Back in February 2025, we were told the resistance had to be different this time…
We can’t swing at every pitch, they said.
We have to choose our battles, they said.
We can’t overreact to everything Donald Trump and Elon Musk are doing, they said.
Well fuck that and fuck them. We said we needed to resist it all. We needed to fight it all. And we needed to start right fucking now.
Well, Sexy Patriots, it’s been 21 months. It’s Election Day. And in a little while the first polls start closing. And guess what? The people who were told to sit down and shut up didn’t. They fought every fight. They packed the town halls. They filled the streets. They voted early in numbers this country has never seen in a midterm, and today they finished the job.
We left it all on the field. Every single one of y’all did.
So while we wait for the first results to come in, we wanna take a minute to remember why we did it.
We voted because America is under attack from within. We said it then and it’s still true now. Trump and Musk spent 2025 decimating every level of our government while trying to move us to a Soviet-style system of oligarchy, where the rich get richer and everyone else is left to fend for themselves.
Remember DOGE? Musk took a chainsaw to agencies that keep Americans alive, got bored like the giant man-child he is, and walked out in May 2025. He threw a tantrum, called the President’s big bill a disaster, talked about starting his own party, and then crawled right back. By last fall, the administration’s own personnel chief was telling reporters that DOGE didn’t even exist anymore as a central agency. The wreckage they left behind sure as hell does.
And then Musk became the single largest individual donor of this midterm, pouring more than $350 million into electing Republicans. The richest man on Earth tried to buy Congress so he’d never have to answer for what he did. We voted to tell him Congress ain’t for sale.
The chaos they created has a body count, and more people will die if we hand them two more years of total control. If this wasn’t a time for total resistance, then when the hell was it?
We voted because when we first wrote “Fight ALL the fights,” the leadership of the Democratic Party had reacted to the election by surrendering. They told us how much they would work with Trump to help the country. Some Democrats even endorsed Musk’s unconstitutional DOGE bullshit, apparently hoping to get on his good side by kissing his ass and selling us out.
Members like John Fetterman had the audacity to tell us to “chill out,” shitting on the fears and anger of the people who sent his spoiled rotten punk ass to Washington and stood by him when he had a stroke and his new friends were rooting for his death.
Meanwhile, real fighters like AOC were passed over for leadership positions, and elected Democrats seemed ready to bail Republicans out yet again in the middle of a goddamn crime spree.
What were we doing?!
Here’s what the “chill out” crowd got wrong. You can’t tell millions of pissed-off Americans to calm down and expect them to listen. They didn’t wait for permission from Washington. They organized. They marched. They ran for office. They knocked doors. And today they voted.
We’ll concede that the 2024 losses were gutting. Like most people who follow politics, we spent months trying to come to terms with what we learned about our fellow Americans. It forced some reflection and some new calculations about how to win elections in the United States. We are not the country we hoped we were, and that’s unacceptable.
But we were never going to just throw up our hands and say oh well. If anything, it made us madder and made us want to fight harder. Because the alternative was to decide which parts of Trumpism we’re ok with. And the answer is still none. Not one goddamn bit of it. It is all evil. It is all corrupt. It is all anti-American.
We also stopped trying to play 3D chess against a meatheaded moron who just likes to break shit. We stopped trying to outsmart the guy who just took a shit on the carpet and started shoving his fucking face in it. No more quoting Ben Franklin or other high-minded shit that only 37 Americans understand. No more votes for Trump nominees. No more listening to your buddies at MSNBC (sorry, MS NOW) and the New York Times. We got off our high horses and went guerilla.
The lesson of 2024 was that the American people don’t give a damn about white papers. They want theater, drama, heroes and villains. They want pro wrestling, and we kept sending debate club champions to get body-slammed. So over the last 21 months, the people stopped waiting for the debate club. They climbed into the ring themselves.
A week after we wrote that first piece, we told you the resistance was alive and well and angry as hell. Chris Kluwe was getting arrested for civil disobedience. Janet Mills was telling Trump “see you in court.” Regular people were booing the shit out of Republicans at town halls in Georgia and Wisconsin. We said we were beaten in November, but we were not defeated.
Now look at what y’all did. In every corner of this country, people got fired up and proved it with ballots.
More than 46 million Americans had voted early by October 30, topping the 45.9 million who voted early in the entire 2022 midterm. By midday today, Michael McDonald at the University of Florida Election Lab had the early vote past 60 million. That’s a midterm record, and it ain’t close.
More than 7.7 million Texans, 40.5% of registered voters, voted early and blew past the modern midterm record set in 2018. Harris, Dallas and Tarrant counties all ran ahead of past midterms.
Minnesota cast 886,427 early ballots through Sunday, smashing the 2022 record of 687,062. This is the state that took to the streets this winter after Renée Good and Alex Pretti were killed. Minnesotans didn’t forget.
Michigan had its first midterm ever with statewide in-person early voting, and one-third of active registered voters had already voted before polls opened this morning. Maine’s early vote was up 44%, with Susan Collins’s seat on the line. And Jon Ossoff says Georgia saw record-breaking youth turnout for a midterm. Young people, we love y’all.
And how about Michigan? We spent the final week watching Haley Stevens do everything she could to derail Abdul El-Sayed and hand Trump another rubber-stamp vote in the Senate. Guess what, Haley? It backfired. Voters clapped back to protect democracy in a way that is honestly remarkable. Take Virginia Jackson in Detroit. She was planning to vote for Mike Rogers. Then Haley Stevens did what she did and changed her mind right back to Abdul. Fuck off, Haley. Watch this:
And it’s not just this year. In January, Democrat Taylor Rehmet won a Texas state Senate special in Tarrant County by 14 points. In a district Trump carried by 17! The people who were told to chill out have been winning, ya know.
Even the Republicans saw it coming. James Comer went on TV and whined that a lot more Democrats were voting than usual and a lot fewer Republicans, and admitted they have a turnout problem. LOL. Damn right you do, Comer.
We’re not stupid. Early votes tell you who showed up, not who they voted for, and Republicans banked ballots too. We won’t know what all of this adds up to until the counting is done. But like McDonald put it today, the canary is still singing.
And we have to give a huge shout to everyone behind No Kings: Vote Early.
On Saturday, October 17, the No Kings movement did something brilliant. For its fourth national day of action, it didn’t just march. It turned roughly 2,500 events across the country into a get-out-the-vote machine under a slogan that says it all: Too Big to Rig.
The idea was simple. In the states where early voting had already started, show up, rally, then go vote. Everywhere else, help people check their registration, make a plan and get ready. Our neighbors gathered at Memorial Circle in Arlington and near the Lincoln Memorial in DC. They turned out in Portland, Maine, in Atlanta and in Manhattan. In Kansas City, the crowd at Mill Creek Park cheered every single person who slid a ballot into the early voting box. Americans abroad joined in under the No Tyrants: Vote Early banner.
That is how you do it. That is how you turn anger into power.
So to every one of y’all, every Indivisible chapter and 50501 organizer, every volunteer who hosted an event in a church basement or a city park, every marshal, every sign-maker, every person who handed out registration info and every person who brought a friend: thank you. You took a protest movement and made it an activation tool. Look at those early vote numbers. You helped build them. Indivisible says early voting jumped 51% in areas that hosted a No Kings event. And that’s with Meta knocking the No Kings Instagram offline on the big day. Love y’all.
Every seat in the House was on the ballot today. So were 35 Senate seats and 36 governors’ mansions. Take back even one chamber of Congress and the rubber stamp is gone. That means subpoenas. That means oversight. That means Musk and the DOGE crew finally answering questions under oath instead of tweeting through it. That means a check on a man who thinks he’s a king.
That’s what saving democracy actually looks like. It’s not a speech. It’s not a Ben Franklin quote. It’s millions of y’all standing in line with a ballot in your hand.
In February 2025 we wrote that we might still fail. That we might still get things wrong. That we might not ever win another election. At least if we fought, we said, we could lose with some self-respect and maybe slow down our enemies in the process.
Well, we fought. You fought. We swung at every pitch. We fought every battle. We overreacted to everything Trump and Musk did, because all of it deserved it. We don’t know what’s going to happen tonight, and we’re not idiots. We’re nervous as hell. But we know we’re on the right side with the right people, and we are really goddamn grateful for that.
And if you’re still in line when your polls close, stay in line. You’ve got the right to vote. And if somebody in your life still hasn’t voted, call them right now and get them there before the polls close.
And remember, we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Tonight we watch the results. Tomorrow we keep fighting. Because the fights aren’t stopping after today. Senate Republicans already want their first vote back after the election to be on a so-called permitting reform bill that critics warn would let the Trump administration rubber-stamp new data centers and fossil fuel projects and make those approvals nearly impossible to undo. And that’s just the first one. There will be worse. We need to be ready to fight that shit too.
We had nothing left to lose, so we acted like it. We left it all on the field. Now let’s see what we won.
Fight ALL the fights. LOVE Y’ALL!!!
Adam
A friend and I went to the No Kings rally in Portland, Maine, and it was terrific. There were people of all ages, and the signs were excellent. My favorites were "The only orange monarch I want" with a huge monarch butterfly; "VOTE—It's easier than hiding with your family in the attic"; and "I'm a better Christian than any Trumper—and I'm an atheist." I voted the first hour of early voting on October 5, gave more money than I could really afford to good candidates all over the country, and I'll probably be up all night hoping we can return to sanity. Onward!
Thanks for all this! It’s gonna be a long night!