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Look on the bright side — all the talk about a stolen election, massive voter fraud, rigged voting machines and threats against local election workers disappeared overnight. Instead of planning an insurrection, MAGA Republicans have pivoted to picking out their outfits for president-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration parties. 

The minute it became clear that Trump won, Republican fulminating about “massive cheating” blew over. Wisconsin Elections Commission Administrator Meagan Wolfe declared the election in Wisconsin a “great success.” Bipartisan poll watchers agreed: the whole thing went off  practically without a hitch. Never mind the WisGOP warnings all day on social media about (nonexistent) illegal voting by noncitizens. Never mind the grandstanding at Central Count in Milwaukee by fake elector scheme co-conspirators Sen. Ron Johnson, elections commissioner Bob Spindell and WisGOP chair Brian Schimming. All is forgiven, because Trump won Wisconsin.

The mechanics of voting are not under attack. Instead, a majority of American voters, including a majority of Wisconsinites, chose to elect a right-wing authoritarian leader and to give his party control of the federal government, apparently because they believe Trump will repeal pandemic-fueled inflation (which is already way down in the U.S.).

As my friend Hugh Jackson, editor of our sister outlet the Nevada Current wrote on Wednesday morning:  “the U.S. Supreme Court, and the U.S. judiciary generally, is now even more on track to become nothing more than a functionary outlet for a right-wing extremist and authoritarian executive branch hell-bent on dismantling and superseding the rule of law. Also, poor Gaza. Poor Ukraine (poor Europe). And for all that, and so much more, a box of Honey Nut Cheerios still isn’t going to fall back to 2019 prices.”

Stress-eating leftover Halloween candy while watching the triumph of MAGA well into the wee hours, I remembered I’d agreed to speak to a group of retirees the morning after the election. What was there to say? The election results are a gut punch. Here in Wisconsin we are at the center of it. “You know Wisconsin put Trump over the top,” a journalist in Washington, D.C., texted me, helpfully. 

Since I had to pull myself together and try to make sense of the results, I headed downtown and found myself in a room full of friendly faces. There’s no sugar-coating things, I told them. The results are a shock. Especially for Wisconsin’s immigrant community, this is a frightening time and we need to do everything we can to support people and ease the fear and suffering of those who are the targets of terrifying threats.

There are a few bright spots in Wisconsin among Tuesday’s results. In addition to the hiatus on election denial, there are the results of state legislative races — the first to be run with Wisconsin’s new fair maps — which ended the gerrymandered GOP supermajority in the state Senate and yielded a more evenly divided state Assembly. 

The end of gerrymandering is the fruit of a long, difficult battle by citizens determined to get fair maps. It’s worth remembering that when all three branches of government in Wisconsin were controlled by a single party, that goal seemed far off. And a hard-fought win it was. We’ve come a long way. Don’t forget that progress is possible. It’s important to combat despair. 

There will be a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking of this election. I’ve written about how I believe the Democrats lost touch with their working class base, and how Trump took the opportunity to move into that space with his right-wing populist message.

But the fact is Harris was a powerful candidate who picked up the torch from Biden when he fell apart, painfully, publicly and irretrievably. 

There are those who say our country is too sexist or too racist for a woman of color to be elected president. Another white guy would have been better, they suggest. Without a doubt, misogyny and racism were big features of the 2024 campaign. But you don’t beat that backlash by surrendering to it. And we must beat it back. That takes a lot of resilience. Harris took us another step forward in making Americans believe they could elect a female president. It will take more than one or two tries to bring that about.

For now, perhaps the most important thing for all of us who are hurting after this election is to prioritize real, human contact. Remember that you are still surrounded by friends, neighbors and loved ones. We need to connect with each other and stay in touch. As simple and maybe even simplistic as it sounds, we need each other’s company to help get us through this difficult time. We need to see other people in person and we need to take a break from scrolling online.

Being with other people, strengthening our bonds of affection and solidarity, is the foundation of democracy. That’s where we need to start.