The 2024 Election Is Giving Us Hope — But We Need Community To Sustain It

A few months ago, I was feeling especially hopeless about the election. But in July, something miraculous happened: Joe Biden dropped out of the race. His replacement was Vice President Kamala Harris, a Black and South Asian woman whose very embodiment defies Donald Trump’s white hegemonic vision of America. My reaction — a clenched knot loosening in my stomach — was immediate and visceral. It felt like hope. Hope that our collective future might actually get better come November. The feeling was shared by millions: Harris broke donation records in just 24 hours. Megan Thee Stallion performed at her first presidential rally, and Hotties for Harris was born. As one woman told Refinery29 in a survey about the election, "Before I was apathetic and resigned to a probable Trump presidency, now I feel hopeful that change can happen if we speak out and stand together."

Two months later, Trump and Harris remain neck and neck in the polls. Each election since 2016 has been framed as a fight for the soul of democracy itself, and this remains true — somehow, the stakes are even higher — in 2024. Trump has reshaped the federal and Supreme courts, appointing three conservative judges who have axed affirmative action, rolled back abortion rights and given him immunity for his crimes.

If he’s elected for a second term, he seeks to restructure the federal government too, and former administrators fear that he’ll use the military in “dictatorial ways” to do so. With Project 2025, evangelicals will remake America in their image: an autocracy run by white nationalists who want to control our bodies and our minds, bringing catastrophe on millions of Americans — especially immigrants, the low-income and working classes, LGBTQIA+ people, people of color, and women. The repercussions would last generations.

In her closing remarks during the September 10 presidential debate, Harris offered Americans a far brighter vision — and pledged to unite a deeply polarized America through compassion. “I do believe that the American people know we all have so much more in common than what separates us and we can chart a new way forward,” she said. “As a prosecutor I never asked a victim or a witness, ‘Are you a Republican or a Democrat?’ The only thing I ever asked them: ‘Are you okay?’ And that's the kind of president we need right now.”

The America that Harris envisions — one with unfettered abortion access, affordable healthcare, and added support for the middle class and small businesses — is far more aligned with the America I want to live in. And of course, Harris’ presidency would be historic. As an Indian American woman and daughter of immigrants who was mocked for my skin color and culture, the thought that our president could be a brown woman fills that wounded child with pride.

But at the debate, Harris’ messages of compassion and empathy, as important as they were, also rang hollow as America continues to supply Israel with bombs that have killed over 40,000 Palestinians — more than a quarter of whom are children. Her message about America’s dignity fell flat when she pledged to finish building Trump’s border wall, an expensive and destructive “symbolic message of hate,” as Arizona Congressman Raúl Grijalva put it.

It is clear by now that Trump, who in 2015 was treated by cable news outlets as a joke, is not some outlandish heckler yelling into a void. He is a profoundly popular creation of our own society, enabled by respected institutions and leaders. As he drags America deeper into conservatism, each passing election feels urgent and yet the options before us feel not nearly enough.

In a commencement speech delivered nearly 40 years ago but which remains just as relevant today, Black civil rights activist and writer Audre Lorde told graduates they were “inheriting a country that has grown hysterical with denial and contradiction.” A country that portrays itself as a bastion of liberal democracy, yet a country in which a state executes a Black man simply because it can; a country that spends more on healthcare than anywhere else in the world, yet where Black women are dying because they can’t access basic healthcare.

A country that cares more for the welfare of our guns than of our children. Like many progressives, I want systemic, institutional change that shifts our culture from punitive to restorative. I want a reckoning with the systems of power that have led us to this cursed place, a system in which, to paraphrase Animal Farm, all of us are equal but some are more equal than others.

The kind of change I crave likely won’t happen in my lifetime. As Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of the pro-immigration reform group America’s Voice, told Vox in August, “Right now, the assignment is very clear”: to “make sure that Trump is defeated.” We will need to summon our hope to get to the polls on November 5, and no matter who wins, we will need to sustain hope long after. Yet how do we sustain the hope we need to improve the world in a society so determined to crush it?

I had thought of hope as a feeling in reaction to goodness in the world. But I am beginning to understand hope as a stubborn refusal to harden in the ways that systems of power demand of me, as an ethic of finding reasons to retain softness precisely because that is how I stay in touch with my humanity in a world that profits from dehumanization.

In a dark year, when I don’t see the humanity or grief I hold reflected in our nation’s leaders, I have been lucky enough to find this communal care at book readings with passionate writers, in mutual aid networks, at local running clubs who gather in solidarity with Palestinians, at rallies organized by groups like Jewish Voice For Peace, and at fundraising events hosted by friends.

The everyday kindness I’ve experienced there does not get advertised or amplified because it does not sell headlines, get clicks or generate outrage, but that does not mean that care is not abundant or transformative. Every time, even just a few hours in these spaces leaves me feeling that I am not alone in my anger, and that there are people who see what I see. When I come together with others who share this pain, I realize that this burden is not mine to carry alone. We carry it together.  

These communal spaces and networks are not merely about catharsis, though — they hold the keys to our collective survival. In 2021, when The Intercept asked abolitionist and organizer Mariame Kaba how she thinks about the power of mutual aid networks (or lack thereof) — after the government’s massive failure to address COVID-19 resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands and left even more in poverty — Kaba did not articulate despair. She articulated hope. “I’m more committed than ever to that project,” she said. “Because I know for a fact that this is what kept many people alive in our communities. It was people, on the one hand, offering aid, and then folks learning to know each other, building with their neighbors, people being awakened through those actions to the broader systemic reasons for why we were in the positions that we were in,” she said. “I see that people are really open to many more radical solutions for things.”

Those radical solutions rarely come from politicians who do the bidding of the system — often, they come from communities of people who are most harmed by these systems. Nearly every unprecedented cultural shift towards progress that I’ve witnessed, moments where the seemingly impossible turned possible — from the life-sustaining mutual aid networks Kaba describes to a national cultural reckoning over sexual assault, to climate change becoming a major political issue — were set in motion by years of work by people standing together in community: leaders, activists, protesters, artists, writers, dreamers and others who persisted in their visions for a just and fairer world.

“Change is constant,” Kaba said. “And so, because that’s true, we have an opportunity at every moment to push in a direction that we think is actually a direction towards more justice.” What Kaba describes is not a naive optimism but an awareness that digging for hope feels Sisyphean, relentless and fruitless — but that does not mean it’s not changing us or our communities.

The enormity of this task cannot be an excuse not to engage with it. We are in an era of deep loneliness and increasing political polarization, and no matter who wins the 2024 election, the road to national healing will be long. But as Lorde reminds us, “Your power is relative, but it is real. And if you do not learn to use it, it will be used against you, and me, and our children.”

Every time we engage ourselves — and each other — to take action against injustice, we are engaging in an act of empowerment. We are generating hope in a society that so often seeks to stamp it out. And when we organize around these principles with our neighbors, we can create real change that ripples through culture. We may not always be able to turn to our leaders for the hope we seek but if we invest in creating community, we can draw hope from something more sustainable: from ourselves, and from each other.

Prachi Gupta is an award-winning journalist and author of debut memoir They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us.