We're NOT Doomed March 4, 2026
I’m flipping the script today. I wanna start with the reasons We’re NOT Doomed.
Roy Cooper is the Democratic Nominee for the North Carolina Senate seat. We knew that, that’s not news.
What IS news is that, with >95% in, 824,798 voters voted in the Democratic primary, while only 625,667 voted in the Republican primary. No matter how few or how many people voted for Roy Cooper, he was winning the Democratic nomination, and yet people came out anyway.
We CAN flip this Senate seat! That doesn’t mean we aren’t going to fight or it won’t be work, but it’s doable.
We FLIPPED Arkansas State House District 70. Alex Holladay is Rep elect. He ran in 2024, getting 49%, and this time he got 57.4% that is an 18.4% overperformance!
There was SO MUCH fuckery in Texas (more on that in a moment), but even with that, 2,158,010 people voted in the Republican primary, and 2,309,617 voted in the Democratic primary.
WE HAD 200K MORE VOTERS THAN REPUBLICANS
EVEN THOUGH so many Dems, especially Black voters, were kept from voting at all or had to go to upwards of FOUR polling places before actually being able to cast their ballot.
I like to call Texas a gray state. We can’t know how blue or red it is because there’s so much gerrymandering and so much voter suppression, but with these numbers? Texas GOTV efforts should be so fucking proud. Hopefully we can replicate whatever they did across the country.
Okay, remember all those reasons why We’re NOT Doomed in your head and your heart, cause the next part isn’t fun. What happened in Texas was really fucking scary.
Let’s start with an important fact: the exact way the Republicans suppressed the vote cannot happen in the general. It was a primary specific tactic and it cannot be repeated in a general election.
That doesn’t mean they won’t find other ways, but THAT way is not a concern AND this wasn’t last minute either, so it can’t come out of nowhere in other states
But let’s go back to the beginning.
As of December 9, Republicans wanted to hand count ballots. So everyone had to hand count ballots. And Republicans wanted to switch from county wide polling places to precinct based, so everyone switched to precinct based. The local Dem party already knew this was gonna be a problem.
Dallas County Chairman Kardal Coleman told Vote Beat
Not just for Democratic voters, but this is going to adversely affect every voter who may show up in the wrong location. It’s already causing chaos and confusion.
Basically, Dallas Dems could vote anywhere in the county, but this time there was only one location they could vote at, and it wasn’t even guaranteed to be nearby.
Fast forward to December 30 and Republicans abandon their plan to hand count ballots. Something tells me they weren’t ever planning on doing it in the first place, but anything to make things harder for Democrats and Black voters to make them think they actually were.
Now, don’t blame Dallas Dems. They did the best they could.
The Democrats and Republicans can run their primaries however they want, separately. Except for county-wide voting vs precinct voting. That’s joint. And Republicans said it was happening, so it didn’t really matter what the Democrats wanted.
As a result, the parties literally had separate voting locations in every single precinct. And they had to find, staff and fully fund every single one of them themselves. Not to mention making sure all these people who have been voting around the county, for a while now, knew that this primary was going to be different.
Just based on the amount of people who voted in the Dem primary ALONE, not to mention those who couldn’t vote because of this mess, that’s well over 2 million people the Dem party was tasked with explaining the new system to.
Surprise surprise, that wasn’t possible.
So that’s part one of this fuckery.
Part two is what happened night of.
Predictably, many Dems went to the wrong location, some 3-4 TIMES. AND so many people were confused that the website telling them where their precinct was literally crashed. So the Dallas County Dems went to a district court and got them extended from 7 till 9. A whole two hour increase.
That’s when AG and Senate Candidate Ken Paxton got involved and went directly to the Texas Supreme Court, who reversed the lower court decision, but only after those votes had started to be cast. So there’s really no way to know which voters were already in line by 7pm and which voters came after.
But, the confusion is the point.
The goal of voter suppression isn’t to throw out votes as much as it is to get people to think voting is a waste of time and not even bother in the future.
These votes might very well be counted, but the whole mess undermined trust in the system, and some people are just not gonna vote in November as a result.
But we can’t think like that, because that is letting them win. We have to show up every single time. We have incredible lawyers who are working on the legal aspect of this. It is our job to keep showing up.
Because they focus these attacks on election day, if there is any way for you to vote early, do it. As long as we have early in person voting, that is the BEST way to do so.
But also spread the word about voter suppression. Don’t stop talking about it. The Republicans want to stop Black voters from having their voice heard. That was the goal of this whole situation. Do not leave them out of this conversation or ignore what happened in Dallas.
There should not be a single conversation about voting, right now, that doesn’t include the realities of voter suppression and voter disenfranchisement. That is the main story right now.
But the other story, we have the votes. Despite the fuckery, we have the votes, and that’s HUGE.
Even with everything that happened, your vote is STILL your superpower, but ONLY when you use it!
