My twin brother is a tough guy! He fishes and climbs and skis and he wears baseball caps. He texts with abbreviations and has a separate climbing Instagram account. He refers to his skiing as “sending.” He has never been interested in politics, the Ezra Klein show, or feminist theory, and was a frequent eye-roller during my middle school feminist rants. He was uninterested in the nobility of the elite East Coast, and after high school escaped, committing to Montana State University vanishing into the mountains and rivers. And through his choice to escape the East Coast blue bubble, this past election he found himself in a district which held host to a very important Senate race—a rare Montana democratic Senator was challenged by a highly conservative republican.
In the days leading up to the election, my mother and I flooded the family group chat with reminders to vote and Ezra Klein links and blue emojis, to no response from my cool brother. But on Tuesday night, he called my mom.
And he told her that he had stood in line for 6 hours and 45 minutes in the biting Montana snow to cast his vote for the Democrat.
I cried when I found this out, curled up in my bed on Wednesday morning. My brother had really surprised me. It was one of the many surprises of this election—although perhaps for most people, not the most shocking. The night produced a Republican victory across the map, with Trump sweeping swing states, the popular vote, and the GOP taking the Senate. After weeks of unprecedented political changes and swings, confused polls and whirlwind campaigning, the dust settled on a very red America.
As we peel back over these scarlet results, I think it’s worth mentioning how strange it was to vote in this election. I felt this so profoundly as I stepped into the voting booth of my Connecticut town’s elementary school on Tuesday. So many of us have come of age in the world of Trumpian politics, laced with fever-pitch news alerts and huge red flags and heavy deep sighs. We’ve watched all this unfold for the past eight years from classrooms and living rooms. Maybe we’ve felt the sting of a Trump policy or cruel remark. Maybe we’ve gone to a march or watched a parent vote, maybe we’ve followed the news. But we’ve never been a part of democratic process where Trump and Clinton and all the chaos seemed to live—until this year. The few ink marks etched onto the ballot was an entry into that dizzying world.
This entry was harsh and quick: we had a few hours to celebrate with our “I Voted” stickers before the results came crashing down on us. But in those few hours, my brother camped out in the cold, because something mattered to him—the rocks and snow and rivers and earth that he loves, his mother and sister, something else entirely perhaps—and voted for them. I walked proudly into a Connecticut elementary school gym and filled in a ballot, double and triple checking it. The immigration non-profit I worked for this summer posted images of first-time voters, people proudly naturalized this year, grinning with “I Voted” stickers on their chests, a quiet and unending testament to their battle towards safety and citizenship and civic commitment.
These tiny pockets of democratic experiences and effort were visible on our campus as well. I watched so many of our classmates give up weekends to organize, fundraise, and knock on hundreds of doors in Pennsylvania. On election night itself, the Wes for Harris watch party was buzzing with a din of phone-bankers, students who had put aside their homework and anxieties and picked up the phone to give a few last moments of work towards a version of this country they are proud of.
And then, Wednesday morning, all of these people and hours and experiences melted away into a dizzy blur of New York Times infographics and red-splotched maps and stats. There were only a few short hours where those dots on the map and percentages were people, people with different stories and lives. Suddenly, those people and their votes and their reasons for voting became nothing but a close race, a lost race.
This is not an article asking anyone to be hopeful, or to forgive our nation. Those election maps and stats showed many of us a version of this nation that makes our blood run cold. There is fear and hatred and blame to be shared, passed towards our leadership and fellow citizens. There were so many that let us down on Tuesday, Nov. 5.
But it is a plea to remember those few hours on Tuesday, those few days leading up to it. The work our classmates put into canvassing. The long process of gaining citizenship, the patriotism and strength it took to vote for the first time. The cold Montana wind and the six hours of my brother’s quiet insistence to make himself heard.
And that means for however disillusioned we might feel about our fellow citizens, our party, our political infrastructure—take a moment to remember the people in our homes and communities who didn’t let us down. Find comfort in the cool, tough brothers who took their sisters’ advice, the students who skipped fun weekends to canvas, new citizens’ commitment to this complicated country. And find comfort in the fact that whatever fight comes next, whatever we must do, these family members and community members and classmates will be here with us, with resilience and commitment and care.
And these people and these experiences can be even more than snippets of hope or optimism to provide us comfort. They can be reminders that the people in our communities, in our lives, in our nation were willing to fight for something. That’s what the canvassing and voting meant the whole time—there are people, sometimes people we don’t expect, who care enough to stick it out for six hours. That effort and care didn’t win the election. It didn’t protect many of the democratic and social infrastructure we fear for, it didn’t protect our friends and neighbors. But it also didn’t go away. It serves as an affirmation of the people in our lives everyday who were willing to show up for us, even when we didn’t expect it—and it serves as a promise they will keep showing up, no matter how cold it gets.
Julia Schroers is a member of the class of 2027 and can be reached at jschroers@wesleyan.edu.
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