Today a lesson in how political and social change actually happens, the consequences, and the long arc of history.

Some background:

The dust is still settling from Tuesday’s historic election and what certainly appears to be a generational realignment up and down ballots and across the country. Tuesday morning, many smart prognosticators and analysts were considering 230-235 House seats for the Democrats to be an ambitious-and-optimistic-but-realistic target. One of the smartest House watchers I know had 228 seats going Democratic.

Now it looks close to 260.

Incredible.

Democrats outpaced the pre-election polling consensus by about four points, 13 points to 9, opening up a host of victories that had looked impossible — including not least of which the Senate seats in South Carolina and Mississippi, which will once all the votes are counted leave Democrats at least a 55-vote majority in that body (enough to achieve one of my major election goals: Never having to hear about John Fetterman ever again).

Looking at the New York Times’ national House race map, Democrats won all of the “lean” and “tossup” states across the country, and pushed so far into GOP territory that of the 18 seats projected as “Republicans expected to win narrowly,” Democrats lead or have already been projected winners of ten of them.

While the House seats are just two-year elections, obviously, the Senate seats are locked in for six and many unexpected state-wide victories — like everything in Texas and Georgia! — are four-year opportunities, meaning that they will be able to have a tremendous impact on the lives of tens of millions of American. The Texas victories alone might mean a million Americans get health care under newly possible Medicaid expansion (that’s far from a guarantee, with the GOP control of the state senate, but possible!).

There is one photo from the election that stuck with me yesterday: Luci Baines Johnson hugging James Talarico on election day, as he won back the Texas Senate seat held by her father before he was elected vice president in 1960. As I wrote in yesterday’s essay, Talarico wasn’t even alive the last time Texas sent a Democrat to the US Senate.

It’s easy on one level to appreciate the symbolism of that photo — but I want to write today about how there’s also much deeper symbolism than most people realize.

America’s history is rarely truly history—the path to Talerico’s victory in Texas, Jon Ossoff in Georgia, Annie Andrews in South Carolina, Roy Cooper in North Carolina, Mark Warner in Virginia, and maybe Scott Colom in Mississippi all traces back across decades and generations.

And LBJ is central to that story.

As I’ve been talking about this month, I’ve spent the last year working on a new book AMERICA IN 25 REVOLUTIONS, the hopeful and optimistic story of how social and political change has happened in our country across the last 250 years, telling 25 stories of moments when America got “better” — not perfect, but better. One of those chapters focuses on the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

(If you missed it earlier in the week, you can read one of the other chapters of the book, about the revolution of the end of the “spoils system” here and preorder the book here, including a fun free gift!)

LBJ assumed the presidency under the worst possible conditions, having just about two hours and 45 minutes to assemble his presidency as he flew home to Washington, D.C., from Dallas, where JFK, and all the light of Camelot, had been assassinated on November 22nd, 1963.

JFK’s approach to civil rights had been very much lackluster and uncertain; he was never the civil rights crusader in life that he has become in our imagination since. But LBJ actually was; he came to office amid the rising tide of the Civil Rights Movement and then seized upon JFK’s assassination to make his initial signature achievement the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

As I write in the book, “Unlike almost every other major advance in civil and human rights across US history up until then, the Civil Rights Movement did not culminate in a landmark constitutional amendment. The Constitution already contained all the power and promises necessary—the demand of the Civil Rights Movement, instead, was that the federal government needed to enact and enforce what Black Americans were owed. The bill from Reconstruction was due. Through courtroom victories and legislation like the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and then Civil Rights Act of 1968—laws passed a century after that first landmark Civil Rights Act of 1866—the movement’s work and the political pressure put on a reluctant John F. Kennedy, a surprisingly forceful Lyndon Johnson, and a deeply segregationist Congress, would start the long process of dismantling Jim Crow.”

The story of that civil rights movement is of course enormously complex and multifaceted; it is impossible to reduce the pressure of social change. LBJ, though, was central to the signature legislative achievements of that era. When he held Talarico’s seat, LBJ was one of the most powerful senators of the 20^th century, the majority leader at a moment when southern segregationists—many virulent racists and naked white supremacists like James O. Eastland—held power in the party and in the Senate. No one expected him to be a civil rights crusader as president.

And yet.

“The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most important piece of legislation passed by Congress in the twentieth century,” writes Clay Risen in his excellent history of the bill. “The act put the political, economic, and moral power of the federal government firmly behind black America, in a single step demolishing white supremacy’s stranglehold on public policy.” It was also a tool that stretched beyond race and would be a key force for women and others seeking rights in the decades to come.

In his first days, weeks, and months, LBJ decided to fight for the passage of the first meaningful civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. Five days after JFK’s assassination, LBJ told Congress, “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long. We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.”

As I write: “Histories often reduce the story of the passage of the Civil Rights Act into one of a unique partnership between LBJ and [Martin Luther] King, one the master legislative dealmaker, the other the righteous moral force. In reality, it took weeks of careful negotiations among the White House, Northern Democrats, Southern Democrats—most of whom still fiercely backed segregation—and other Capitol Hill leaders. Moreover, as Clay Risen writes, ‘Outside Congress and the White House, dozens of civil rights, labor, and religious groups brought enormous pressure on the government to create and then strengthen the bill, and later provided the manpower and coordination to pull the bill through the record-breaking filibuster it faced in the Senate.’ King later called the bill, ‘the child of a storm, the product of the most turbulent motion the nation has ever known in peacetime.’”

LBJ understood that fighting for civil rights would cost the Dems the South for decades — and he did it anyway. As I write, “This surge of legislation and civil rights, fulfilling the dreams of Reconstruction, precipitated the permanent fissure of the Southern wing of the Democratic Party, which would soon align itself with the far-right of the Republican Party, rallying around figures like George Wallace. No one anticipated it better than LBJ himself, who is said to have uttered after signing the 1964 act, ‘We have just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.’”

It indeed launched the major political realignment of the 20^th century — the Republican Party became the party of the white supremacists, and the Democratic Party became the party of civil rights.

That Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent legislation, including the Voting Rights Act of 1965, changed the landscape of America. “The Voting Rights Act of 1965 completely changed the game,” says Sherrilyn Ifill, leader of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “When that act was finally passed by Congress, there were only 72 Black elected officials in the entire United States… By 1980, when Congress reauthorized the Voting Rights Act, we were up to about 1,500.”

And the south was, indeed, mostly lost to Democrats for decades — becoming the beating soul of the GOP and, more recently, MAGA. The north, meanwhile, which had long been the bastion of the anti-slavery Republican Party and the Union in the Civil War became the center of the Democratic Party.

Today, though, the arc of history bends again: Being the party that fought for civil rights in the face of unprecedented white supremacist politics by the Trump administration, is what has delivered the South back to Democrats.

There are of course many factors that go into elections, but part of this week’s victory — and no small part of it either — is that Talarico won in Texas, and all these other Democrats won all these other races across the south and into deep-red places like Kansas, because of the foundation that LBJ laid in 1964: Democrats would be the party of civil rights.

And on Tuesday, Luci Baines Johnson reached up and gave James Talarico a hug: “We did it.”

And in Georgia, Keisha Lance Bottoms — the first Black woman ever elected governor of any US state — will hold the office held by Eugene Talmadge and Lester Maddox, two of the most notorious segregationists of the 20^th century:

None of this was all that long ago either. Keisha Lance Bottoms was born in 1970, when segregationist Lester Maddox was still governor of Georgia. She was in kindergarten when James Eastland was still chair of the judiciary committee and president pro tem of the US Senate.

That’s some incredible arc-of-history stuff right there.

The victories of Talarico, Bottoms, and all the rest are not theirs alone. They were elected on the hard work of others, work that stretched back years and decades itself to the Civil Rights Movement and even Reconstruction and the Civil War. Beta O’Rourke helped rebuild the Texas Democratic Party, galvanize enthusiasm, and register voters.

In Georgia, Stacey Abrams lost the 2018 gubernatorial election and then got to work, building a voter-registration organization that registered some 200,000 new Georgia voters. The latest totals show Bottoms winning by just over 300,000 votes.

Mississippi — where Colom leads now by about 1,800 votes — is a state that is 40 percent Black, but has so effectively depressed Black voter turnout for so long that the state’s last Black senator, Blanche Bruce, was born enslaved.

That’s some incredible arc-of-history stuff right there.

One of my favorite memes from Tuesday was this giant smiling portrait of the normally dour Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman:

IYKYK.

The hard work of overturning and dismantling Jim Crow continues to this day: As I noted yesterday, Virginia on Tuesday overturned its 124-year-old Jim Crow-era law requiring lifetime voting bans for felons.

And as astounding and hopeful as the 260ish House seats won by Democrats are, the reality is that another dozen, perhaps even two, remain in Republican hands because of gerrymandering and active voter suppression—thwarting the will of the people and undermining American democracy.

One of the themes of my book is that progress in our country is rarely linear — and it’s never guaranteed. That critical Voting Rights Act of 1965 was largely undone by the Republican-controlled Supreme Court even as I wrote AMERICA IN 25 REVOLUTIONS, allowing MAGA and the GOP to gerrymander, shutter polling locations, and otherwise carry out a whole campaign of suppression again aimed at ensuring Blacks don’t vote. In North Carolina, students at the historically Black A&T State University marched together to the polls after their on-campus location was shuttered. Videos celebrated the march online — but it was, like so many “inspirational” stories of American life, actually a story of suppression and a broken system.

Those students voted anyway — and North Carolina changed, up and down the ballot. Thom Tillis will be replaced by Roy Cooper. That’s a huge upgrade for American democracy and our country’s future. The flip of so many seats in the state house in North Carolina gives hope that the Republican gerrymandering can be undone and that future elections will be more just and more fair.

Change and revolutions as big as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and as little as any of the thousands of local elections that changed hands on Tuesday, happen because people organize, register voters, and demand change.

It’s not easy or glamorous work, but it’s the incredibly important work of day-to-day democracy. And it’s what keeps a democracy alive in the face of authoritarianism.

In my hometown of Burlington, Tuesday was “Andrew Champagne Day,” honoring one of the city’s most familiar Democratic organizers who died just hours before this fall’s election. The beloved and charming Andrew tabled endlessly — registering voters at concerts, farmers’ markets, festivals, and anywhere else people gathered — and went door-to-door when people weren’t gathered to register voters individually. He registered in recent years some 2,000 people. I would have told you I saw Andrew everywhere I went in Burlington. The last line of his excellently written obituary was simple: “Andrew would want you to get out and VOTE to make your voice heard.”

Each morning, we wake up and have a choice about what side of history we want to be on. To me, one of the simplest political tests in our country is this: Be on the side that encourages more people to vote. A lot of people have chosen in recent years to sell their souls cheaply — and got a very bad return on that investment on Tuesday, an investment that I hope only gets worse in the weeks, months, and years ahead.

For years leading up to Tuesday, a whole lot of other people like Andrew Champagne and Stacey Abrams woke up and chose the side of change — of making America not perfect, but better.

We owe them our thanks this week — but we also owe them our commitment to carry forward their hard work toward a better tomorrow.

There are more revolutions still to be won.

GMG

PS: If you liked this essay, you’ll love the full book AMERICA IN 25 REVOLUTIONS. Preorder here and get an amazing set of coasters drawn by POLITICO cartoonist Matt Wuerker: