It's often better to be lucky than good, but it never hurts to be both.

Rep.-elect Teresa Benitez-Thompson (D-NV), the first Democrat ever to win Northern Nevada's 2nd Congressional District, proved to be a lot of both this year. A canny political veteran with deep roots in the community, she proved to be the perfect candidate to take advantage of a blue wave and a fatally flawed opponent who opportunistically moved to Northern Nevada after Rep. Mark Amodei (R-NV) announced his retirement from the seat.

Before the wave crested, however — and before Northern Nevadans became better informed about their newest resident-turned-Republican congressional candidate — even Benitez-Thompson admitted she was a long shot.

She was right. No Democrat had ever won the district before. Only two Democrats — Pete Sferrazza in 1992 and Jill Derby in 2006 — lost by less than 10 percentage points. Even now, Republicans still enjoy a nearly 12 percent voter registration advantage.

This places Benitez-Thompson and several other Democrats who won last Tuesday in much the same position former Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL) found himself in after he defeated Roy Moore in Alabama's 2017 special election.

That is, to be clear, not a bad place to be for a Democrat in a solidly Republican jurisdiction. 

Jones was given a chance to serve as Alabama's first Democratic senator since Jeff Sessions was elected as one of Alabama's senators in 1996. It is not, however, a position conducive to long-term success. Jones ultimately lost re-election by more than 20 percentage points against Republican Tommy Tuberville in 2020 — even with a generationally strong blue wave behind him, Jones still fell tantalizingly short of beating Tuberville in the solidly Republican state's gubernatorial election this year.

It's going to be tempting for Democrats to view this year's election results as a harbinger of a permanent political realignment. 

In the short term, there's likely going to be some truth to this. President Donald Trump's (R) popularity — already the lowest since President Harry Truman and the Democrats faced a similar rout in 1946 — is not likely to improve anytime soon. In Trump's first appearance after the election, he decided it was the perfect moment to celebrate the potentially illegal and questionably funded new ballroom he's adding to the White House — this, presumably, was an attempt to woo back the coveted Cheesecake Factory-loving swing voter. After the appearance, Trump announced that Stephen Miller, the outspoken white supremacist architect of the administration's violent immigration policies, would replace Susie Wiles as White House chief of staff. Then he accused Democrats of "extortion" for calling for the impeachment and removal of administration officials and ordered the Justice Department to investigate.

Allow me a moment to spare the Justice Department some effort. Per Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, the House of Representatives has the sole power of impeachment and, per Article I, Section 3, the Senate has the sole power to try impeachments. Even if open discussion among members of Congress of the exercise of constitutional powers was justiciable — which it's not — it's not extortion because it's not a threat to take the life of or harm the president or his cabinet.

Returning to the subject of impeachments, Republican lawmakers, with encouragement from their Democratic colleagues, are calling for the impeachment of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Getting rid of the alcoholic religious extremist war criminal who wanted to livestream a public execution is a good start, but it's only a start. Another official to consider impeaching would be Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine crank, who is overseeing the first childhood deaths of measles this country has seen in decades. 

Then there's Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, who has been openly contemptuous of Congress and its constitutional powers. Most recently, he redirected taxpayer money toward broadcasting pro-Trump ads during football games without congressional authorization. Meanwhile, a think tank he founded published an article that called for several current and future members of Congress to be expelled for "personally embrac[ing] the destruction of the constitutional order espoused by" a so-called "Red-Green Alliance" between "neo-Marxist progressives and anti-Western Muslims."

And then there's the big man himself who, when questioned by former opinion columnist and current 60 Minutes correspondent Ross Douthat about how his net worth grew by $3 billion, replied, "You should've owned stock." The various family ventures and memecoins he's launched since he was elected, along with the 28,700 trades he's made since he was inaugurated, surely had nothing to do with it.

I bring up impeachments because many recently elected Democrats — Benitez-Thompson likely among them — are going to require more than a little luck to serve more than a term or two, regardless of the putative wisdom of any ideological commitments they choose to embrace (sorry, Michael Schaus). Sooner or later, voters demonstrate that they have astonishingly short memories and waves recede. Just ask Democrats in 1980, who learned the hard way that President Jimmy Carter's single term was all voters needed to forget about former Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. Or ask Democrats in 2010, who, only two years after President Barack Obama, eight senators, and 21 representatives succeeded one of the most unpopular presidencies in recorded history during the sharpest economic contraction since the Great Depression, suddenly found themselves facing a Tea Party-infused electorate of born-again conservative voters.

The sad truth is a majority of Americans don't know who their congressional representative is and many Americans couldn't identify a congressional leader, such as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) or Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), in a police lineup. Many voters — more than enough voters to decide an election — see a "D" or an "R" next to a candidate's name on the ballot and, depending on how they feel about Democrats or Republicans at that specific moment, will cast their ballot accordingly.

Republican voters in rural Nevada will neither learn nor care whether their Democratic congresswoman-elect's messaging was relentlessly focused on affordability and the economy.

Democrats elected in long-shot races must remember that many of the people they represent will likely never learn their name, much less whether they were moderate or progressive. Either way, their opponents will try to brand them as "neo-Marxist progressives and anti-Western Muslims." Sooner or later, it will stick regardless of any facts to the contrary because many of their voters will neither know nor care who they are, how they voted, or what issues were top of mind during their term.

If engineering a "permanent majority" is out of the question — which it certainly is — then what's the alternative?

The answer is to go for broke and vote like nobody's watching. 

Multiple polls show that accountability and corruption are at or near the top of the list of voter concerns. Addressing those issues by attempting to impeach and remove the most unpopular officials in the current administration, even if the efforts are ultimately unsuccessful — removal requires a two-thirds majority of the Senate, which Democrats do not currently enjoy — would at least demonstrate a refreshing willingness to give voters what they want. If a removal or two is actually successful, that would establish that malicious or incompetent officials can be held accountable — and raise questions about why the next impeached official shouldn't be removed as well.

Do that enough times and even Republicans might start calling for Trump's resignation so they don't have to vote to remove him.

Investigate everything. Can Congress reassert control over tariffs and revenue? How did Trump make a deal to buy Russian diesel despite a congressional ban on energy imports from the belligerent country? What gives the Federal Communications Commission the power to threaten reporters and comedians? How many federal employees were hired or promoted based on their loyalty to the administration instead of their ability to do their jobs effectively? Why did the Trump administration order the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency to buy and analyze a voting machine — and why was it directed not to alert the voting machine company if it found any flaws? Is the U.S. Postal Service going to move forward with its controversial mail ballot rule now that the election is over? If the Department of Justice is spending its time on launching frivolous lawsuits against election officials in Alaska and California, should it be defunded?

Whatever happened to the Epstein Files? No, seriously, there is a 53-page document in the congressional record that, among other things, claims Jeffrey Epstein likely introduced Trump to Melania. How will any of the perpetrators be held accountable?

Trump has spent 10 years flooding the zone with shit. Take a page from New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) and start flooding the zone with shovels.

Most importantly, don't overthink this. Your career as an elected official representing a majority-Republican district is destined to be short — it's only a matter of time and voter registration. If you wanted to play it safe, you should've either run as a Republican two years ago or waited for Trump to leave office and run two years after that.

So, how do you want to be remembered? Will anyone want to remember you?

David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager and an award-winning columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social, on Threads @davidcolbornenv or email him at [email protected]. You can also message him on Signal at dcolborne.64.