TOPEKA, KS — In November of 2012, at a gas station in Florida, a 45-year-old white man named Michael Dunn objected to the volume of the music being played by some African-American teenagers in the car parked next to his. Dunn registered his displeasure by emptying 12 shots into the car and its occupants. One of them, a 19-year old named Jordan Davis, died at the scene. In November of 2018, Michael Dunn is serving a life sentence for murder and Jordan Davis's mother, Lucy McBath, is going to the United States House of Representatives as the newly elected member of Congress from the Sixth Congressional District of the state of Georgia. Maybe.

Of all the results that came in overnight, this was the one that was the most satisfying, probably because it was an example of someone motivated by horrible circumstances to do something so that those horrible circumstances don't occur to anyone else. Now, it's possible that McBath's lead may not survive the now-inevitable recount, but it is devoutly to be hoped that it does. This is the kind of victory that American politics needs. Among the results Tuesday night, which left us with a divided government and a muddled Congress—just as the Founders intended, damn them all—there were a number of similar triumphs.

Lucy McBath (right) with (R-L) Barack Obama, Stacey Abrams, Sarah Riggs Amico, and Carolyn Bourdeaux. Jessica McGowan Getty Images

Progressive issues won almost everywhere. Idaho, Utah, and Nebraska all voted to expand Medicaid, three victories for the Affordable Care Act in very red states. Gerrymandering had a very bad night. (There were other conservative initiatives that passed, too, but the anti-choice referenda in Alabama and West Virginia are, for the moment, nakedly unconstitutional in their hand-waving at the Supremacy Clause.)

And then there was Wisconsin, where Scott Walker, the goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage this particular midwest subsidiary, took a massive haymaker in the late rounds from the voters that he and his administration have tried so hard to suppress over the past decade, especially those in Milwaukee. Although this is cold comfort in Georgia, where Stacey Abrams was victimized by voter-suppression tactics that were not even subtle, in Wisconsin, voters simply overwhelmed eight years of legalized ratfcking through sheer numbers. This was a real blue wave, and it also was enough to oust Republican State Attorney General Brad Schimel as well. From The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

On a night when Democrats retook the U.S. House and both parties piled up striking wins and equally striking losses, voters in Wisconsin turned the page on one of the nation's best-known and most polarizing governors. They did so by a very small margin, when a late tally of absentee ballots from Milwaukee County put the race out of reach for Walker. In the other marquee race in Wisconsin, Democratic U.S. Senate incumbent Tammy Baldwin won her own re-election bid handily against Republican Leah Vukmir. The most arresting features of Evers' win and Walker's loss were massive Democratic landslides in Dane and Milwaukee counties, the two big blue bastions that delivered far higher margins for Democrats than they did four years earlier.

Scott Walker at a campaign event November 5. Darren Hauck Getty Images

Democrats won Dane County in the 2014 governor's race by some 102,000 votes; they won the county Tuesday by more than 150,000 votes and 50 points. Democrats won Milwaukee County by just under 100,000 votes in the 2014 governor's race; they won it by almost 140,000 votes in the 2018 race for governor, based on unofficial returns. Turnout in Wisconsin was remarkable across the state: more than 2.6 million people voted, far more than in any past midterm, more than in the 2012 recall election, and equal to roughly 59 percent of the state's voting-age population. That is more than the turnout rate that many states achieved in the 2016 presidential race.

The shebeen is going to miss Scott Walker. Actually, no, it's not, and Wisconsin isn't rid of the politics that produced him yet, either. The wave wasn't strong enough to flip the Wisconsin state legislature. Randy (Iron Stache) Bryce got beat in Paul Ryan's old congressional district. And, on his first day in office, Evers is going to have to deal with the monumental Walker legacy of the FoxConn deal, the whitest white elephant in the history of American politics. As is the case in the country generally, this is going to take a while, and political impatience remains white hot.

It's the Lucy McBath election that stays with me, though. While the Congress slowly slides into a dysfunctional tong war (Just as Mr. Madison designed! Idiocy must counteract idiocy!), it is an example of actual citizen politics. So is the victory by Kendra Horn, who flipped a vividly red congressional district in Oklahoma. So are those won by many of the over 100 women who were elected through the enduring power of all those marches that flooded the streets immediately after the inauguration of El Caudillo Del Mar-A-Lago. The jokes about the pussy hats are less funny than they were Tuesday morning.

Diversity matters, too, as the Republicans also found. They re-elected two congresscritters—California's Duncan Hunter and (perhaps) Chris Collins in upstate New York —presently under federal indictment, a Texas attorney general presently under indictment for securities fraud, and, for the Nevada assembly, a dead pimp.

Party of ideas, people.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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