Here’s our latest podcast featuring Mainline’s founding editor, Aja Arnold, and Mainline editor, J, with a newsletter from Aja below. Music in this episode by NAG.
Hey subscribers,
Aja here, reporting back to you on the other side of the long-awaited presidential election. And… well, the results have people feeling and fearing an array of things. It’s been an interesting week connecting and reconnecting with people in community to put our heads together to try to imagine our futures.
[ Resource: Atlanta election results: 6 metro races head to runoffs. Atlanta Civic Circle. ]
I linked up with J, one of our editors at Mainline, and asked her if she’d join me on a special podcast where she and I could go deep in our analysis. In addition to that, it was also a space for us to finally release some things we had been holding leading up to the election campaign. Now that the results are in, we can begin to look back and conduct a post-mortem for the Democratic Party and examine not only why they lost … but why they came out with around 10 million less votes than they did in 2020.
Everyone has their own takes. We all want to make sense of the world that’s happening around us, and as journalists, that’s a bit of our task at hand. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of mis- and disinformation out there, such as claims that third party votes or Arab voters “handed” Trump the election. But, the data from this election is trying to tell us something; the data tells a story, and it’s a complex one.
It’s extremely interesting to me that some states showed majority support for pro-abortion referendums, while not voting Harris in. Other states, like Michigan, voted in Democratic nominees, but didn’t turn up for Harris.
As to why the Democrats lost by such steep numbers, I don’t believe it’s one answer.
If anything is clear to me, though, it’s that liberalism isn’t a solution to fascism. If anything, based on what we saw from the Harris campaign, liberalism would rather mimic and become more like fascism in attempts to “defeat” it. This sentiment feels extremely personal to me as an Atlanta resident and reporter. Between 2020 and now, in Atlanta, we’ve seen some of the most intense escalations of repression and authoritarian crackdowns on the Stop Cop City movement, such as the violent police killing of Tortuguita (who was nonbinary), the antidemocratic efforts of a majority Democrat city council, the sweeping RICO indictment on 61 individuals for their protest against Cop City, the city’s blocking of the referendum campaign (which was a historical democratic effort conducted by thousands of community members), the attacks on the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, numerous raids and continuous police harassment, 42 domestic terrorism charges … the list goes on.
All of this coming from a city controlled and led by Democrats, with the seal of the State GOP’s approval.
I think the closer you get to the fight, whether as a reporter, organizer, or community member, it becomes more and more difficult to see the differences between the two major parties in the U.S. And of course, we can’t erase Palestine from the equation when we consider the outcome of these results; and any report that fails to acknowledge it is failing to tell the whole story. We woke up to a reality last Wednesday that told us that Democrats can’t actually run an election on genocide and win. I feared that if they did, that would be a place we, and our collective humanity, couldn’t come back from.
But Trump? We’ve survived him before and we will again. This isn’t a time for despair. It’s a time to ask questions, connect with people in your communities, and prepare for the work ahead—including the Atlanta City Council races next year. The rubber will meet the road even more then than we’re feeling it now. You can expect more coverage from us on the local races next year.
[ On a personal note, to shed light on why we didn’t produce coverage for the elections this year: I sustained a traumatic brain injury from a car accident this year that had me out for about six months. So our reporting was sparse, and our funds became rather depleted. But we are bouncing back and doing our best to catch up. As for my health, I’m now fully recovered, which I’m extremely grateful for. ]
Join some of our community at Park Avenue Baptist Church this Saturday from 12 p.m. to 3 p.m. to get connected and learn more.
Don’t give up.
We’re not.
— Aja Arnold, Mainline, Founding Editor
