The End of the Trump Era: The Democratic Sweep of the Midterm Elections
Election
Originally published by The Elephant — Read the original article →
Early this morning, I was woken up by a text from my daughter in Atlanta, nine hours behind Sharjah, UAE, where I’m currently located. Dems are leading, she exclaimed. Can you chat for a quick second? Before I called her, she sent another text, saying, it’s breaking news: Keisha Lance Bottoms is the projected winner as Governor of Georgia. My daughter, who has lived in Atlanta since she went to university there in the early 2000s, was ecstatic beyond measure.
Our celebratory chatter woke up my wife, a political scientist and keen observer of American politics. The ancestors must be smiling, she proclaimed with giddy excitement. We switched on the television and followed the elections on American stations we had access to, including CNN International and Bloomberg, while simultaneously perusing newspapers including The New York Times and The Guardian.
The more we talked and thought about the unfolding election results, I couldn’t help and filtering the elections through Africanist and global lenses, the clearer it became that this stunning blue wave, which races had been predicting, represented political triumph in five dimensions, what I would the 5Ds: democrats, democracy, diversity, demography, and development.
