Lucy McBath for Congress in CD-06 will be the first black woman to represent Georgia in the House since Cynthia McKinney last held CD-04 and turned it over in 2007 to current incumbent Hank Johnson. She will also be only the third black woman to represent Georgia in the House, after Denise Majette and McKinney. 

Also, Maxine Waters of California will likely be the first woman and first African-American to chair the House Financial Services Committee. 

Some history: Yvonne Braithwaite Burke (who currently serves on the board of Amtrak) was the first black woman to chair a congressional committee, twice chairing the Select Committee on the House Beauty Shop in the 94th and 95th Congresses. The other black women to chair House committees were both in the 110th: Juanita Millender-McDonald, who chaired the House Administration Committee, and Stephanie Tubbs Jones, who chaired the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (now known as the Ethics Committee). 

So #AuntieMaxine will be the first to chair a higher-tier committee, one with impact outside of Congress. It’s not one of the four great committees – Appropriations, Ways and Means, Energy and Commerce, and Rules – but if you’re angry about “CREAM” and the excesses of the banking and financial industry, you want a regulator like Waters in charge of this committee. You want the bankers to be scared and to not get away with so much.

Here’s the plan. 

• There’s no going back for the DPG. Because Stacey Abrams has performed so well as a gubernatorial candidate, there’s no turning back on the sort of campaign she waged across the state. Next Dem guv prospect in 2022 must do more of what she did, cannot turn their back on PoC and women voters, and must hit more counties more frequently. The Abrams model mostly works in lieu of a Mid/western-style labor-driven model, and will define us for election cycles to come. 
• No one expected white women here to break with the GOP, even for a woman, and it was lopsidedly 70-20 for Kemp. Right now, I ascribe it to the value system of Colin Woodard’s “Deep South nation”. I need the white women and men who voted for Abrams or ran for office as the #Resistance to find a way over the coming years to help break that value system, by any means necessary, because it’s been a burden on our state and is the reason we can’t have nice things here like strong labor unions and a minimum wage increase. I ask you to help reform our state’s culture to feel more like the Mid/west than the Deep South. Start UU churches, start labor union locals, start more organizations to change your community and challenge authority. 
• Georgia Democrats must come together like never before, more frequently than ever before, conduct more business than ever before, in more hub cities than ever before, with more goals than ever before, with more action than ever before, and at an earlier time than ever before (preferably before the primary). Reform of the State Convention must be a top priority for anyone who wants to reform our party.

tl;dr: Organize, Organize, Organize.

We won some big things tonight. We don’t know if we lost Georgia, but Stacey Abrams overperformed compared to past Dem gubernatorial candidates since 2002. She needs to stay in this fight. Gillum also overperformed across Florida for a Democratic gubernatorial candidate. He needs to stay in this fight, too. Not our dream day here but we both have given the Southern GOP a run for their money tonight. 

I want to see if we break one or two GOP supermajorities in Atlanta tonight. #TeamValerie didn’t win tonight but we’re already planning for 2020. The Eagle’s Landing secession failed. And CD-06 and CD-07 look insanely close. 

But progressive victories abound all across the nation, and I’m not talking about the U.S. House. My favorite ballot initiatives right now – Amendment A in Colorado, Amendment 4 in Florida, Amendment 2 and Prop B in Missouri, Question 3 in Massachusetts – all won. Nonpartisan redistricting initiatives are winning in four states, Medicaid expansion is winning, marijuana is winning, automatic and same-day voter registration are winning, minimum wage increases are winning. And most of the North Carolina GOP’s ballot question power grabs went down in defeat. 

We also flipped several governorships tonight, giving us a somewhat stronger state-executive hand in redistricting for 2020. 

So tonight, we’ve made several progressive changes which will impact the future of the country in the longer term.

Call me a purist, but I feel like our Georgia Democrats are very conservative when it comes to small-d democratic participation. 

We talk about turnout and services for the poor, but do we take our state constitution seriously? Do we take the impact of the state constitution upon our lives seriously? 

Why are our elected Dems so cold to “Western-style” ballot initiatives? Why do we act like the fever which has ailed our state will suddenly break when we elect the Abrams slate to office?

When we take the governor’s mansion, I hope that the team we send to both the mansion and the Gold Dome take the need to amend our constitution and empower the democratic vote seriously. 

We cannot allow the Abrams slate to be Obama 2008, when the Dems won a majority of governorships and Congressional seats but was not sustained by 2010 and were cratered in a succession of elections which became more of a measure of Obama’s personality than of Democrats’ political will. 

We cannot be a flash in the pan, a blip in this state’s political history. Do it all, do it big, and fuck the haters. Otherwise, every #BlueWave promise we’ve made – Medicaid expansion, HOPE 2.0, gun law reform, redistricting reform – will have all been in vain by the next gubernatorial election in 2022. 

But then again, I have the creeping suspicion that I’m losing my mind with anxiety as I stay in this state. I’m openly glad and anxious that we are this close to winning, but I’m privately mad as hell that our Georgia Dems are so conservative in their political imagination.

Every time I see The Young Turks’ “Rebel HQ” (formerly known as “TYT Politics”) covering another Trump Rally, it dawns on me more and more that Trump supporters get as much free coverage as he does, in 2018, even by “progressive” broadcasters. 

Where are the progressive rallies? Where are the brief questions to progressive rally goers waiting in line to hear Stacey or Andrew or Beto speak?

While Trump supporters already have Fox News and Right Side Broadcasting to cover their rallies, progressives have…what? The UpTake? They’re based entirely in Minnesota, although they do a good job of covering 

Not even The Young Turks has done anywhere near a good job of covering progressive rallies. 

You’re so busy keeping an eye out for train wrecks and domestic terror that you don’t look out for hope and progress. Tired of it.

I voted Yes on 1, No on 2, Yes on 3, No on 4 and No on 5. 

I reiterate my gripe that so many states have the chance of improving their state for the better through citizen ballot initiatives, while we don’t. 

We’re out here in GA trying to get a blue wave flowing to the polls, and progressives are fighting to elect a firewall against the specter of a triumphant federal fascist apocalypse, while conservative states with tepid blue ponds like MO and AR are about to raise the minimum wage, expand Medicaid and restore voting rights to ex-cons against their conservative legislatures’ and governors’ wishes. 

Think about it: Conservative voters are voting for progressive-minted ballot initiatives AND conservative legislators/governors/congresscritters.

That’s been a joke to me for the last four years. But maybe it shouldn’t be, because during T3 training through the ASDC last year, I remember a former Democratic governor who spoke on the conference call talking about how voters don’t vote for candidates for their stances on issues, but do so based on their values. 

So maybe voters are voting on their values with the candidates, but they’re voting on their issues with the ballot questions.