It’s hard to imagine anyone putting 2023 into the highlight reel of America’s best years. A former president caught 91 felony charges, including multiple counts related to alleged election interference. Our children and our families were terrorized by 40 mass shootings this year — a grim new record. More than 40,000 people died as a result of gun violence overall.
The polls tell us Americans have never been more divided, nor have their political realities ever been more at odds with each other. We increasingly seem to inhabit two antagonistic and mutually exclusive worlds. Those political resentments are increasingly hardening into threats of overt political violence, a dangerous tendency too often fanned by politicians, including former President Donald Trump. Is it all some nightmare aberration? Or is this just who we are now?
Millions of Americans are looking to the new year with dread. Who can blame them? An already acidic presidential campaign will only get more savage as Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, distracts from his towering legal woes by amplifying ever more extreme anti-democratic rhetoric. Democracy itself will be on the ballot next year, and that weight rests heavy on the shoulders of regular Americans entrusted by our Founders with the power of the vote.
In a sea of national pessimism, those voters give me hope for our future.
And believe me, there is reason to hope. Our country is undergoing not only a generational transfer of power, but a moral one as well. We’ve seen that change made manifest in an unbroken string of victories for reproductive rights ballot measures, most recently in Ohio. Last month, Ohioans enshrined abortion rights in their state’s constitution, despite the nationalized efforts of anti-choice Republicans to defeat the initiative. That’s a national trend: Pro-choice voters have won every single abortion referendum since the Supreme Court’s controversial Dobbs decision.
Abortion has become perhaps the single most powerful, unifying social issue in American politics. Supermajorities of Americans now support protecting its legality at the national level. Next year, voters in at least 11 states, including Arizona and Nevada, will get their chance to protect legal abortion. If recent history is any indication, those votes will be political nightmares for a Republican Party eager to talk about anything but. They’ll also bring out record numbers of new voters, many of whom are hostile to the GOP’s rancid ideology.
If 2023 was the year in which the Supreme Court all but legalized racial gerrymandering, it was also a year that saw a surge in voter registration. Some of that came from an unlikely place: musician Taylor Swift, recently the bete-noire of countless right-wing Twitter commentators. Swift helped drive a record number of new voter registrations with a single Instagram post marking National Voter Registration Day. Her single post registered over 35,000 new voters. Swift won’t save democracy by herself, of course, but the help is certainly appreciated.
Meanwhile, some states are boosting youth voter engagement by eliminating obstacles that dissuade young voters from registering to vote at all. That can include passing automatic voter registration laws like Georgia’s, or promoting online voter registration. Recent election cycles, in 2020 and 2022, saw some of the highest voter turnout in a generation. Lowering the structural barriers to youth voter registration means 2024 could push those big numbers even higher. That may not be good for Republicans, but it’s a great sign for the health of our democracy.
Despite the doom-and-gloom polling that shows President Joe Biden stuck in a dead heat against Trump, actual voters paint a far more optimistic picture for Democrats. FiveThirtyEight tracked 30 special elections this year and found that, on average, Democrats were beating their expected performance by about 11 percent. When the most important presidential swing states will be decided by no more than a few percentage points, that overperformance becomes decisive.
Democrats’ off-year strength was on full display in Virginia last month, where state campaigns often reflect the national issues being debated just across the Potomac in Congress. Virginia voters delivered a stinging round of electoral defeats to “anti-woke” crusader Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R), ending Youngkin’s budding presidential dreams in the process. If Americans are sour on Biden and the Democrats, they sure aren’t voting like it.
None of that is to say what comes next will be easy. The Republican Party has openly embraced not only authoritarianism but the nativist blood-and-soil rhetoric that has defined the violent fascist movements of the past. That rhetoric is meant to intimidate voters, but 2023 has shown us that while Americans may be weary of our toxic political culture, they are not so easily intimidated into surrendering their vote. We may be battered and bruised this time next year, but democracy will prevail — and so will we.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.