Here’s an honest place to start: I didn’t love the way Darline Graham got her Senate seat.
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.