The midterms. The first big test finally approached. MFOL upped the pace. August 30, David Hogg appeared with New York City mayor Bill de Blasio on MSNBC’s Morning Joe to announce the group’s next big initiative, Mayors for Our Lives. They had enlisted more than fifty mayors from both parties around the country in a program to register new voters under thirty, particularly at high schools and colleges.
They would need them. All indications still pointed to enthusiasm in their swath of the electorate, but the gun issue was getting less and less attention. The Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was accused of sexual misconduct, and the country was riveted by the battle over his confirmation in late September and early October. Pollsters reported the fight energizing the Right. And the Supreme Court suddenly leapt to voters’ number one issue in a Pew poll, pushing gun policy down to fourth. CNN had it down to fifth in August, right behind “corruption,” presumably due to Robert Mueller’s investigation of President Trump. Endless political upheavals would follow.
And journalists were sometimes speaking about the Parkland kids in the past tense. In October, Katy Tur’s MSNBC show did a “Battleground College Tour,” speaking to students on different campuses each day. She mentioned Parkland as a huge factor in the spring that had seemed to disappear. Keeping guns a priority would be a challenge. On bad days, it felt like this time might be like all the other times: The nation would gasp at another slaughter, vow to really do something, and then forget. Guns never seemed to stick.
Also in October, Ariana Grande posted an Instagram story urging her fans to register, posting imminent deadlines in each state, with a swipe-up link to the MFOL website. So many people followed the link to register that it temporarily crashed the site. And MFOL announced twelve more cities on its Vote for Our Lives tour, a final sprint for the last three weeks to Election Day. “I was so exhausted,” Jackie said. “The last two weeks, I was starting to burn out. And I was like, ‘Well, I’ve got to stick it out. It’s like when you’re really tired, you stay up for two more hours, it’s like, ‘Stay up! You have to do this.’”
Her grades were taking a hit. The same was true for all the kids who were back in school. Teachers had been very forgiving in the spring semester, but that was over. Even after she scaled back to one AP class, an academic breeze for Jackie, her grades were ugly. Choices had to be made.
Emma was coping with college—a big adjustment for everyone, but strange to enter as an icon. “A lot of people here feel like it’s weird that they know about me without me having gotten to know about them,” she said. Shortly before Election Day she reported classes going well, but she was struggling still with the social transition. “You can’t bond at the base soul level when you first meet somebody at school like I did with these [MFOL] people,” Emma said. “I’m working on it. Nobody else is ready to share traumatic experiences with each other.”
It helped to bring someone with her who understood. She had made it through the terror holding hands with two friends, and one of them, Lenore, was her roommate at New College of Florida. That helped. “She and I are the only two people who know what each other was going through,” Emma said. “We already have little movies set up, communicating with pictures instead of words, because sometimes it’s hard to always figure out what words we’re feeling.”
As Election Day beckoned, hopes ran sky high. Election day—the concept was anachronistic in much of the country, where more people voted in the lead-up weeks than on the day. And early voting was through the roof. All the demographics MFOL was counting on seemed to be coming out.
Dreams were taking shape. When MFOL marched on Washington, pundits were batting about a “blue wave” scenario, and a big enough wave might actually turn over the House. That seemed like a best-case scenario all spring. Because of gerrymandering, and Democrats being concentrated in cities, it seemed highly unlikely that they could win much more than the twenty-three seats needed to retake the House. And because of a fluke of history, most of the thirty-five Senate seats up for election were Democratic incumbents, several in deep-red territory. They had to defend seats in Montana, West Virginia, North Dakota, and Missouri, states Trump had won by 18 to 41 points. And they had few pickup opportunities, mostly in the Deep South. Tennessee? Arizona? Texas? All seemed like fantasies. The conventional wisdom through the spring and into the summer was that the best the Dems could hope for in the Senate was to give up a few seats. They would have to wait until 2020, when the Senate map reversed, and they could make a potential killing.
But late polls showed some of the long-shot races coming into reach. And with all that early voting, all bets were off. Beto O’Rourke was the breakout star of the year, an unabashed progressive, winning over huge swaths of Texas. A week out, polls showed him within three points of the Republican incumbent, Ted Cruz. A Democratic senator from Texas? Two blue houses of Congress? The fantasy might actually materialize.
Election night brought reality crashing down. Much of the MFOL crew and their allies, along with parents of the victims, gathered at Hurricane Grill & Wings to celebrate the returns. David was there, and Emma, Jackie, Daniel, and the Deitsch brothers. As polls closed from east to west across the country, the mood turned sour. Twitter felt like a Democratic wake. The House was going blue, but the Dems picked up only two dozen seats. The Senate was going the other way: probably five seats lost. No Texas miracle. The Dems were picking up a lot of governorships, that was nice, but no historic black woman to lead Georgia. And there was a painful personal blow: they were losing both big races in Florida. They were about to have gun safety foes in their governor’s mansion and for both of their senators.
But none of that was the worst of it. Their generation might have let them down. There were only preliminary numbers available, but early exit poll numbers were indicating that young voters made up about the same share of the electorate as in previous elections.
“I’m shaking with anger right now,” Jackie said. “It’s like the same feeling I was getting the night of February fourteenth. I’m so angry and I don’t know what to do with that anger.” But maybe she did know. “We’re not going to stop fighting,” she said. “I can tell you, I’m doing this for the rest of my life.”
There was anger, then guilt. “I felt like I disappointed some of the families that lost their kids,” Jackie said. She looked around the room. Guac’s family: Tío Manny and Patricia Oliver. She looked at the Guttenbergs and saw their daughter, her lost young ballerina friend, Jaime. “I was just like, ‘Damn, we couldn’t do this for them.’ But they comforted me. Patricia, she was like hugging me and telling me to relax, and I was like, ‘Oh my God.’”
The gloom was premature. By Wednesday morning, they regained sight of the best-case scenario they had envisioned in the spring: a big surge in youth voting, candidates unabashedly running on gun safety, candidates winning on gun safety, and maybe, if all that happened, the Democrats taking control of the House to begin implementing their agenda. They had accomplished all four.
The early returns proved misleading. The late-counted vote trended heavily Democratic. They took back two of the Senate seats that appeared lost the night before, both in deep-red states, Montana and Arizona—in the latter, the first Democratic senator elected there in thirty years. But the House was truly startling. When all the races were over, the Democrats had picked up forty seats—their biggest night since the post-Watergate landslide of 1974. And Democrats won the popular vote in House races by 8.8 million, beating even the number in 1974. They had also flipped 349 state legislative seats, six state legislative chambers, and seven governorships, mostly from large battleground states. Those would be crucial to the big redistricting fights ahead, following the 2020 census.
Voter turnout among the under-thirty voters was 31 percent, dwarfing the 21 percent from the previous midterms. It was the highest-recorded turnout since the premier organization studying them, at Tufts University, began collecting data in 1994. And those new young voters swung overwhelmingly liberal. They supported Democratic House candidates by a 35-point margin, exceeding even the margin for Barack Obama’s election. Their vote had been apparently decisive in the Democrats’ winning the Senate seats in Montana and Nevada, and the governorship in Wisconsin.
And people were finally voting on guns. Exit polls showed gun control as voters’ fourth-most-important issue, surpassing any previous result. And they were finally voting on both sides. Professor Robert Spitzer, a gun politics expert at SUNY Cortland, said that about 16 or 17 percent of people voted on guns as a primary issue in the past, mostly against gun safety. NBC News’ exit poll indicated that 60 percent of voters favored stronger gun laws—even 42 percent of gun owners. Gun country hadn’t quite boarded the MFOL bandwagon, but 42 percent was a hell of a start.
Candidates had been watching those polls all year, and many decided it was finally safe to come out of the gun closet. “Candidates embraced the gun safety agenda this cycle to a degree not seen since at least the 2000 elections,” Professor Spitzer said. It could be hard to take the pulse of 435 different House races, but the Democratic Party’s “red to blue” list was telling. That’s their list of districts they hope to flip each cycle. In 2016, only four of thirty-six candidates in those races included gun safety in their platforms. This time, it was thirty-eight of fifty-nine candidates.
And MFOL had achieved one dream, of drawing some Republicans to their cause. In some key swing districts, like the Philadelphia suburbs of Bucks County, the House candidates ran on gun safety on both sides.
Both the NRA and gun safety groups claimed victories in several House races—itself a game changer. For the first time in a long time, the gun issue was at play, Spitzer said. “It worked mostly to the benefit of gun safety in a way we have not seen for almost twenty years. I think it has also given the gun safety people real momentum to continue their activities for the next election cycle, which of course will be a presidential year.”
The NRA was also losing the money battle, another first. Earlier in the year, it admitted to big fund-raising problems, and in this cycle, it spent only $11 million, half what it spent in the previous midterms. For the first time ever, it was outspent by gun safety groups, which spent $12 million.
The NRA’s aura of invincibility had been ruptured, Spitzer said. “It had this reputation, if they target you for defeat, that (a) they’ll make your life miserable, and (b) they’ll probably succeed.” That was never true, he said—there was a mountain of data disproving it. But it was believed and feared, and acted on. But this election really blew a hole in that marked-for-extinction narrative, he said. “They have no visible effect on the outcome at all.”
The fight would really get hot in the presidential year, but Spitzer was actually looking past that. “The question is, what does the Republican Party look like in a post-Trump world?” he said. “Either it’s very small and even more hard-core, which means they won’t be winning many elections, or they’re going to have to broaden their base somehow. And an issue like gun safety could be one amenable to bipartisan support.”
Spitzer said the gun safety movement had a long way to go, but they had broken a huge barrier. Their cause had been seen as untouchable, the third rail of American politics. “It’s no longer a third rail,” he said. “It’s been deactivated, de-electrified.”
The best evidence that the gun third rail has been deactivated came two days later, from the presumptive House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi. She announced that House Democrats would prioritize “bipartisan legislation to have commonsense background checks” on gun sales. That obviously wouldn’t pass the Senate, and President Trump would veto it anyway, said Professor Spitzer. “But it has a very forward-looking objective, first because it’s low-hanging fruit. Pelosi knows that well. It’s a good campaign issue. And once the House passes it, she’ll have bragging rights to say that every Democrat in Congress supported this bill, and the Republicans killed it. It gives them kind of bragging rights to say, ‘Look, we’re doing what the majority of American people want us to do, but the obstructionist Republicans turn a deaf ear to that.’ It’s a useful club in the next round of elections.”