It’s ok to be excited

This is no honeymoon

Don’t be surprised that an out-of-touch press corps doesn’t understand what’s going on. They are usually the last to know.

But anyone who has paid even a little bit of attention to the presidential race in recent days can tell that something BIG is happening.

There are already signs that the press wants to write off record fundraising, lightning fast party consolidation, massive endorsements, giant crowds and polling surges as some kind of temporary honeymoon. They’re going to be shocked when this honeymoon keeps going through Vice President Harris’s inauguration in January. 

Because what we are learning every day that Harris is in this race as our nominee is that this is not a moment. This is a movement. 

For the last eight years, we have lived in a state of anxiety, battling back the forces of fascism in a political environment where the stakes became unimaginably high seemingly overnight. We have certainly enjoyed our share of victories, but the size of the losses like the 2016 election and the overturning of Roe v. Wade and the violent attack on our Capitol dampened even our biggest wins. We’ve won a lot. But we’ve lost a lot too. 

The magnitude and pain of those losses left us frightened and desperately fighting to stop Trump from returning to do more damage, a joyless slog against a relentless foe who is hellbent on destroying everything we hold dear. But not anymore. 

Thanks to Vice President Kamala Harris and her millions of energized supporters, we are happy warriors, smiling from ear to ear as we go toe to toe with Trump’s cult of cruel weirdness. We are laughing and we are laughing at them. We are winning the election while also winning back something we’ve lost in the dark years since Trump came on the scene. 

There is joy in the battle, and it has been a while since that was true. 

There will still be challenging days ahead to be sure. The accusation of weirdness is sure to offend some mainstream news reporters and pundits who feel included in the attack. If they believe this to be a honeymoon period, then they will set out to make that true. 

But we know better. And we will show them. 

Vice President Harris is just getting started, and so are we. We have only just begun to organize, to fight, to hope. We were always going to give everything we had to stop Trump. But now we have renewed and expanded purpose. We are going to make history, save democracy and have fun doing both. 

Trump and his weird friends in the media will try to come for our joy. They will try to tell us this can’t last. They will try to tell us we shouldn’t believe our own eyes and ears.

But we know what is happening, and we know it’s not just a moment. It is a movement.