If money is the root of all evil, then evil was rebuked in the mid-term elections last week.  Money – the lack of it for millions of Americans, and too much of it in multimillion-dollar campaign contributions that tried to buy elections – seemed persuasive for many voters who crafted the seismic shift that, hopefully, will begin to move the pendulum back to some semblance of equilibrium. Costs, chaos, and corruption finally caught up with the Trump Administration and a complicit Republican Congress which utterly ceded its constitutional role as an equal branch of government.  

Votes still are being counted in some races; the Alaska Senate race may take another week or two to record votes from the far-flung areas of that state. As of press time, Democrats held the majority with at least 254 confirmed seats in the House of Representatives, and they won the majority in the Senate with at least 54 confirmed seats versus the 44 controlled by Republicans. In Virginia, Democrats flipped two House seats from red to blue, and the Commonwealth’s delegation now has eight Democrats and three Republicans, without the crazy gerrymandering that was attempted this spring. In fact, the mid-term effort to redraw district boundaries around the country resulted in massive defeats, exactly the opposite of what the Trump Administration supporters seeking to retain power had plotted.

The stunning results were in the South – Texas, South Carolina, and Mississippi – with Kansas and Ohio thrown in for good measure. When I started working on Capitol Hill, most of those states had Democrats representing them: Ralph Yarborough, Fritz Hollings, John Stennis, Frank Lausche and curmudgeonly Steven Young. They weren’t all sterling characters, but they wore the Democratic label. Those were the days when Democrats and Republicans would work together to enact legislation that responded to the rights and needs of the American electorate.   The Texas results moved the Lone Star State squarely into blue territory, including positions down to the local level. In South Carolina, what was supposed to be an easy win turned into Donald Trump’s worst nightmare when his hand-picked, extremely inexperienced, candidate Darline Graham was defeated by Dr. Annie Andrews by five points. Ohio rejected both its Republican Senator, about whose physique Trump waxed dreamily and weirdly, and the venal gubernatorial candidate. The mere idea that a Democrat might represent Mississippi in the Senate was on no one’s list. That the Democrat might be an African-American man was an even bigger stretch of the imagination, another welcome surprise of the mid-terms. The roster of officials elected last Tuesday looks much like the face of America – male, female, black, white, Latino, Muslim, LGBTQ.  

Regardless of the so-called blue tsunami, this country still is split, polarized, divided – whichever word works. The margins in most races were close; sometimes only a few hundred or a few thousand votes separated the victors from the vanquished. The challenge now will be governance, and that is much harder than campaigning. As much as the postmortem of the midterms might focus on what people voted against, what they voted for is worth remembering. Americans want a return to fair play, to elevate the human condition for everyone, native-born, immigrant or visitor, celebrating shared values, of which there are many, and a government that actually works for them rather than only a small number of super-rich cronies.  

In the last months of his life, former president Lyndon Johnson dictated some thoughts to his longtime friend, Horace Busby, for delivery at an event in Temple, Texas. It was September of 1972, a presidential election year, Vietnam was raging, and the nation was badly split.  Johnson told Busby: “This country isn’t over the hill. We aren’t on the skids. This is a just country. It’s a beautiful country. All this moaning and complaining isn’t true, isn’t right, and it isn’t leadership.” More than 50 years later, it looks like LBJ was right!