You know what happened by now. She’s the late senator’s sister. She’d never run for anything in her life. Her brother died in July, the governor appointed her within days, and she was sworn in before most of us had finished reading the obituary. By the next week the president had asked her to run for the full term and handed her his complete endorsement. She got there without one of us casting a vote for her to be there.

If that bothers you, I understand. It bothered me. There’s something in us that wants the big jobs earned out in the open, in a contest, with our say in it somewhere.

Then I remembered what happened just two years ago.

In the summer of 2024, the top of the other party’s ticket changed abruptly and quickly. The sitting president stepped aside, endorsed his vice president, and she became the nominee without a primary ever being run for her. I thought that was fine. More than fine, honestly. I figured the people hollering about it were sore losers hunting for a technicality. “That’s just how the process works,” I said more than once. “Calm down.”

So watch me contradict myself:

“She wasn’t really voted in.”

“That’s just how the process works, calm down.”

I’ve said both of those sentences with a straight face. The one I chose in the moment just came down to which happened to confirm my view at the time.

I know the two aren’t exactly the same, and I’m not going to pretend they are. One was a sitting vice president, already on the only ticket the whole country votes on. She moved up when the top of the ticket withdrew, and the delegates made it official. The other was a governor handing one person a seat that nobody had voted on at all. Different doors into the building. If you want to argue that one was legitimate and the other wasn’t, you can probably build a case that holds up.

But be honest about the parts that sound the same. In both, somebody reached high office through something other than winning a normal, contested race for the job. And in both, the level of outrage tracked almost perfectly with which team it helped. Yours might have. Mine did.

So I’ve started running a little test on myself and it’s an uncomfortable one. Which is usually how you know it’s working. Before I get nice and sure about the way I feel about something the other side did, I picture my own people doing the exact same thing and I ask whether I’d be just as angry. Sometimes the answer is no and that one stings. Because it means the anger was mostly about who did it and not what was done. But plenty of times the answer is yes. I’d be every bit as furious, and the fact that I checked is what turns the anger from a reflex into something I can actually stand behind.

There’s always one example so far over the line that running the test on it feels almost pointless. Of course I’d be angry if my own side did that. Any sensible person would. But that’s the one most worth testing out loud, not because the verdict is in question but because “I checked, and I’d feel the same no matter who did it” is the whole thing that separates a real objection from simple team loyalty.

This isn’t a Republican habit or a Democrat habit. It’s a human habit, and an old one. We’re all way more principled about the process the moment the process only costs the other side. I don’t say that from above it. I say it from inside it.

So that’s the whole ask. The next time you’re certain the other side stepped over a line, swap the names first. See if your outrage still stands when it’s your people doing the stepping. If it stands, good. Plant your feet, you earned the spot. And if it doesn’t, well…then you found out something true about yourself.

That beats winning the argument. Nobody even has to know but you.

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I bet most pastors have a list of things they won't bring up on a Sunday.

The only thing that’s different about John Jackman is he'll actually tell you what's on his list. Immigration. Student loans. The whole familiar list. Raise one of those and you’d split the room right down the middle, and after forty years he knows exactly where the cracks run.

But four years ago he brought up something else, and the room didn’t split.

John has been the pastor at Trinity Moravian for forty years. There are about two hundred members that meet in a 114 year old red brick building near the old textile mills. He calls it a purple congregation. Conservative Republicans in the pew next to liberal Democrats. People who voted for Trump beside people who can’t say his name without their jaw going tight.

The idea was medical debt. When somebody can’t pay a hospital bill, that debt eventually gets sold off cheap to collectors, often for pennies on the dollar, because the companies selling it have given up on ever seeing the money. Well it turns out anybody can buy the debt on those same terms, so Jackman asked his congregation to chip in. Except Trinity Moravian just forgave the debt they bought instead of chasing it for repayment. And here’s the part I can’t get out of my head, the thing he says about asking:

“This is the easiest money I’ve ever raised. All I do is tell people what we’re doing, and they write me a check.”

The most recent campaign brought in a little over $17,000. At the crazy pennies-on-the-dollar price, that allowed the congregation to wipe out more than $2.2 million in medical debt for 1631 families. Most of them had no warning. One thousand six hundred and thirty-one people just got a letter one day telling them the thing they’d been dreading for years was gone.

But the number isn’t what stayed with me. It was who wrote the checks.

Catherine Coe does accounting for a hospital system. She calls herself a conservative and she voted for Trump. She’s also the one who said we’re all just one medical bill from ruin. Terri Mabe has been going to Trinity for decades and can’t stand the president. Says he never had any real concern for the people of this country. Paul Sluder spent his whole working life collecting debt for a credit union, doesn’t claim either party, and figures the whole system is out of whack.

Those people cancel each other out every November. Their votes go in and erase each other and the tally comes out looking like nobody there agrees on anything.

In that church basement, over a spaghetti lunch, they were on the same side. Nobody had to win an argument first. Nobody changed a vote or took back a yard sign. They had found a thing they already agreed on, and they took some action to improve the life of people they didn’t even know.

Here’s what I keep coming back to.

We are told, over and over, that we are divided all the way down. That the person across the aisle isn’t just wrong about taxes, they’re a complete stranger to you. And Jackman would be the first to tell you there’s a bit of truth in there. He keeps a whole list of subjects he won’t touch precisely because of it.

But it’s far from the whole story. In Winston-Salem there was a room full of people who will never agree about that president, agreeing about this. You don’t get that by accident. You get it because somebody was willing to ask the one question that didn’t split the room, instead of leading with the ones that do.

Jackman has a line for why the church does this at all. He says “we cannot fix everything, but we have to fix what we can in the place where we're planted.”

I think that’s beautiful and sensible at the same time. It isn’t “we solved healthcare.” Nobody at Trinity thinks they solved healthcare. It was just… Here is one broken thing, right in front of us, close enough to touch, that we can actually do something about together. So start there.

I don’t know what that thing is where you’re planted. But I’d put money on there being one. And I’d put more money on this: you already agree about that thing with somebody you’ve long since decided you couldn’t talk to.

Source: Noam Levey, "These church members disagree on politics. Together they're wiping out medical debt," NPR / KFF Health News, June 28, 2026.

Here’s the setup. Missouri is not a swing state anymore. Trump carried it by eighteen points. Republicans run the legislature, they wrote this measure, and they scheduled the vote for a sleepy August primary, which is about as friendly a field as they could have picked. The measure would have made it a lot harder for ordinary citizens to change the state constitution, which is the tool Missourians have used over the years to do things the legislature wouldn’t.

It lost. Not by a little. It lost big! Nearly four to one. Almost 80% of Missouri said no.

Do the math on that, because it’s the whole point. You cannot get to 80% “no” in a state that red without an enormous number of people who vote Republican marking the exact same box as the bluest precincts in St. Louis. The reddest corners of rural Missouri and the heart of a Democratic city looked at the same question and gave the same answer, and gave it hard. Even the campaign against it wasn’t one-sided. It was a coalition of groups from the left and the right, which is something you almost never see these days.

Two places that look, on a map, like they agree on absolutely nothing. Agreeing that much on one thing.

That’s the part the map never shows you. We color a state red or a county blue, and then we believe the color all the way down, as if every person inside it thinks one way. But the color is a trick. It goes to whoever won, and it takes the whole county with it, no matter how close the vote was. A place that split 51/49 gets painted the exact same red as a place that went 90/10. Same color, and it swallows every single person who voted the other way. There are a lot of those people. There are more of them than the map will ever show.

Now let me bring it home, because we had our own version of this the same week, and it didn’t make a fraction of the noise.

An enormous data center, roughly three billion dollars, is going up in Spartanburg County. A lot of folks who live right next to it felt like something that big got waved through without the kind of public hearing a thing that big ought to get. So they did something people almost never do. Dozens of them chartered a coach bus and rode over an hour down to Columbia, on a weekday, for a hearing in front of the Public Service Commission. They packed the room. It was the biggest turnout that commission had seen since 2018.

Nobody took a poll on that bus. But look at the county it rolled out of. Spartanburg went for Trump two to one in 2024, the kind of county that shows up solid red on every map anybody ever draws of this state. And more than fifty thousand people there voted for Harris. Fifty thousand, in that one county, painted over by the color.

So I can’t tell you who sat in which seat. But a busload of neighbors out of a county like that almost certainly had both kinds on it, riding three seats apart to the same hearing, for the same reason. They didn’t get on as Republicans and Democrats. They got on as people who live next to the same construction site and didn’t think anybody had listened to them.

That’s the thing I wish a map could show, and it never will. You have a whole lot more in common with the folks down the road, even the ones whose yard signs make you wince, than a red or blue square will ever admit. Most of the time you just never find out. The question that would prove it doesn’t get asked, and the bus doesn’t get chartered, and everybody drives home alone, still assuming.

Missouri got asked, and answered. A busload of South Carolinians climbed on without being asked at all.

There are more of us who agree than the map has ever let us see.

If you didn’t, you’re in good company. Hardly anybody does. It’s a special primary in the first week of August, tucked between summer and the start of school, about as easy to miss as an election can be.

So let me start with the part I actually believe, in case you did know and decided to skip it. If you’ve looked at the maps and the margins in this state and concluded your vote doesn’t count, you’re not being dumb. You’ve done the math on a presidential race here and watched your one ballot vanish into a number so large it stops meaning anything. You’ve earned that feeling. I’ve had it, too.

But that’s a November feeling. It’s built for the biggest, loudest election we run, the one with a president on top and a dozen names underneath and more than two million people showing up at once.

This week is not that.

For most of us, there’s a single race on the whole ballot. No president to drag the crowd out. Nothing underneath it to pad the numbers. Just one line, and only a handful of people will bother to show up for it.

And that changes the math completely.

In November your vote is one drop in an ocean. In a special election in August, in the heat, when hardly anybody’s paying attention, the ocean isn’t there. It’s a swimming pool. Maybe even a bathtub.

I want to give you a number, because a number helped me.

Two years ago, a seat in our state senate came down to 29 votes. Not 29,000. Twenty-nine. The man who lost had held that seat since 2016, and rather than drag it through a recount, he conceded. 55,877 votes were cast in total, but at the end of the day the difference was only 29. And that decided who’d represent that whole district.

29 is smaller than a Sunday school class. There are more people in the waiting room in any given DMV. It’s a number of people you could fit in somebody’s living room, and it picked a state senator.

That’s not a freak accident. That’s just what happens in the races nobody’s watching. The fewer people who show up, the more each one weighs. It’s the most basic arithmetic there is, and almost nobody down here has ever been told it applies to them.

So here’s where I’ve landed.

You have probably never mattered more, per vote, than you do this week. Not because this one race is bigger than November. Because it’s smaller. Because the room is nearly empty, and you’d be standing in it.

Early voting is open this Wednesday through Friday, and if it’s a race you can vote in, it takes about two minutes. You don’t have to make a speech about it. You don’t have to put a sign in your yard or announce anything to anybody. You can go on your lunch break and be back before your coffee’s cold.

And whatever you decide to do, watch the number when it comes in. Watch how few people it took.

It’s not that your vote doesn’t count.

It’s that in the races nobody’s watching, it counts for more than you’d ever believe. And hardly anybody shows up to find out.

My son wanted to see it on film.

Not just on a screen. On film. 70 millimeter, IMAX, the format the thing was actually shot in, which turns out to be a rare enough way to watch a movie in this country that the closest place to do it was three hours away in Atlanta. He’s eighteen. He loves movies. He knows the difference between formats and he cares about it, and he has ideas about costume design that I mostly don’t follow but like listening to.

So we drove. Three hours there, three hours of movie, three hours back.

It was sold out for weeks, which is how we ended up at an 11:30 am showing on a weekday. That was the only time left with decent seats.

I want to tell you it was worth the drive, but that undersells it. I have never seen a movie look like that. I still don’t have the words for how big it felt. We didn’t just watch a movie, we had a cinematic experience. It moves fast and loud for a stretch, and then it slows all the way down and nobody in the audience moves. Just his ship on the water. The ocean felt eight stories tall and that boat looked small and alone on it. And then a storm, and your seat is shaking.

I cried twice.

Once at Penelope. Twenty years of a woman holding a house together and refusing every sensible argument for giving up on a man she loved but everybody else had already buried. And once when Telemachus finally looks at the stranger and understands he is looking at his father. The way the boy’s face changes.

I didn’t tell my kids that. I didn’t hide it either. I still don’t know if they noticed.

Here’s what I’d been hearing about that movie for weeks.

That Helen is played by a Black actress and Homer called her white-armed. That Athena is too. That a trans actor was cast, and for a while people were angry about a role he turned out not to even be playing. That a rapper got a part. That the ships looked wrong and the costumes looked like Batman villains. That a character says “dad” instead of “father.” Some of it came from men with very large followings. The last trailer got hundreds of thousands of dislikes. There were people saying with real confidence that the thing was headed for disaster.

My kids had picked up on a lot of that. Somewhere on the way back, one of them said he couldn’t understand how a word, or who got cast, ruins a whole movie for somebody.

I told him what I think: Some people have figured out how to make money by telling us what we should be mad about.

That’s not a partisan thing. There’s big money in it on my side too, and I’ve been sold it before.

But not everybody was faking. Some people actually know and love that poem. They’ve had a picture of it in their head since they first read it and they didn’t want somebody else changing it. That isn’t politics. That’s just caring about something. And we’ve all been there about something.

Set all of it aside for a minute, though, because here’s what I keep coming back to.

This movie is about a wife who waited twenty years. It’s about a son who wouldn’t quit on a father he couldn’t remember. It’s about a man so far from home that for a long stretch he forgets he even has one, and the minute he remembers, there is nothing on this earth that’s going to keep him from getting back.

Faithfulness. Endurance. A family that won’t let go of each other. Home as the only thing worth all that trouble.

All of that is up there. Three hours of it in the biggest film format anybody makes.

And the argument was about whether the boy says “dad”.

I think a lot of us are getting robbed and don’t quite notice. There’s a story right there about the things people down here say we’ve lost, and many never got near it, because somebody else picked what we were going to be mad about that week. And we just went along with it.

That whole conversation, in the car, took about four minutes.

The rest of the nine hours was the music. The lighting. The acting. The costumes. The practical effects. The director. The feeling of being in that theater. A dozen behind-the-scenes things they’d been reading for a month and were dying to tell me. It came in waves. Quiet for a while, then somebody remembers something and we’re off again.

That’s most of what I have from the day. Not the argument. The argument was a footnote in a car that was mostly full of my kids talking.

Somewhere on the way home I figured out what the day was actually for. He’s got a month left in this house. And at some point, maybe even a long time from now, he’s going to tell somebody: my dad drove us all the way to Atlanta and back in one day just so we could see that movie the right way.

That’s what nine hours buys.

Outrage is free. That’s why there’s so much of it. Everything actually worth having costs you something. Penelope knew that. Odysseus found out the hard way. My son knew it too, in his way, when he asked me to drive.

One Way to Say It

When somebody tells you the casting ruined it, you don’t have to defend the movie. You can just be curious out loud.

“Really? I thought she was great in it. What was it about her that didn’t work for you?”

Half the time there’s no answer, because the opinion arrived preassembled and he’s never had to take it apart. And you haven’t argued with him. You’ve just asked him what he actually thinks. That’s harder than it sounds and kinder than it looks.

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You know the feeling. You’re at a cookout, or in a break room, or in the pickup line at the school, and somebody says a thing. Not cruelly…usually. Just casually. The way people say things when they’re certain everybody around them agrees with them.

And you say nothing.

Maybe you nod. Maybe you find something interesting on your phone. Then you drive home and run the conversation back and feel something that isn’t quite anger and isn’t quite shame. Something more like loneliness. Like you’re the only one.

I want to tell you a number.

In the last presidential election, over forty percent of South Carolina voters chose differently than the majority. More than a million people. Not a fringe. Not a handful of holdouts in Charleston and Columbia. A million.

Do the math on that for your own life. In your county, in your neighborhood, in that break room. The odds are not that you are the only one. The odds are that you’re standing next to someone doing exactly what you’re doing. Nodding. Finding something on their phone. Driving home feeling alone.

Two of you, in the same room, each convinced you’re the last one left.

Here’s why that happens. Our maps are liars. A state that splits 60/40 gets colored in one solid shade of red, and that color becomes the whole story we tell about a place. Including the story we tell ourselves about our own neighbors. And once you believe you’re outnumbered, you go quiet. And when you go quiet, the next person looks around, doesn’t hear you, and concludes they’re outnumbered too. They go quiet. It compounds. A million people can talk themselves into silence one at a time.

Now, I want to be careful here, because this is the part where a piece like this can easily turn mean. It picks a villain. It gets loud.

That’s not what this is.

The people I disagree with in this state are not strangers to me. They raised me. They taught my Sunday school. They helped me move. They showed up with a casserole when my family needed one, and they would do it again tomorrow, and they would do it today for you. I’m not writing this to dunk on them. I’ve got no interest in a South Carolina where they lose and I win.

I’m writing because I don’t think anybody should have to feel like the only one in the room. That’s it. That’s the whole ambition.