Five years ago, when my mother was in her late eighties, she volunteered for Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign. Most days, she drove twenty minutes to an office park in Virginia Beach and made phone calls for four or five hours at a stretch. Hillary was her candidate—not because she was a woman on track to make history (my mother isn’t sentimental that way) but because years before, when Clinton was considering a run for the Senate, my mother heard her speak at a fund-raising dinner and was impressed by her intelligence, humor, and, yes, warmth. My husband, a 2016 Bernie surrogate, could not persuade her to change her allegiance. She was “all in for Hillary.”
The 2016 campaign marked a turning point for my mother: it was the first in decades in which she did not go door to door, urging strangers to vote for whichever candidate she happened to be supporting. (One year, that candidate was my uncle, a progressive Democrat, who was running a quixotic campaign for Congress in a conservative Republican district in New York. Needless to say, he lost.) She said she was finally too old to be a door knocker, a task that she was very good at because, over the years, she had acquired the ability to talk to anyone, anywhere. Still, her biggest campaign triumph was pulling up at a rally in suburban Connecticut, where we lived at the time, with a huge Jimmy Carter sign atop her Oldsmobile 88, and getting a shout-out from the actor Paul Newman. This was in 1976. It probably kept her campaigning for the next forty years.
Both my parents were dyed-in-the-wool Democrats, members of a local activist group pushing for reforms in the Party, but they recognized that American democracy did not work without a loyal opposition, and they sometimes voted for Republicans. The polarization that now characterizes our shared political life had not yet taken hold, and the concept of a moderate Republican was not anathema to either the Republican Party or liberal Democrats. Our corner of Connecticut was represented—and represented well—by two such Republicans, Lowell Weicker, in the Senate, and Stewart McKinney, in the House. They, and their fellow-travellers, had some gravitational pull in their party, and that was a good thing.
When I turned eighteen, I registered to vote as a Democrat. Then I wrote to Representative McKinney and told him I’d done that, and asked for a summer job. He brought me on as an assistant to his press secretary. And, although that experience cured me of any desire to work on the Hill, it was a hands-on education in the political give-and-take necessary to meet the needs of constituents. Today, as we watch Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s victory and encourage spurious claims of voter fraud; when we hear reports that McConnell, if he retains his leadership position, will block Biden’s Cabinet appointees if he deems them too radical; and when only four sitting Republican senators have reached across the aisle to congratulate the President-elect, we are seeing irrefutable evidence that McConnell’s Republican Party has little interest in governing. It is difficult to see how a two-party system works when the animating ideology of one of them is nihilism. Actually, that’s not true. We have empirical evidence from the past four years: it works nominally, but that is all. Unfortunately, democratic norms are not automatically revived by the election of a Democratic President, though it’s a start.
On November 8, 2016, my mother went to the Clinton campaign office for her last shift. The Times she read that day with her morning coffee calculated that Hillary had an eighty-five-per-cent chance of winning the Presidency. (The paper likened her chance of losing to an N.F.L. kicker missing a thirty-seven-yard field goal.) Everyone in the office was giddy, my mother told me when she got home that afternoon. The young people she’d worked alongside for months urged her to come back that evening for a watch party and victory celebration. “I’m not going,” she said. “He’s going to win.” At the time, I thought that she was hedging her bets so as not to jinx it. But, for months, she’d been telling me that most of the young and middle-aged women she was calling (and who she assumed were white) told her that they were voting for Trump, or at least that they would not be voting for Clinton. “I don’t get it,” she often said, but, on the night that those sentiments mattered, she did get it. She stayed home, and watched Trump glide into office.
My mother is a first-generation American. Both her parents came to this country from Europe, at the turn of the last century. She was born a year before the Great Depression and came of age during the Second World War. Hers was the generation that planted victory gardens, bought war bonds, and sent loved ones abroad to fight Nazism and fascism. They had a more visceral understanding of what was at stake in 2020 than many of us did. They had seen men like Trump before. The idea that their lives would be bookended by racist, authoritarian strongmen was almost unbearable. (Though Trump still carried seniors nationally, a post-election report from the Brookings Institution notes that there was “less Republican support among older segments of the population” than in 2016; among white people aged forty-five to sixty-four, support for Trump fell nine percentage points from 2016. There were no exit polls of nonagenarians, as far as I can tell.)
The pandemic—and Trump’s politicization of public health—meant that we could not be with my mother to celebrate her birthday, and that she could not attend her granddaughter’s wedding. Her book group went on hiatus, her mah-jongg crew was sidelined, and the municipal gym where she walked the track most mornings shut down. The isolation has been extreme, but she’s not complaining, nor are her friends. I suspect that their youth prepared them for behaving in the public interest. Their generation may be the last with a lived experience of comity, though the mutual-aid groups spawned by the pandemic may yet turn out to be instructive to the rest of us. When I posted, on Twitter, that my ninety-two-year-old mother had waited two hours to cast a ballot during Virginia’s early voting, the tweet received more than forty-four thousand likes. The overriding comments were of thanks.
Many people cast this election as the most consequential of their lives. They said that they were voting for the future—for their children and grandchildren, for the health of the planet, for the survival of democracy. But, for those of us with relatives and friends of a certain age, we were also voting for them.
