Jessie Haas is the author of 49 books for children and adults, and a writer for Green Energy Times.
WESTMINSTER WEST-One of my favorite lines from New Mexican writer Gene Rhodes is this, about the old-time cowboy life.
"When we drive in a wild bunch, when we top off the boundin' bronco, it may look easy, but it's always a close thing. Even when we win we nearly lose; when we lose we nearly win. And that forms the stay-with-it-Bill-you're-doin'-well habit."
We nearly won. They nearly lost. This was a closer presidential margin than Bush versus Gore (49.9% vs. 48.4%), and it does not constitute a mandate.
Why was it so hard for them to win? Despite $150 million from Musk (I like to call him "Elonia") and untold other millions from the other billionaires, despite being a former president with incredible name recognition, despite being the sole focus of most media in this country for years, 45 barely eked out a win.
His micro-margin came from what it's polite to call "low-information voters." The more informed you were, the more you voted for Harris.
Forty-five's voters were the least informed - people who voted for abortion rights, but not for the person vigorously pursuing reproductive freedom in her campaign and her entire career. People who feared being drafted, yet somehow missed the part in Project 2025 where it talks about instituting a draft.
I could go on. He won the racial hatred vote, the misogyny vote, and the white-women-with-little-education vote. Even then, he barely squeaked this one out.
Many of 45's voters disagree with him on major issues, which is reflected in down-ballot results. Despite this being a bad map for them, Senate Democrats kept most of their endangered seats.
Democrats flipped many House seats as well, giving the next speaker the smallest majority in history. Derek Tran, Dave Min, George Whitesides, and Janelle Bynum, among others, will replace Republican incumbents.
Reproductive-rights laws were approved in 8 of 10 states; I include Florida, which recently began requiring a 60% threshold to pass a referendum. They got 57%.
North Carolina and Wisconsin, which have suffered for years under minority rule, gerrymandering, and voter suppression, notched historic wins for Democrats, breaking Republican supermajorities.
Kentucky voted the first African American woman to its Supreme Court, which now has a liberal majority.
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These things are just as true as the result at the top of the ticket, and they tell us something: Most Americans want reproductive freedom, economic justice, and a clean environment.
This country has a mean streak, no doubt about that, and no surprise, really. We started with some noble ideas of liberty and self-government that applied only to white men of a certain status. Expanding those ideas to include everyone has been the project of the past 250 years, and it has been painful and often lethal. None of this is easy.
But I am proud of President Biden, who has moved the economy back toward favoring the working person, and countless times has pulled off victories nobody thought he could.
I'm incredibly proud of Kamala Harris and her bold, last-minute candidacy. To be thrown into the race three months before the election, and to nearly win, is remarkable.
I'm proud to have volunteered, and I'm incredibly proud of the millions of other volunteers, mostly women.
We did our part. We nearly won.
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That being the case, it's crucial not to learn the wrong lesson from this election.
At the moment, we're heading down a familiar path - Republican overreach, Democratic underreach. The people who always shriek at the Democratic Party are shrieking. A bunch of us are curled up in a fetal position. (Me too, sometimes.)
A small minority are anointing 45's nominees as "experts" - the predatory billionaire, the Russian asset, the guy frothing about fluoride in the water (what movie does that remind you of?), the dog shooter, the credibly accused sex trafficker. Pretty sure none of this is a useful response.
I don't know what the exact lesson is. Probably it's complex, and we'll have to learn it under fire, while trying to get our country through to its 250th birthday.
But I know the crowd I want to hang out with: people like the hundreds of volunteers I gathered with the week after the election, 98% older women, who were helping people correct errors on their mail-in ballots so they would be counted.
I wouldn't say the mood was buoyant, but these folks showed up to scrounge those last votes that in some cases have put Democrats over the top.
I'm proud of them, too, and they give me hope.
According to Heather Cox Richardson, the 2026 Senate map looks as bad for Republicans as this one was for Democrats. It's not too early to start planning.
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