At 12:29 this afternoon, I was driving to pick up my daughter when my phone suddenly started lighting up with nonstop message notifications, one after another, without a break for several minutes. There were so many that my mind went to the worst places. When I was finally able to pull off the freeway and look to see what the emergency was, the first thing I saw was a message that began with “URGENT!” from someone named Dave at a local phone number I didn’t recognize.
His message to me continued with, “I’ve been assigned to TRACK your ballot - but I see you still haven’t voted yet!” Dave wanted to make my voting easy. Dave wanted me to know someone was watching. Dave isn’t real. No one has been assigned to track me or my ballot. But the language being used was deliberate: track, urgent, assigned. Words designed to intimidate me and make me feel vulnerable.
The other text messages were just as disturbing. There was one that said “YOUR TAX ASSESSMENT” that tried to convince me one candidate would “force” me to pay exorbitant taxes if elected. Another said “WE NEED YOUR HELP, YOUR VOTE!” and insisted that “This is not political,” while trying to scare me into believing my daughter would be in danger if I didn’t vote for them, and quickly. I lost track of how many messages I received, and deleted, before I stopped and really studied them. The one thing they all had in common, aside from the scare tactics, manipulative language, and false sense of urgency, was something buried way at the bottom of the messages if they even disclosed it. They were all being sent on behalf of the local Republican Party, PACs supporting Republicans, or the Republican candidates’ campaigns directly.
In contrast, the few Democratic messages I’ve received could not have been more different. They immediately identified themselves and who paid for the message, and there were no scare tactics. No threats or attempts to scare me into voting a certain way. They were playing by the rules that most political campaigns used to follow.
In any other era, text messages like these, maybe not to this extent, would be annoying and perhaps even laughable. Just more political spam you delete without thinking. But in this era, under this president, in a week when the Department of Justice literally tried to throw out the ballots of 20,000 registered voters in my own state of California, it feels more like a warning of what’s to come.
Everything about politics, our elections, and the election cycles themselves is different. It feels like we are living in the upside down. Before Trump, we disagreed about politics. We argued about tax policy and whether the government should spend more or less and on what programs and priorities. We weren’t arguing about whether the president was above the law or whether the Constitution would still protect us when those in power decided it was inconvenient. We weren’t worried about losing the kind of rights that had already been fought for and won hundreds of years before. We weren’t afraid of what an election might take from us, because even when the other side won, there were limits. There were norms. There was a floor beneath us.
That floor is gone now. And every two years, we now find ourselves standing at the edge of something, holding our breath, wondering what they’ll come for next, knowing that everything we thought was settled can be ripped away by the right combination of power and cruelty. We are being held hostage to elections in a way we never were before, because this isn’t politics anymore. This is a cult of personality with the power to dismantle the country piece by piece, and every cycle feels like it could be the one where we lose something we can never get back.
And perhaps one of the cruelest parts of all of this is that we never get a chance to recover from the last election before we are forced to start fighting for our country all over again. There is no time to catch our breath, no time to enjoy the freedoms we have managed to protect, no time to feel the kind of security that comes from knowing our country will still be recognizable when we wake up tomorrow. We have spent years living from one election to the next, measuring time not by the things we have accomplished or the lives we have built, but by how much longer we have to survive before we get another chance to stop what is happening. And even when we win, the relief is temporary, because we know the people trying to take those rights away are not going to stop. They will come back in two years, or four, with another plan, another manufactured crisis, another attempt to take something from us that we never imagined we would have to defend in the first place.
I think about the generations who came before us, the people who fought and marched and sacrificed, sometimes giving their lives, to secure rights they believed their children and grandchildren would never have to fight for again. They weren’t fighting so that every generation would have to start over. They were fighting so that the next generation could build on what they had accomplished, so that America could keep moving closer to becoming the country it had always promised to be. And now, instead of building on their progress, we are spending our lives trying to prevent it from being erased. Instead of arguing about how to make our country better, we are fighting to keep it from becoming something our ancestors would have recognized as the very thing they were trying to escape or overcome.
Our “politics” have gotten so bad that the President of the United States was back on a stage campaigning at the Shoemaker Center at Ohio University, six days before the midterm elections, defending a campaign ad from Vivek Ramaswamy that attacked a child abuse survivor, his opponent, Dr. Amy Acton. What kind of country have we become when the President of the United States stands in front of thousands of people and endorses the use of such a deplorable ad?
That wasn’t even the worst moment of the night. For at least the third time, Donald Trump returned to his fixation on Senator Jon Husted’s body, telling the audience that he had “examined” Husted’s physique and “looked at his ass.” He seems to know he should stop making these inappropriate comments, but he just can’t stop himself. We’ve also seen more protesters interrupting his speeches, along with his growing hostility toward them. Between the desperate text messages and what Donald Trump has been saying, it is becoming clearer by the day how much fear and intimidation have become part of our elections, and how far removed we are from a time when political campaigns were about competing ideas for the future of our country.
It wasn’t that long ago that so much of what we are witnessing today would have been unthinkable. Today, we got a small glimpse of how politics in our country used to be conducted and how they could be again when President Barack Obama stood before thousands of people and asked them to rediscover their north star. He talked about rising prices and real solutions. He talked about what kind of country we want to be. He didn’t insult anyone. He didn’t perform cruelty. He didn’t ramble about anyone’s body or dismiss abuse survivors or scream about paid protesters. Instead, he focused on the Trump administration’s response to the speech he gave earlier this week, where he described the last two years as “chaos, and cruelty, and corruption,” and how they didn’t dispute any of that. Instead, they got upset because Obama said Trump had the White House looking like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” The President of the United States was more offended by a joke about his interior decorating than by being called out for making life harder for every American family. And Obama leaned into it, because of how absurd it is. They have no defense for what they’ve done, so they argue about Donald Trump’s pet projects.
Obama also called this election what it is: an inflection point and a course correction. He gave Democrats a reality check, telling them they have two more years of this administration no matter what happens next Tuesday, but that it doesn’t mean we’re powerless. He said nobody voted for sending “masked agents running through our streets.” He called on people to show up and vote because the country they want to live in depends on it.
While two presidents were addressing the nation, another branch of government was also making its voice heard. This afternoon, U.S. District Judge David O. Carter denied the Department of Justice’s emergency request to block California from counting more than 20,000 mail-in ballots. The DOJ had claimed those voters were “likely noncitizens” and demanded the state set aside their ballots until their citizenship could be verified. When Los Angeles County actually reviewed a sample of 200 names from the DOJ’s list, nearly 40 percent were people born in the United States. Thankfully, a federal judge saw through their attempt to interfere with the election.
Judge Carter, an 82-year-old Clinton appointee, opened his ruling with these powerful words: “Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch.” He wrote that the Executive Branch would have the court believe “that it reigns as a sole sovereign. But California and its people are sovereign, too.”
He didn’t stop there. He warned the DOJ to stop threatening election workers. Trump’s own top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, Bill Essayli, had been insisting during the hearing that election administrators who processed ballots from people on the DOJ’s list would be committing a federal crime. Carter shut that down too and suggested a timeline that would push the case past Election Day entirely, preventing the Trump DOJ from interfering with ballot processing while voting is still underway.
This was the second time Judge Carter has blocked the DOJ’s attempts to seize control of California’s elections. Back in January, he also dismissed their lawsuit demanding the unredacted voter data of 23 million Californians, writing in a 33-page ruling that “the taking of democracy does not occur in one fell swoop; it is chipped away piece-by-piece until there is nothing left.”
If nothing feels right and just and okay, it’s because we are living in a holding pattern right now, all of us, holding our breath, waiting for the next ruling, raid, executive order, and the next election. Waiting to find out if the courts will hold, if the states will fight back, if the results next Tuesday will be the ones that finally begin to turn this around. It is exhausting. And some days it feels like we are chasing a sense of normal that might not come for years, if it comes at all.
But the reality is that normal isn’t something that returns on its own. It’s something we build back, one action at a time. Each time we vote, show up to a protest, call our representatives, or just talk to another person in our community about what is being done to our country, we are doing our part to build the future we want to live in, even when we can’t see the results of our efforts right away. As hard as it is to live through this constant back and forth, we have to remember that the progress we are fighting for was never going to happen all at once, and not all of us will get to see everything we are working toward become a reality. Some of this work is for the generation after us, and the one after that. But that’s always been true. The women who marched for suffrage didn’t all live to see the 19th Amendment. The people who marched for voting rights in Selma didn’t all live to see the Voting Rights Act. They did the work anyway, because they understood something that every generation in crisis has to learn: the fight is the legacy. The refusal to stop is the gift we leave behind. In six days, the next chapter of our country’s history begins, and we will have another chance to move America closer to becoming the country it has always promised to be. That’s why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.
I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather
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This commentary represents my personal opinions and analysis of matters of public concern, informed by publicly available information. Any references to individuals constitute opinion and commentary protected under the First Amendment.
Picture of the day: I had settled in for the afternoon to start watching Donald Trump’s rally, and this girl must have sensed the shift in my mood because she immediately brought over a toy for me to “play” with. It made me think about how it’s become a common response for me that when I talk to people I used to work with in the travel space and tell them I have shifted completely over to trying to do my part to resist this authoritarian takeover, nearly everyone says they could never do it. And the reason they almost always give is that they could not listen to him talk for hours every single day. I don’t blame them. I’ve been subjecting myself to it every single day for over a year and a half now, and it really is that bad. The constant lies and gaslighting feel like what I imagine one aspect of being in an emotionally abusive relationship might be like. Of course, I’m not saying it’s the same thing by any means. I’m just talking about the constant lies and gaslighting, and how exhausting it is to listen to someone twist reality every single day, knowing that millions of people are believing every word of it. I truly cannot wait for the day when I never have to hear his voice again, and I cannot wait for the day when I no longer have to watch my fellow Americans stand behind him and cheer for the destruction of our country in the name of patriotism either.
Links to sources used in writing this article:
President Trump holds midterm rally in Ohio: YouTube Video
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ramaswamy-ad-amy-acton-mother-trump/
https://www.cnn.com/2026/10/28/politics/live-news/midterm-election-congress
That is unconscionable! However, this is what the Republican party is left with: scare tactics. It is the only way they can try to win this election, but they won't. Democrats have a soul, a mind and a heart, and the American people know that's what they want in their leaders.
Heather, the president and his administration's relationship with us IS abusive. That's exactly what it is. Not only are our traditions, values, and norms being violated, but WE are subject to abuse every single day. And of course, he blames us, the victims, for his and his administration's behavior. Maybe we don't look like we should, or act like we should, or submit like we should, or pretend like we should. So the abuse ramps up.
Our only safe house is our vote and our communities and our living with some joy anyway. Every time I give someone a hug or get some work done or cook a meal, I am resisting, giving a finger to his bullying. After what I hope will be dancing in the streets on Nov. 4 and beyond, I know he will try all kinds of things to hold on to power. But if we have TWO branches of government resisting him, instead of just one, he and his minions will be the lamest of lame ducks. May that give us renewed strength and some rest.