Trump Went to War on DEI and Lost. The Democratic Party Still Owes Us the Receipt.

Politics / Commentary — REAL POWER.TV

Donald Trump went to war on DEI. Kenn Dowell says the voters answered him on election night, and the Democratic Party still owes Black Ohio a receipt.

They had the story written before we voted.

Black folks are staying home. Black men are walking away. That was the word all year.

Then Tuesday came, and Black Ohio showed up.

So who gets the credit? Be careful how you answer. The clock on 2028 started Wednesday morning.

The Count

Back in June, Shayla L. Davis and the Ohio Legislative Black Caucus Foundation counted 603,000 Black Ohioans missing from the last midterm. She and I went at it on the air over who has to go get them.

Then the votes came in.

The foundation’s post-election report says the 603,000 is down to about 518,000. Some 84,000 Black Ohioans came back. Davis says most of that gain came out of northeast Ohio.

Cleveland went from 30.9 percent turnout four years ago to 39.7.

And the brothers they wrote off? Nationally, Black men voted Democratic 86 to 12. Two years ago it was 75 to 24. They came home.

And look what came home with them.

One Hell of a Night

On election night, Roland Martin sat with D.L. Hughley on Black Star Network and called it what it was. A huge night for Black folks.

Before Tuesday, this country had elected three Black governors in its whole history. On Tuesday it elected four more and sent the third one back.

Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia, the first Black woman ever elected governor. David Crowley in Wisconsin. Aaron Ford in Nevada. Wes Moore again in Maryland. And Byron Donalds in Florida, a Republican, first Black governor of that state.

In Mississippi, Scott Colom is sitting on a lead of more than 2,500 votes over a sitting Republican senator.

It didn’t stop with us. Come January, at least 17 women will be sitting in governor’s offices, the most this country has ever had. Deb Haaland in New Mexico is the first Native American woman elected to lead a state.

All of it in a country whose president went to war on DEI. On Tuesday the voters answered him, one first at a time.

But Hughley wouldn’t let the room just celebrate. “Act like you won and govern like you won and deliver like you won.”

He was talking to the winners. I want to talk to the people who cashed our votes.

Start with who did the work.

We Did Our Part

Everybody wants credit for those 84,000. I can’t tell you who brought every one of them back. I can tell you we were in it. Breakfasts and phone banks in Cleveland. So Vote callers in Toledo and Akron, and Tina Butts and her team knocking 45,000 doors in Lucas County. The full roll call has its own story.

We did none of it alone. Black Voters Matter. Audrey Tidmore and the Divine Nine sororities. The NAACP. We didn’t tell anybody who to vote for. We told them to vote.

But I’m going to tell you the truth. The hardest worker for Democrats this year wasn’t in any of those rooms.

The Hardest Workers in the Democratic Party

That title goes to Donald Trump. And in Ohio, to Vivek Ramaswamy.

The Supreme Court he built gutted the Voting Rights Act in April. Gas hit its highest price ever for an Election Day. Black women, the heads of a lot of our households, are sitting at 7.2 percent unemployment after the federal layoffs and the war on DEI.

Then Vivek put Amy Acton’s estranged mother in a four-million-dollar ad to call her daughter a liar. His own Republican governor told him to take it down. Trump doubled down. So did Vivek.

He lost by eight.

You can’t be smart and stupid at the same time.

So if turnout is all we want, I guess we need more Donald Trumps. He did what no party chair could.

And that is exactly the problem.

Fear Runs Out

Fear got us to the polls. Fear does not keep us there.

A voter who shows up because he’s scared is voting against something. He hasn’t been asked to vote for anything. Nobody knocked on his door in March. Nobody told him what the state auditor does, or why a school board seat touches his block. Take the villain off the ballot and you find out how much of that turnout was ever yours.

That’s the bill coming due. And I know who should pay it.

The Receipt

Trump handed the Ohio Democratic Party the best turnout weather in twenty years. The whole ticket rode it in but one. Annette Blackwell, the only Black candidate on it, lost the auditor’s race by a point and a half. Where her votes went is its own story.

Davis is asking “what the party is actually doing for black candidates.” I’m asking it too, of the state party and the county party.

On the same night suburbs like Bay Village cleared 70 percent turnout, two Cleveland wards sat at 27. Trump can scare a suburb to the polls. He can’t organize a neighborhood. That’s the party’s job.

In Michigan, Black Detroit closed ranks behind Abdul El-Sayed and sent him to the Senate by seven. They’re waiting on a receipt too.

Put the turnout money where turnout is lowest. And put it there in the spring, not the last week of October.

Because there are still 518,000 of us out there, and Donald Trump will not be on the ballot forever.

Hughley told the winners to govern like they won. I’m telling the party: organize like we won it for you. Because we did.

Next time, the other side might not be stupid enough to help.