Dear Friend,
Much of the coverage regarding Tuesday’s election results focused on California’s redistricting proposition, gubernatorial gains in New Jersey and Virginia, and Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City (where exit polling showed 76% of the mayor-elect’s supporters identified as religious Nones).
But today, I’d like to tell you about a different Election Day, far from any fanfare.
I spent thirteen hours at my local firehall on Tuesday, helping exactly 111 Iowans cast votes for city council and school board. It was a long and quiet day. No paparazzi, pollsters, or pundits to be found.
That’s how democracy happens sometimes: in races the media isn’t watching with candidates few people have heard of. These hyper-local, down-ballot races receive little attention, but have enormous impact.
It really matters, for instance, that voters across the country showed up and again rejected candidates backed by Moms For Liberty, the anti-LGBTQ+ group determined to inject religious dogma into public classrooms and libraries. By some accounts, every one of their 31 endorsees in contested races lost (though they’re busy boasting 100% of their uncontested picks prevailed).
For the students in those districts, these elections mean a lot: that their classrooms can remain places for inquiry, not indoctrination; that their library’s shelves can still be filled with diverse perspectives and relatable characters; that they are a little safer to discover who they are and then to be authentically so.
We all have in common that uneasy, messy endeavor of growing up and figuring out what we believe — or don’t. Kids and teens face enough challenges and pressures. They need and deserve to be supported by the adults around them, not stigmatized or suppressed. While Moms For Liberty talks an awful lot about “parents’ rights,” they aren’t concerned about violating the rights of students or even other parents. No, religious nationalists only care about their own power to dictate what everyone else will read, learn, and, ultimately, believe.
This week gave us reason to hope, but not to be complacent. We can’t become desensitized to still-emboldened Christian Nationalists’ calls to return to the Dark Ages, nor can we normalize a still-empowered federal government whose press releases read more like scripture than statesmanship.
After exit polling showed an overwhelming majority of young women (nearly 40% of whom are religiously unaffiliated) supported progressive candidates on Tuesday, “Repeal the 19th [Amendment]” began trending on X/Twitter. One far-right Christian influencer said we must “protect our nation from [women’s] suicidal empathy.”
At the same time, the White House website recently honored “the perfect example of Christ;” promised to defend the freedom “of every believer” and to ensure “Christian values maintain their rightful place at the center of American life.”
Ahead of next year’s Semiquincentennial, the Trump Administration has been eager to Christianize and contemporize American heroes, like John Adams. But it was Adams who warned “if the people cannot be sufficiently enlightened… to despise and resent… all pretences of right drawn from… divine missions,” we would be ruled by superstitious imposters and corrupt despots.
And he was adamant that our government was “contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses,” “without a pretence of miracle or mystery,” and that no founder “had any interview with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven.” Of course, they did so precisely to avoid a politician claiming divine right and to prevent any party, faction, or sect from forcing its views on the people.
Alas, here we are, in that moment the founders most feared. But so long as we are, it’s incumbent on each of us to keep insisting, as Adams did, that we be governed by reason and to keep showing up — not just at the raucous rallies, but to even the most uneventful elections, everywhere.
Because it’s there, on our public school boards, where we ensure students may be supported and sufficiently enlightened, and there, in your own polling location, where we keep democracy alive.
In solidarity,
Melina Cohen
Director of Strategic Communications & Policy Engagement
“It would be the height of folly to go back to the institutions of Woden and of Thor.”
John Adams, 1787, in the Preface to A Defence of the Constitutions of the Government of the United States of America
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