Who’s ready for a new year?

On Sunday night we’ll say good-bye to 2023, which by many measures has been one of the worst years we can remember. The horrors of the Middle East and Ukraine, the worldwide resurgence of authoritarianism, the tragedy of desperate families at our borders and in our cities, the warming climate, the ever-widening gap between those who have too much and those who have nothing . . . the list goes on and on. 

It’s hard to be hopeful at a time like this. But we find strength and resilience in our community of activists and our shared sense of purpose. Action, we know, is the best antidote to anxiety. 

So before closing the door on 2023, let’s take a few minutes to celebrate what’s been good about this year—and about the path we’ve been on since we started our fight seven years ago. 

After flipping the House in the 2018 midterm elections, and winning back the White House in 2020, and turning back the mythical “red wave” predicted for 2022, we put together a string of important wins in 2023.

We won the state Supreme Court race in Wisconsin. By electing Justice Janet Protasiewicz, we flipped the court from conservative to liberal—undoing the state’s horrendously gerrymandered election maps and loosening the grip of its extremist Republican minority. 

We won the cynical special election in Ohio to keep the abortion issue off the November ballot—won by a landslide—then we easily won the vote in November, permanently protecting in the state constitution a woman’s right to control her own healthcare. 

We won in Virginia by holding the state Senate and flipping the House. We won in Kentucky by re-electing Governor Andy Beshear over a right-winger endorsed by Mitch McConnell and the former president. And here in Chicago, we won by electing Brandon Johnson over an opponent who would have taken the city backward in so many ways.

All these wins came through the efforts of people like us.

While polls can be misleading, elections are definitive. And since 2018 elections have shown consistently that the voters stand with us. That’s the first step, and a huge step, toward the just and peaceful world we envision.

So let’s take a breather, enjoy what’s left of the holidays, and celebrate our wins. (Have a look at these inspiring videos from our friends and allies.) And then resolve to come back in 2024 with all the fire and determination that brought us together in 2017. As you read this, your colleagues at Indivisible Chicago are busy connecting with campaigns, developing training programs, and lining up volunteer opportunities where our work will be most effective—opportunities that we’ll bring you in a newsletter we’re launching soon. Plan to join us in this work. If there’s one thing we’ve learned in the past seven years, it’s this:

When we register the voters, send the texts, make the phone calls, knock the doors, show up at the marches—when we do the work—

That's when bad gets better.

Happy new year!

Your friends at Indivisible Chicago