Our Power Goes Beyond the Ballot Box

For the past year we have been strapped into a seemingly never-ending roller coaster of vicious propaganda, vitriol, racism, sexism, queerphobia, and a smug complacency in the face of a bloody genocide. 

Election 2024 brought the lowest of lows—Donald Trump’s wildest, most fascist fantasies manifesting in a parade of hate—and the highest highs—the late-breaking entry of a multiracial woman of color who snagged the Democratic Party’s nomination. Vice President Kamala Harris launched a record-breaking billion-dollar campaign amid a tidal wave of young women progressives spurred by attacks on their bodily autonomy. 

Over and over, we were told this was the most important election of our lifetimes. We, the people, were asked to choose between an apologist for genocide, the specter of fascist insurrection, or a third-party option that had no serious prospects for victory.

Along the way to winning the election, Trump and his allies reduced so many of us to objects, to evildoers, to garbage, to the enemy. If we made it through these past months, it was with a sense of nervous hope that the insults and attacks had an expiration date. If we could just make it to Nov. 6, we could deal with the trauma, heal, and look forward to holding the centrist establishment accountable. 

Along the way to losing the election, Harris and her backers flirted with A-list celebrities and anti-Trump Republicans, repeatedly shunned Palestinians fighting for their rights, pushed back against demands to hold Israel accountable for genocide, and wrapped it all up with an appearance on Saturday Night Live. 

With both candidates’ approaches top of mind, I began monitoring election results on Nov. 5, feeling—to quote one woman I overheard say to another that morning—“nauseously optimistic.” As I anxiously monitored the New York Times’ election needle, coaxing it toward the blue-tinged left, I found myself reliving the trauma of Election 2016, when that same needle veered suddenly to the red-hued right. 

So, here we are again, waking up to a new chapter of the same nightmare we experienced from 2016 to 2020. Now, as we are still reeling from many months of abuse, we face the prospect of four more years of it. 

We need to understand what has happened and how to move from here. But we also need to take a moment to mourn—for ourselves; for our fellow Americans and especially immigrants; for our Black, Brown and queer sisters, brothers, and kinfolk; for our children’s imperiled future; and for our country’s fate. 

In the coming months, we’re going to read reams of analyses about why Harris lost the  election: the insurmountable polarization our country is experiencing, third-party candidates’ “spoiler” effects, the blind spots and failures of the Harris campaign, political amnesia, whether the nation is ready to elect a woman, and how Trump’s voters will regret supporting a demagogue. 

But maybe it’s not even that complicated. 

“In so many ways our leaders have failed us, and a lot of people are really struggling,” immigrant rights organizer and author Silky Shah said on a recent episode of my show, YES! Presents: Rising Up With Sonali. “And the easy thing that happens is blaming immigrant communities when, in fact, obviously we should be blaming those who have put in these policies that aren’t helping communities on the whole.”

Most Americans agree on their basic needs: good jobs and unions, affordable housing, and so on. They also don’t trust the government. Indeed, some of those who picked Trump might have done so because he’s promised to burn it all down, while others might be hopelessly invested in racist, misogynist, queerphobic, anti-immigrant hate—or both. Together they number more than 71 million Americans, or 51% of the electorate, with increased turnout of Latino men, younger voters, and first-time voters. 

The rest of us—about 67 million—who picked Harris, either did so holding our nose to keep Trump away from the levers of power, or genuinely believed she was a force for good. (It is this latter group that is probably most shocked and perplexed by the election results). 

Instead of a shift toward policies that prioritize collective care—which could unite Americans—what we got from the two major-party political candidates were false narratives that largely fell into two camps: Trump painted the nation as a dystopian quagmire that only a strongman like him could fix, while Harris’ campaign was based on the idea that we must preserve the booming economy she and incumbent President Joe Biden ushered in. 

But in truth, both parties have moved dramatically rightward. According to investigative journalist and YES! contributor Arun Gupta, “One is a hard-right Republican party known as the Democrats, and the other is a fascist party, a MAGA party known as the Republicans.” 

Shah concurred, saying she found it “actually really surreal to see how far to the right things have moved and how much Democrats aren’t even really advocating for immigrants in the way that they were before.”

Gupta attended Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally in New York City that made headlines for its speakers’ hateful comments. He saw a different reality than the one being reported in corporate media outlets. “You had lots of anti-Palestinian, anti-immigrant bombast. But that is only half the equation,” he said, a week before the election. “What’s really going on at these rallies … is love and hate.”

He concluded that Trump supporters are “there as much out of hate as they are out of love. And they go there because these rallies make them feel good about themselves. They make them feel good about the country, that they’re part of a movement.”

What if we all seek a love-based movement that prioritizes us over the interests of elites? What if Trump’s election is a horrific manifestation of a nation cutting off its nose to spite its face? There are no easy answers to these questions, but since we have failed to stave off extremist hate from occupying the highest rungs of power, we know the most vulnerable among us will likely pay a heavy price in the coming years. The rest of us can’t give up. 

“Our power and our potential actually goes beyond the ballot box,” says Khury Petersen-Smith, co-director of the New Internationalism Project at the Institute for Policy Studies. “We need to keep on pushing on all of those levers [of power], regardless of who wins, no matter what day—Election Day, the day after, Inauguration Day, the day after.”

We will—we must—get through this time by reminding ourselves that most of us want the same things: safety, security, stability, and—dare I say it?—love. But how we get there as a nation is a conundrum we must continue grappling with.