! Democratic operatives in the Magnolia State are optimistic that Scott Colom, an African American district attorney, will defeat Cindy Hyde-Smith. 

Hyde-Smith is a cartoonish racist. She once was photographed wearing a Confederate uniform. And Booker T. Washington once said that Mississippi had “national supremacy in cotton and lynchings.” Donald Trump won at least 80% of the white vote there in 2024, according to Fox News exit polls. Even if Colom loses narrowly, he won a greater share of the white vote in Mississippi than any Democrat in many, many decades. 

5. North Carolina’s Jim Crow police state was less severe than Mississippi’s or Georgia’s—but it was solid and our state’s Dixiecrat leadership defended it as ardently as any segregationist from the Deep South. Last night, North Carolina very much did its part to contribute to the wave of racial progress we saw below the Mason-Dixon line. Anita Earls, a brilliant African American civil rights attorney, won a dominant victory over a white opponent who was closely tied to our white, conservative political establishment. Jesse Helms wept. 

6. Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling is looking characteristically intelligent today. Years ago, Tom noted in despair (which I shared) that it would take a twenty-point popular vote victory for Democrats to retake the North Carolina legislature. Cooper won by twenty points—and his coattails pulled Democrats over the finish line in the House and very nearly the Senate. The Senate may flip, though I am skeptical that it will. Tom is the Tar Heel prophet. 

7. Cooper disproved one of the criticisms he has occasionally received since getting elected governor in 2016. Some analysts, mostly on the right but also progressive sociologist Theda Skocpol, have faulted Cooper for lacking coattails. In other words, in 2016 and 2020 his campaign didn’t serve as a “firewall” for other Democrats like Jim Hunt and Mike Easley did in their eras. Cooper has achieved the greatest victory we have seen by a candidate at the top of the ticket since Hunt himself—and Cooper’s coattails were prodigious. 

8. I do not expect North Carolina Republicans to be gracious in defeat. They believed that they owned the legislature, that their voters were the only legitimate voters, and that Democrats deserved to spend a century in the wilderness. I highly doubt that most of them have changed their minds in the last 24 hours. I expect a brutal lame-duck session in which 

Republicans will do everything they can to limit the powers of the incoming Democratic leadership. 

How about Destin Hall? The young speaker’s majority lasted one term, and now he’s about to be demoted. Some hardliners in his caucus thought he was too kind, too conciliatory to the Democrats, and were rumored to be interested in having him replaced as Republican Leader. Representative Brendan Jones is more in tune with the populist histrionics his caucus relishes, and it wouldn’t surprise me to see Jones or someone else take a run at Hall’s position. 

10. Hope. Hope. Hope. I grew up in the South. I remember being taught straight-up Confederate apologia in middle school and seeing “flesh”-colored colored pencils, which were the color of my Caucasian flesh. But from time to time it has seemed like there was a willingness in this region to consider trying to build goodwill between white people and Black people and brown people, a touch of willingness to strive for atonement. Nothing can undo the harm that slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, and incarceration did to African Americans. But—even being mindful of my whiteness—I think there is a chance for us to construct a future that I had very recently thought was impossible