When We Fight, We Win
Issue 3 - November 12, 2025
In this issue, we’ll compare and contrast the highs of an inspiring election night and the lows of eight Senate Democrats caving when they were ahead. We’re also keeping the spotlight on our communities in need with mutual aid lists and ways we can all help out. So, let’s get into it!
“The Obvious and the Obviously Obsolete”
by H. Doremus
By now, you would have to have been living under a rock to have missed that Election Day went very well for progressives across the country. From New York to Seattle, Mississippi to New Jersey, Virginia to Colorado, and Georgia to California, American people at the polls were activated and excited to take back their country from anti-democratic influences and corrupt political institutions. While just a first step in the great work we have ahead of us, it was a night to celebrate and feel hopeful in the building momentum of the movement.
You would have to be living under a similarly dense rock to have missed that, in the midst of Republican handwringing and their ever-waning support from the American people, Chuck Schumer - old rollover and play dead himself - pulled together seven other nominal Democrats to shoot the whole country and the efforts of millions of Americans not so much in the foot as in the back. Schumer and his cronies’ valiant efforts all but hammered the final nails into the coffin of the ACA, dooming millions of Americans to the very real loss of healthcare once more on the assurance that Republicans - yes, those Republicans - would behave honorably and work with Democrats to keep ACA credits going.
Hundreds of pundits have weighed in by now on this wild dichotomy between the left as a whole and out of touch corporate Democratic leadership. While Americans were ready to make sacrifices to secure somewhat affordable health insurance - as miserable as it is in this country - and were readily debunking Republican lies as fast as they were tested out, Chuck Schumer - whether instructed by his imaginary friends, eyeballing his own pocketbook, or just mildly inconvenienced by air traffic delays - decided that he was too uncomfy to hold the line. From the floor of Congress, he instead declared (per the AP) that, “Americans will remember Republican intransigence every time they make a sky-high payment on health insurance.”
This last must have felt like a resounding declaration to Schumer when he said it, but it instead reveals a fundamental and confounding misunderstanding of why voters came out for those measures and candidates who won on November 4th.
Much is made on the right of the elitism of left-leaning folks. It’s a popular refrain that we’re a bunch of tweedy college-educated (if not “indoctrinated”) snobs; just virtue-signaling bleeding hearts who are too naive, gritless, and self-indulgent to be credible. (And, on the other hand, we’re also a dangerous threat to everything conservatives cherish; a great unwashed mass of evildoers, dead behind the eyes and bent unceasingly towards corruption and the craven destruction of all the apple pie and family and picket fences that white bread America holds dear. We contain multitudes.) But Americans remembering to rightly blame Republicans when they make expensive premium payments? That’s some first class out of touch elitism from the leader of the Democratic caucus, asking Americans to accept a dubious moral win over having healthcare coverage.
Without waxing too poetic, it was kitchen table issues like the cost of living that won those seats and those measures on Election Day. Zohran Mamdani ran on community level needs like bus fare, food deserts, and affordable housing, despite innumerable attacks on his race, religion, and attempts to somehow make a mayoral race about national or international relations. Moderates Spanberger and Sherrill won their governor seats on economic messaging like the cost of utilities and access to healthcare. And for smaller races, it was about community: in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, voters decisively ousted the seated Sherriff who had agreed to work with ICE on their raids.
In light of this, a phrase comes to mind. In Virginia’s Declaration of Rights, written about the same time as the Declaration of Independence, “the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety,” are founding human rights of the Commonwealth. Kitchen table issues, if you will, not telling the people to eat the costs of others’ convenience and remember to blame the right people.
So how do we square this circle? How do we keep the hope and momentum of the elections alive in the face of the Other Party’s intransigence? We keep the pressure on the House to listen to constituents and not lying liars who lie. We plan ahead for midterms and keep our ears to the ground for up and comers like Mamdani, who famously had a bare fraction of the voters’ attention less than a year ago. We refuse to let politics “happen to us,” as Zohran referenced in his acceptance speech, but instead make politics - make the governance of our country - something we do, together. We, in the words of a fellow DAN volunteer, “resist, remove, and replace,” and accept nothing less than a better, stronger democracy for us all.
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Mutual Aid Resources
While the GOP is fighting the restoration of SNAP funding for our communities and drooling over the possibility of killing the ACA, and as federal employees, including members of our military, continue to go unpaid, we won’t stand idly by. These resources lean LA-specific, since that’s DAN’s home port, but we encourage all of our readers to look up food banks and mutual aid groups in their own areas and lend them your support.
The Los Angeles Regional Food Bank Pantry Location Finder
The Mutual Aid Los Angeles Network (MALAN) Group Directory and Volunteer Opportunity Calendar
Los Angeles Community Fridges - A directory of all the community fridges in the broader LA area
Google Doc of LA Mutual Aid Organizations
NDLON - Adopt a Day Labor Corner
LA Street Vendor Solidarity Fund
FindHelp.org - A nationwide resource for locating all manner of support, from diapers to bus fare, by zip code
Mutual Aid Hub - A nationwide resource for finding mutual aid groups in your area