OP-ED: More ‘firsts’ than you can count, almost
What a country we have was confirmed once again on Election Day, and not just because the Republican president and the Republican Congress suffered a just rebuke by voters.
The Democratic triumph seems almost incidental to the fact that there were so many head-spinning firsts: the first Black woman governor of Georgia; the first openly gay U.S. senator (New Hampshire); the first Black U.S. senator from Mississippi since Reconstruction; the first American Indian governor (New Mexico); the first Native American woman senator (Minnesota); the first Muslim U.S. senator (Michigan); and the first two governors with Hispanic backgrounds (Texas and California).
Nor is this all.
Wisconsin, Nevada, and Florida voters elected their first Black governors, all men. Tennessee voters chose a woman chief executive, as did voters in Ohio and Minnesota.
For the first and only time in history, a woman will represent South Carolina in the U.S. Senate.
Illinois, the home state of Senate greats Everett Dirksen, Paul Douglass, and Stephen A. Douglas, will have two women in the upper chamber. One is African-American, the other has family ties to Thailand.
Of the 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, starting in January 2027 there will be 117 women, seven more than in the record-breaking outgoing Congress.
In the past nearly two years, the Trump administration has conducted a war on diversity. It looks like the attempt largely failed. The president and his gang overlooked one thing: the American voter remains as cantankerous and stubborn and independent-minded as ever.
Ironically enough, not just Democrats, but Republicans benefited from the voter mindset of diversity and inclusion, even though the various Democratic campaigns in the various states were carefully framed to avoid the losing issue of identity politics.
It came down to this: The winners and losers on Election Day 2026 were Americans. Born here, born elsewhere but later naturalized, male, female – they were Americans. Not to be naive or polyannaish about race, ethnicity, and gender, and their historic roles in setting the nation’s electoral outcomes, but this singularity is the heart of the matter.
Free and fair elections are the American way of change. Under unprecedented assault by President Trump, democracy not only survived, it once again saved the day. The straitjacket of one man hegemony was thrown off. The diverse and energetic and ever-changing outlook of the nation was authenticated at the ballot box.
Noted with pleasure: Voters finally end up ruling in America. It’s been this way a very long time. The historian Allan Nevins, writing of the Supreme Court’s Dred Scott decision in 1857 and adverse Northern reaction, which included the 1860 presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, noted, “The tribunal of final jurisdiction (regarding the future of slavery) was the American people massed at the polls.”
Another great historian, Gordon S. Wood, traced the development of democracy in America, which proceeded rapidly from the seeds planted by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the 1790s to its blossoming under Andrew Jackson in the 1820s.
In his book, “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” Wood quotes Jackson’s vice president (and later president in his own right), Martin Van Buren, who as much as any man moved the nation past Revolutionary-era political practices to the updated practice of party politics.
Van Buren, known as the “Little Magician” for his political wizardry, told Americans in 1820 that there was no looking to the past and the Founders, since the Founders, in Woods’ interpretation of Van Buren, “feared” democracy – feared rule by the masses.
American democracy, so Wood posited, was beholden to a vast cohort of “obscure people with workaday concerns … common people with their common interests … in making money and getting ahead.”
So it was, so it is. Despite its many drawbacks, “there is no denying the wonder” of American democracy with “its many earthly benefits,” its capacity for peacefully sidelining some while elevating others, and for its seeming unerring ability to respond to the moment.
The results aren’t always what we want, but this is American democracy, and there’s always next time, or the time after that. Three heartfelt cheers for rule by ordinary people.
Richard Robbins lives in Uniontown. He can be reached at dick.l.robbins@gmail.com.