Failure and Progress
By: Rebecca Prince
Tags: Parenting, Politics, Democracy, Arizona, 2020 Presidential Race

At our house, we had four campaign signs in the front yard: Mark Kelly for U.S. Senate, Jennifer Pawlik for AZ LD17 House, Julie Gunnigle for Maricopa County Attorney, and Adrian Fontes for Maricopa County Recorder.

My son (he’s 5) asked me if everybody in our yard won because Joe Biden won. I had to tell him no.

Yes, in 2020, Arizona went blue in the presidential election for the first time since 1996, and we are now represented by two Democratic Senators for the first time since the 1940s. It’s something to be proud of, for sure, and it’s something that many local Arizona activists worked hard toward for years.

But Arizona’s only blue if you’re looking at us here for our Electoral College and Senate votes. The 2020 down-ballot races were… rough. And deeply red.

The GOP retained their trifecta in Arizona, keeping control over both houses of the state legislature, although Democrats picked up one state Senate seat in LD28. For context, the last time the Democrats controlled a chamber of the state legislature was in 1990 for the state Senate. The last time Democrats had a majority in the state House was in the mid-1960s. And in the 2020 cycle, the GOP swept all the Maricopa County races except Sheriff.

Smarter people than me will do the thinking and analyzing about why and how Arizona flipped blue for Biden/Harris and Mark Kelly but went deep red for everything else. We’ll all be inundated with articles and Twitter takes for years over why and how this wasn’t the landslide election we liberals were hoping for.

I’m just here to talk about how I’m explaining this to my kids. But there are deeper issues here beyond winning and losing.

Caring about difficult, messy things says something about who you are.

Politics is frustrating, full of contradictions, and the results are not always reflective of the work and effort put in. This is because people are frustrating, full of contradictions, and the resulting relationships are not always reflective of the work and effort put in.

It can be so easy and tempting to just block it all out and say, “I don’t pay attention to politics. I’m not really involved.” Paying the bills, trying to stay physically healthy and emotionally sane, and caring for family members were a lot in pre-COVID times. Add in the stresses of a global pandemic, virtual learning for kids, and adapting ways to support family from a distance, and we could all just retreat into our bubble bunkers, and nobody could really blame us. It’s a lot.

But let’s be real here: enduring painful, contradictory, emotionally fraught, time-consuming, expensive things for uncertain payoff … sounds a lot like parenting. Take me for example: I decided to play Chutes and Ladders with my 5 year old son and 2 1/2 year old daughter.

Let me spell it out for the non-parents reading this: BOARD. GAME. MULTIPLE. LITTLE. KIDS.

Yeah, it very nearly ended in the kind of sibling war that only children 5 and under in a global pandemic during a no-nap afternoon can wage. My son almost rage-quit by upending the board when his sister obliviously got three ladders in a row. My daughter just could not get over “landing in the mud” and had a unique take on what “rolling the dice” meant. Either she hucked it across the house, or it stayed balled in her fist. There was no in-between, collateral damage be damned.

And yet we played. It felt like one of those ordinary but crystalized parenting moments you get once in a while. You know, the ones where you can imagine your kid remembering this moment years from now, hopefully writing about it for a college essay but equally likely to be recounting it to a therapist if you mess it up. Whatever the outcome, we had to play through the game that day; it was a teachable moment.

Losing doesn’t stop progress. But it can make it tempting to give up.

There were some real heartbreaking races here in Arizona. County Recorder Adrian Fontes, who was elected in 2016 after the previous incumbent held the position for 28 years, counted the votes that resulted in his own defeat. And yet, he did his job with integrity and grace. Jevin Hodge missed getting a seat on the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors by a 403 vote margin out of over 470,000 votes cast.

But the eventual winning race is built on the momentum of the prior candidates who lost but who had the courage to run anyway. It’s how things change. And those candidates who lost this year aren’t going anywhere. Candidates like Adrian Fontes, Julie Gunnigle, Jevin Hodge, Deedra Abboud, Suzanne Hug, AJ Kurdoglu, Eric Kurland, they are all still here, in our communities. They are better and stronger people for having run, and that can only be to our community’s benefit.

So it’s like the Chutes and Ladders game. Was it particularly awesome for me to have a child on each knee, each scream-crying into a shoulder? No. Would it have been easier and more peaceful to quit the game and opt for Netflix? Probably in the short-term, but how else would my kids learn about sportsmanship, fair play, and honor except to guide them through how setbacks happen but not to quit the game because we don’t know what’s going to happen next?

We all lose when not enough people participate, both in politics and in life learning how to play and fight fair. And politics affects us whether or not we’re paying attention. Maybe especially when we’re not paying attention.

My point in writing this is to say (and to remind myself) that we MUST stay involved in politics beyond this year and beyond every four years. This isn’t the Olympics. The 2020 election was not a one-and-done. The Blue Wave didn’t fix everything. Arguably, it wasn’t even a blue wave. The work is never done; there’s always going to be the next thing to strive for. This is not to say don’t be grateful for the progress made (please do be thankful and supportive), but justice and equality aren’t places we simply and suddenly land in like Star Trek and start unpacking our bags to live there. It’s something to work towards every day, in whatever small steps we can, because every day can be the start of undoing it all.

Gandalf in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (in the movie, not the books, yes it matters, fight me) says, “Saruman believes it is only great power that can hold evil in check, but that is not what I have found. I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.”

I have hope and faith that my kids see those small acts, even though they may not fully understand them now. Not just of kindness and love, but of civic duty, speaking up, voting, and supporting allies who are working toward justice, equality, and fairness. That they’ll remember me making donations and writing postcards to voters and walking with me to drop off flyers at our neighbors’ homes. That we talked as a family about how voting is important and how treating other people fairly is important.

Don’t give up because we can’t do everything or fix everything right now at once. Focus on what you can do about the issues you care about, and commit to doing that.

In the end, we make the best of the time given to us. We play for the moments of connection. We play and endure the noise and the tantrums for the moment during Chutes and Ladders that your kid tells his sobbing little sister, “It’s okay… Mommy fell in the mud, you fell in the mud, I fell in the mud. We all do. The next roll might get you out. Let’s keep going and see what happens.”

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If this moved you, and you would like to do something, consider reading more about and supporting the work of:

Northeast Native Democrats

https://neaznativedemocrats.org/neaz-native-dems

LUCHA (Living United For Change in Arizona)

https://luchaaz.org/

Mi Familia Vota

https://www.mifamiliavota.org/

Run For Something

https://runforsomething.net/

Fair Fight

https://fairfight.com/