This article was produced by Capital & Main. It is co-published by Rolling Stone with permission.
The historic shellacking voters delivered to President Donald Trump and the GOP Tuesday already has many names — stinging rebuke, rejection, repudiation,
reset. Analysts’ consensus is that the blue wave was a response to what so many Americans could see and feel every day — soaring prices, the effects of a needless war, blatant corruption at the top, all led by an erratic and increasingly unpopular president who openly dismissed the concerns of average people. The message was: enough.
For anyone alarmed about the country’s Trump-led decline, the midterm results are beyond heartening, the best possible outcome. At the very least — and this is still huge — a Democratic takeover of Congress puts a serious check on the chaos. At most, it is a generational opportunity to change direction. But what remains undiscussed is what the election results will mean for the country’s most intractable and corrosive problem, what powered the rise of Trumpism 10 years ago and powers it still: racism.
Will Democrats insist the country re-embrace diversity? And if so, how? In the last two years, many norms have been degraded and discarded with astonishing speed, chief among them the ideal of racial equality that is at the heart of America itself. Undoing diversity, equity and inclusion programs was the first agenda item of Trump’s second term, because it was dear to his base, but more importantly, because he intuited that dividing the country racially would weaken it and make it vulnerable to his authoritarian ambitions.
In his overarching campaign against DEI, Trump crossed lines and broke norms in ways detrimental and devastating for people of color, from sweeping federal job cuts that disproportionately hit Black workers to the targeting of Haitian immigrants for deportation to the recklessness and violence of ICE. It was the contempt and anything-goes lawlessness white authorities perpetrated on Black people during a century of Jim Crow segregation, but with the whole country drawn in this time.
Were the midterms a repudiation of this? Dorian Warren, co-president of the civil rights organization Community Change, is cautiously optimistic they might be. When we spoke in 2016 Warren told me that the crisis of Trump’s election was racial, a white problem that only white people could ultimately resolve. While that hasn’t happened, he now thinks the midterm results are a mark of notable progress.
“Though there were multiple motivations for voters, this was a definitely repudiation of Trump and MAGA,” Warren said in an interview on Thursday. “Think about it — now we have five Black governors. Keisha Lance Bottoms is the first Black female governor in history . . . It’s astounding.”
Warren said that this could be the moment that the Democratic Party finally realizes the magnitude of debt it owes to Black voters, who turned out in force, especially across the South.
“It’s like we’re saying, ‘Enough! We saved your butt many times,’” said Warren. “‘Stop running away from race.’”
In other words, Democrats need to unapologetically own the diversity of their party, and of America itself.
While it isn’t yet clear how much antiracism factored into the Democrats’ sweeping victory, there is no doubt about the role of Black Americans in pushing back. Black voters turned out in big numbers and shifted markedly to the left compared to 2024. That is at least in part an angry reaction to the GOP’s bald attempts to wipe out Black political representation with gerrymandering that disappeared Black-majority districts after the Supreme Court’s latest gutting of the Voting Rights Act.
That was perhaps the sweetest victory of all on Tuesday: that not only was a racist strategy ineffective, it backfired. Remarkable as that was, it’s also consistent with the resolve that has long characterized Black history.
“It’s amazing how resilient we are,” said Warren. “They tried to shut us down, and we said, ‘No, we’re not doing this.’”
Even if voters’ repudiation of Trump and the Republicans wasn’t chiefly about their racism, it was about morality. Candidates from Texas Sen.-elect James Talarico to Kansas Sen.-elect Adam Hamilton spoke about restoring decency, humanity and neighborliness to politics and American life. Talarico is a Presbyterian seminarian and Hamilton a Methodist pastor, but you didn’t have to be Christian to call out the moral rot of the Trump era, or to hear the message.
While few white candidates actually talked about racism — Talarico has called Christian nationalism “fundamentally un-Christian” and racism “immoral and wrong” — Democrats have generally been reluctant to talk in detail about spirituality or race. The moment demands they do both.
But even if the Democratic Party leaders don’t step up, Warren believes people of color will.
“My first thought after the election was, ‘This is a rainbow coalition,’” he said. “People are calling the increase of Black and Latino Democratic voters ‘blacklash’ and ‘brownlash.’ But that’s a coalition.”
While the Latino voters’ shift away from Trump was crucial, Warren said Black voters remain the anchor of the Democratic coalition. The question is whether their status within the party will change from being “captured” — taken for granted — to being “anchors” involved with directing the party and its mission.
The answer has great implications for the larger existential question about whether the U.S. will finally decide to champion its diversity as a permanent political and cultural good. Even at this moment of uncertainty and inflection, those answers are probably not coming anytime soon.
That’s fine with Warren.
“As Black organizations and activists, we can’t wait around,” he said. “Now is the time we have to make demands and apply pressure. We have to get to work.”
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