On Election Day 2024, A Disabled Woman Considers History
It was a vivid November morning nearly eight years ago today. Wearing suffrage white pants and a sharp Democratic blue blazer, I proudly stood in line outside a local church hall waiting to give me name to the volunteer at the door. Buzzing with excitement, I shifted from foot to foot, despite the fact I was voting in my fifth presidential election. Because today was the day I would help elect the first female President of the United States, Hillary Clinton.
As I waited to receive my ballot, I couldn’t help but think back to when I was 14 years old and lucky enough to meet Ms. Clinton while helping my uncle campaign for a seat in the Senate. She gave him a powerful endorsement at a donor dinner in Worcester, Massachusetts, and my uncle invited me to attend after I had spent the summer holding signs and passing out election materials and babysitting while he hit the campaign trail.
After Ms. Clinton finished her speech, I watched her swoop by my table, tall and regal, and I couldn’t help but stand up and call out, “Excuse me, ma’am?”
Ma’am?! Ugh, Wendy, get it together.
She turned on her heels, eyes bright, and offered a pleasant, “Yes?”
I didn’t expect her to stop for the awkward teen in the metallic baby tee under the crushed velvet camisole dress. But she did, and she listened intently as I gushed about how I looked up to her, and how smart I thought she was, and how I hoped she would be president one day, too.
She gave a wry smile and a wink, quipping, “We’ll see,” before bending down so she could look me in the eye. She took hold of my hands and praised me for being passionate about politics, telling me she was glad to see the younger generation interested and engaged. And I’ll never forget what she said next:
“It is so, so important for young women to be involved in politics as citizens and as leaders. We need more of us to be seen and heard. Can you do that for me?”
I nodded vigorously, and she released my hands to offer her right one for a shake.
It’s a deal.
Back at the ballot box, pen steady in hand, I firmly pressed the ink into the circle next to Hillary Rodham Clinton for President. My eyes welled with tears, catching me off guard. I didn’t expect to feel emotional in a humble booth making history.
On election night in 2008, I was in the NBC Bay Area newsroom with my fellow Stanford classmates tallying votes when a murmur ran through the bullpen. Barack Obama, the country’s first Black President, had just been elected. It was electric, though we kept our expressions at a respectable newsroom neutral.
But this one was personal for me. Especially because Hillary’s opponent was the gawdy, crude, “grab her by the pussy” Donald Trump. I felt confident as I settled in that evening with my husband, parents, and young son to watch the election results pour in.
Pour in they did, but not in the way I expected. When NBC called the race for Donald J. Trump, the 45th President of the United States, I fell to my knees and sobbed. Deep and guttural, the defeat sliced like a razor across my stomach.
Because it wasn’t just that the first woman with a real shot of being president lost the race. It was that she lost the race to Donald Trump, a man who eleven days earlier was caught on tape saying he could sexually assault women and get away with it since he was a celebrity.
It made me sick.
Because I also knew of his intentions when he assumed his golden throne and defiled the Oval Office. He told reporters women should be punished for having abortions and helped Republicans block a Supreme Court appointment for Obama so Trump could sway the judicial branch to the right. He began his term with one appointment in the pocket and two other Supremes far beyond retirement age. And he promised—he swore—that he’d overturn Roe v. Wade.
Then my father asked why I was crying and told me to stop being dramatic.
***
That was the beginning of eight years of hell. Yes, Trump was only in office for four years, but they were the four longest years of my and many others’ lives. We had the Muslim bans. The awful separation and detention of Mexican children away from their parents. The disastrous paper towel response to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. The exit from the Paris Agreement. The insane, blatant negligence throughout the COVID-19 pandemic that resulted in a conservative estimate of 400,000 lives lost.
Think about that for a second. 400,000 American souls. That’s more than the death toll from the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
While he was president, Obama was briefed by epidemiologists of the very likely scenario of a global pandemic, and he and his administration put together a plan. They ran red drills. They handed over well-rehearsed procedures for U.S. institutions from schools to hospitals to Trump, who promptly threw that manual in the garbage.
And so hundreds of thousands died. Millions of others experienced loneliness, trauma, and despondence on level with the pandemic itself—especially young children, who still grapple with academic and mental health fallout. Trump’s reckless modeling of risky behaviors, his rejection of masks, which could have released us from our hellish home prisons if they were uniformly adopted, were even more dangerous for immunocompromised folks like me. We feared for our lives while seething at the heartless indifference of our neighbors, friends, and family, spurred on by Trump, the Mocker in Chief.
And that doesn’t begin to touch on the atrocities committed since losing the 2020 election to the supremely awesome, I don’t care if you don’t like him, he’s the best president ever Joe Biden.
There were the fake electors. The 60 swing state lawsuits to contest election results. The phone calls to election officials to “just find me 11,000 votes, c’mon!” The pressure campaign on Mike Pence to unilaterally declare Trump the winner instead of certifying the results. The planned coup (!), January 6th.
The overturning of Roe v. Wade.
The 91 indictments for fraud, stealing classified documents, obstructing justice, and attempting to overthrow the government. The 34 felony convictions, including being found liable for sexual assault. Project 2025. Denying Project 2025 was written for him, even though his name appears more than 300 times. The selection of JD Vance. The assassination merch. The gold sneakers. The $100,000 watch. The cryptocurrency. Elon Musk, aka Darth Maul. Palling up to dictators like Putin and Kim Jong Un. Telling his chief of staff he wanted generals like Hitler’s. Sending COVID tests to Russian dictators instead of American citizens during the height of the pandemic. Spreading disinformation about FEMA relief in hurricane-ravaged North Carolina and Florida, then sending militia groups after first responders.
And then, there’s the batshit crazy ramblings of a madman.
She was Indian then she turned Black. Childcare is childcare. They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. I’m more concerned about the enemy from within. I’ll protect the women whether they like it or not. Let’s put her standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. Let’s see how she feels when the guns are trained on her face. To get to me, somebody would have to shoot through the fake news, but I don’t mind that so much.
I know I’m not alone in saying this shit is exhausting, and we all want the nightmare to be over.
But for me, it’s less about how awful this empty vessel of a man is, full of his own hubris and McDonald’s as he may be. It’s so much more about Kamala Harris.
Kamala Harris. I watched her star rise in the Bay Area, California, where I’ve lived for nearly 20 years, and where I was proud to help elect her to the U.S. Senate on the same ballot I cast my vote for Hillary Clinton. I remember her as the spunky District Attorney of San Francisco when my friend worked as an aide in Gavin Newsom’s mayoral office, and I recall a tough as nails Attorney General for the state. Her addition to the Biden ticket made me excited for politics again in a way I thought had died on that November evening in 2016.
She’s the real deal. Full of empathy, compassion, and dignity, but also strength, clarity, and the stones to lead the most powerful nation on the planet with grace. But people can’t see her brilliance through the real-time, 50-car pileup that is Trump. And isn’t that what all women experience on the daily, especially in the workplace? Constantly underestimated. Constantly expected to do the job before the title, while our male competition gets the title before ever performing the job. It’s beyond draining. If men are sick of Trump and his poisonous impact on their lives, imagine how women feel?
Imagine how it feels to have a known convict, rapist, treasonous fascist, sexist, racist, possible pedophile, sadistic sociopath be virtually tied in the race, according to the polls. Imagine that guy, who’s also approaching 80 and showing signs of dementia, beats you for the job. You’d probably refrain from chastising Hillary again for her sullen, solitary walks through the forest. So many women could relate, though none of us ever ran for president. We understood the impetus to retreat and lick our wounds, realizing just how far our country had to come before electing its first female to the highest office in the land.
After nearly a decade of living under the cloud of defeat—preceded by millennia of suppression—we stand on the precipice of history once again. We dare not imagine a world where we say, “Madam President,” though we ache through the core for that reality. And we ask all those who love us to close their eyes and picture how it would feel to have Donald Trump win again, the delta between his incompetence and Harris’ brilliance even more pronounced than in 2016.
And then imagine the consequences of that win.
Imagine what it would feel like to have the government control your body. To monitor all of your doctor’s visits. To track you as you travel so you don’t make a decision about your body they don’t like. To face possible death every time you copulate, for fear it leads to something else. To watch maternal morbidity rates rise, and cervical cancer rates skyrocket, and uterine, ovarian, and breast cancer spread like wildfire, taking scores of our mothers and daughters and sisters and wives away far too soon.
And imagine you know someone who’s disabled or immunocompromised or elderly or a survivor of a preexisting condition. Imagine their healthcare could be ripped away or rendered unaffordable, as expensive, live-saving treatments are saved only for those who can shell out. Imagine at the same time, their Social Security and Medicare benefits dwindle and die off within the next five years.
Imagine your son-in-law is Black or Mexican or Puerto Rican, and even though he’s lived in this country his entire life, he’s rounded up and shoved in an internment camp, facing military tribunals for the crime of having darker skin.
Those are the stakes, and that’s the guy stomping around announcing them while denying he’s announcing them while threatening his political opponents and nearly every minority group in America, gesticulating wildly and pantomiming obscene sex acts at his public rallies.
Meanwhile, you’re missing her. As her confidence grows, Kamala Harris simply dazzles. She’s run an airtight, elegant campaign with incredible results in a mere four months. She’s galvanized people of every age, color, creed, sexuality, and gender to her cause. And she’s gathered support from hundreds, possibly thousands, maybe millions of Republicans across the country.
The enthusiasm for Harris and Tim Walz is palpable, as we picture a world without the orange menace and his constant lowering of the lowest common denominator. A world without a glass ceiling, where women’s rights are restored, and we’re considered equals under the law once more. A peaceful, dull world where our small problems feel large again because they finally have space to breathe, and our politicians get to work for us, the citizens of the greatest country in the oldest democracy in the world. And leading that republic for the first time in United States history…is a woman.
Can you feel it? Remember that glimmer, maybe eight years ago, maybe longer?
The Olive Gal
green of skin, black of heart
