This article appears in the October 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
Dio Smith had a clean record before they showed up to protest OpenAI executives’ plan to dominate American life, drain increasingly scarce resources, and otherwise steal their future. They gathered with more than 30 other students on August 10 at the artificial intelligence company’s new lobbying headquarters, just blocks from the half-destroyed White House. They dropped banners and held signs, all of which demanded that the company cease and desist.
Cops closed in after two hours. They arrested 13 students, separated them by gender, sent them to two different precincts in D.C., and left OpenAI executives free to continue their $140 million-plus lobbying project to manipulate the government in their favor. Smith was in jail for six hours, taking solace from their preparation with other student organizers and reminding themselves that they were following the paths laid by their ancestors: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Huey Newton.
“I spent a lot of time thinking about my choices with the protest,” Smith told me, “and I believe I made the right choice.”
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Smith is 21 years old. They are from Ohio, with a dream of attending law school and one day becoming a lawyer. They see how oligarchs like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are making deals with the federal government to enrich themselves while much of the country struggles to survive on subpar minimum wage and no universal health care.
Like millions of others who have undertaken a record number of protests across the country over the last two years—there were at least 55,061 between January 1, 2025, and March 31, 2026, according to Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium—Smith risked their physical safety and well-being to take action against an aspect of President Trump’s fascist takeover. They organized with others and built power as a group; then they acted on it.
Now, in the lead-up to the midterms, activists say they expect leaders to act on their power, to similarly risk something of themselves to stop the destruction of the country. Some are sick of the new planned economy, where AI rules all. Some are sick of high gas, housing, grocery, and electricity prices. Some are literally sick, because Trump defunded hospitals so severely that 596 of them have closed wards or entirely shuttered and another 613 are at risk of doing so; or because he destroyed food safety so thoroughly that as of early last month at least 18,000 people have explosive diarrhea across at least 49 states.
Sometimes politicians only think of how volunteers can serve the campaign, but that’s an ineffective view to building power.
Others are sick of Democrats undertaking little half measures that ultimately amount to nothing. They are angry about high-ranking Democrats collaborating with the right, such as House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) holding meetings with corrupt international land-grabber Jared Kushner rather than New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, or minority leaders Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Jeffries’s refusal to support abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, despite a YouGov poll in July finding that 73 percent of Democrats support doing so.
It’s hard to miss the deep anger across the United States.
“People are fed up about what’s happening in Washington,” Democrat Dr. Adam Hamawy told me before he won his primary in June to represent New Jersey’s 12th District. “People are upset about not just Republicans, but the Democratic Party as well. I think Trump won not because people came out for him, but because Democrats lost voters.”
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FOR THE LAST YEAR, EVERY TIME I talked to a progressive activist, campaign volunteer, or political candidate, I asked them how progressives as a group should build power for the long term. Those I spoke with, about 30 people, told me that the best and only way is to do what Zohran Mamdani did in his campaign to become the second Democratic Socialist New York City mayor: organize.
They credited Mamdani’s volunteer network and constant canvassing with his win and said the method is available to anyone with the stamina to try it. Organizers must talk to supporters one-on-one and gather a core group, then send them out to talk with even more people, to persuade them to take action, to vote or rally or sign a petition or volunteer themselves. They must find ways for volunteers to develop their organizing skills, take on leadership roles, expand their capabilities and their ability to exercise power. And they have to keep doing it, day in, day out.
Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, who won his primary in August to represent Michigan in the U.S. Senate, told me his campaign thinks of door-knocking and voter outreach as a mobilization strategy, a plan to get people to vote. But organizing is a different matter that requires more time and effort. It includes talking with community members, understanding their frustrations, and creating pathways for them to act.
“The most effective volunteer outreach is about deep canvassing, organizing as an all-the-time thing and not just an Election Day thing,” El-Sayed told me ahead of his win.
Sometimes politicians only think of how volunteers can serve the campaign, he said, but that’s an ineffective view to building power. A better view is that “all power shall be vested in the people,” so candidates should think about their volunteer network as a partner and set loftier goals for what the group could achieve together.
“You can’t forget the folks who rely on you and who powered you to get you there in the first place,” El-Sayed said. “To me that means you don’t just disband the [volunteer] infrastructure that got you there … you start to think about how to engage with that infrastructure but with accountability, to build out a volunteer corps out through the rest of the country.”
Some made that point with the cautionary tale of how Barack Obama mishandled the volunteer army that helped him win the White House in 2008. About 2.2 million unpaid volunteers mobilized across the country to help the young senator win the White House. But once in the job, Obama effectively told his foot soldiers, “I’ll take it from here,” then left them to figure out what to do next. “He made young people feel important, then he got into office and there was no one talking to us,” one volunteer told The New York Times.
Political actors still discuss it, as the Prospect did in 2020 when it asked, “Why did Obama forget who brought him to the dance?” That question matters a lot, wrote Micah L. Sifry, because while Obama and his advisers demobilized the volunteer army, “folding it into the Democratic National Committee and using its giant list mainly to ask supporters to buy Obama mugs and send occasional thank-you notes to members of Congress,” the right wing was rapidly building its own grassroots army. That organizing gave rise first to the Tea Party, and it has only strengthened since then, putting Trump in the White House and now providing a ready base to overrun school boards across the country, act as January 6th insurrectionists, and apply for jobs as trigger-happy vigilantes to populate the growing immigration terror industry workforce.
Candidates I spoke with said a more pressing question these days than why Obama handled his volunteers the way he did is what they should do differently. Just look at how Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) mobilized 100,000 volunteers to knock on three million doors to help get Mamdani elected, then kept going. The campaign combined regular canvasses, outreach training, social events, and swag; after Mamdani’s inauguration, he encouraged volunteers to throw themselves into new projects, like the Tax the Rich campaign, as well as canvasses for other candidates.
For some volunteers, it wasn’t just a matter of one local leader; they saw the bigger picture and were already motivated to continue exercising and building their own power. “We don’t just need a new mayor,” DC 37 union member Isaac Kirk-Davidoff told me. “We need a new system.”
The excitement about Mamdani is “a window of opportunity and I really want to seize it and see what we can push through,” he said, and added that changing the system will require not just a personal commitment on the part of those involved, but a practical plan with concrete actions and goals.
“It’s not so simple as just ‘We’ll get organized after the election,’” he said. “The who, where, why, how to build sustainable structures to hold that energy is really, really hard.” Not every effort will be successful, as the collapse of nonprofit Our Time NYC illustrates. Shortly after Mamdani’s allies launched the 501(c)(4) to build grassroots support for his agenda, all but one staff member quit and the organization shut down in August.
One of the candidates Mamdani endorsed and encouraged his army to support was Claire Valdez. Like Mamdani, Valdez is a Democratic Socialist; she won her primary against Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, whom retiring Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) had endorsed, by more than 20 points.
Valdez said that maintaining the energy of volunteers after a massive upset like Mamdani’s win requires a thoughtful strategy. Her approach is to not only find meaningful work for them to do, but opportunities to become leaders themselves so they can grow as political actors. Joining a union or a DSA chapter is part of that strategy, she said, because those organizations already have methods in place to help people expand their political education and set of skills, and can hold volunteers “as politically powerful people who can think strategically, who can consider resource allocation, who can be real organizers in that way. That’s the most important thing for keeping people involved.”
If the request is only to simply keep door-knocking, folks will get burned out and leave, Valdez added. “Organizations that are really ready to develop leaders are the ones that are the most durable when we have these eruptions of energy and political excitement.”
Across the country in Los Angeles, Democrat Angela Gonzales-Torres embodies what capturing and expanding one’s power can look like. She was a volunteer herself when community leaders suggested she run for president of the Highland Park Neighborhood Council; she then entered the race to represent California’s 34th Congressional District, placed second in the nonpartisan primary, and will face incumbent Rep. Jimmy Gomez (D-CA) in the general election this November.
Now Gonzales-Torres is shepherding her own volunteers, holding political education and know-your-rights sessions. She’s thinking of the campaign as not just a race for her to win, but as a way for her neighbors to stay engaged, so that the experience “eventually, hopefully, inspires them to run for office, to build something long-term and a permanent organizing infrastructure to outlast any one campaign.”
The responsibility to activate volunteers and keep them engaged is on both the candidates and the volunteers themselves, Gonzales-Torres said, but candidates play an outsized role. Just 38 percent of registered Los Angeles County voters turned out for the June primary; Gonzales-Torres says that means it’s on her to make the first move, especially when someone is worried about engaging because they haven’t voted.
“I can see the shame and embarrassment, and I think, ‘No, no, it’s not your fault,’” she said. “I think it’s my responsibility to reach my voters where they’re at. I already have so many stories of people signing up to volunteer because we were able to put in a little bit more effort.”
A THROUGH LINE IN THESE CONVERSATIONS is that building power also means undertaking fights now, not just after a candidate wins their seat.
Will Lawrence, the Democratic nominee to represent Michigan’s toss-up Seventh Congressional District, put it this way: “I would not have run in the first place if I believed that the only way to win is by winning the election.” That’s why, just a week before his successful primary and after a series of attack ads against him in the homestretch, he rallied supporters and marched across his district to highlight “Service not Smears,” raising money for local community groups and calling out super PAC spending, rather than simply stumping for himself.
That ethic has been a hallmark of his entire campaign, during which he held a food drive that raised enough money to feed 5,000 people and a medical debt relief drive to cancel $130,000 worth of bills. He told the Prospect that life these days is so difficult, so volatile, that his district needs action now, not just when he gets to Capitol Hill. “Nobody should be building a political strategy that relies on everything just working out,” he said. And while he’s going for the “big win” of holding the power of a congressional seat so he can vote to stop “stupid wars” and data centers, that’s only one way to build power.
“Even if I run and lose we will have still built a stronger and more powerful community that can look out for each other in the midst of so much violence and increasingly unaffordable economies,” Lawrence said.
Candidates with that mentality are following through even after disappointing outcomes. Journalist and activist Kat Abughazaleh is showing one way to do it, quickly shifting after finishing second out of ten candidates (eight others left the race) in her primary bid to represent Illinois’s Ninth District. She quickly founded the mutual aid organization KAPOW, turned her campaign office into its hub full-time, and is now organizing community actions like regular phone-banking for political candidates, mutual aid days and park cleanups, as well as movie and game nights. As she says on her website, “Electoral work became community work, and community work became electoral power.” She was doing that, though, before the election.
Speaking to the Prospect back in January, she described how her campaign office doubled as a mutual aid hub months before it officially transformed into KAPOW. Roughly 75 percent of her campaign’s funding came through small-dollar donations, and she was using those resources “to help people right now.” Abughazaleh said she wasn’t running because it was a step on her career ladder, but because, like Lawrence, she wanted better outcomes for her district now, not a pile of half measures and promises that don’t resolve the problems people are facing.
“One of the most toxic things we have done is the insistence of ‘vote blue no matter who,’ because none of the Democrats think they have to earn their votes anymore,” Abughazaleh said. “I’m sick of it and so is everyone else. It’s resulted in an affordability crisis, in mass anger and disdain, and it’s resulted in Trump, and if we ignore that then things will get worse. In the meantime, people don’t want to be shot in the face in broad daylight, or preferably any time.”
“If folks don’t want to build a better party,” she said, “then we’ll build it without them.”
That’s the orientation needed to achieve real goals, said candidates who talked to the Prospect, like taking the country back from fascists, establishing laws to serve the people, and creating a just nation for all. After Trump’s mockery of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding, these political candidates said the issues now facing the country are ones that threaten to destroy it. But all of the methods they listed—constant organizing, constant conversations, and constant leadership development—are the ones that have worked time and time again, said Nelson Lichtenstein, research professor in the history department of the University of California, Santa Barbara. The power comes from the relationships people build with one another.
“An organization that’s doing something all the time and is engaged—unions are fighting about grievances on the shop floor, or wages,” Lichtenstein said. “You get these thick connections between people and then when that organization or one member says, ‘Hey, I think we should vote X or Y,’ you don’t need a lot of arguments.”
That comes from having something to fight for, a lesson the right has already weaponized to put fellow bigots on school boards and get rid of library books they don’t like.
“Knocking on doors is better than emailing, but even better than knocking on doors is if people are engaged in their own fight,” Lichtenstein told the Prospect. “You need the cadre to be engaged, and if you don’t have that you get parasites, the consulting class. After it’s all over, they aren’t going to do anything.”
IN OTHER WORDS, “FIGHT, DON’T FOLD,” as former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander urges in his campaign literature to represent the state’s Tenth District. The day after his primary win against Democratic incumbent and Levi Strauss heir Dan Sachs Goldman, Lander described the importance of the canvasses that groups like Jews for Racial & Economic Justice and IfNotNow established. He also described a Jewish/Muslim solidarity canvass that was “politically complicated” because of the scrutiny it would draw, but ultimately important for his campaign because he wanted to “model something that was necessary to our movement work.”
That’s another common aspect of candidates’ orientation to power-building. They recognize the strength of numbers and called for a coalition of individuals willing to give themselves over to the project of making life affordable and good for everyone living in America. Some pointed to Haley Stevens’s response to El-Sayed’s win in Michigan as what all Democrats should do: After her racist attacks on El-Sayed during the Michigan Senate primary, she then quickly endorsed him and turned her attention to their common enemies—El-Sayed’s opponent Mike Rogers, and Trump.
“The anti-Trump, anti-fascist movement has matured a lot,” Lander said, while using the interview to make a pitch for anyone who hasn’t found a volunteer project and wants one.
“You gotta do what makes sense for you,” he said. “Some people love knocking on the doors of strangers and some people would rather do anything but that … [People can] join their Indivisible chapter or work with MoveOn or engage in their union on its work electorally or politically. This is an important movement and there are roles for everybody to play.”
The role he’s chosen for himself for several months is attending and monitoring immigration court proceedings and advocating for immigrants, activity for which federal agents arrested him last summer and to which he returned immediately after winning his primary. The best day of the year wasn’t his victory, he told me. The best day is any day someone says his arrest inspired them to volunteer.
“It’s a bigger movement,” he said. “It’s not about me, it’s not about electoral politics, it’s about fighting for our neighbors.”
VOLUNTEER NETWORKING AND COALITIONS are one thing. But candidates also said that progressives must go beyond that and find ways to foster a sense of community. Like Abughazaleh, they recognize that while community-building does not necessarily equate to political power, they can feed each other. Especially in an era of instability and loneliness, everyone needs to know that someone has their back.
When I asked student activist Smith how they think about power, they responded from the heart, saying that people can feel too discouraged to believe they can make a change or even speak up for themselves. “I know that this is easier said than done but we really need to be doing a lot of community care right now and taking care of each other, so people can feel empowered and they can enact change,” they said. “I believe we need to be educating people on what is organizing, how do you get organized, so the general populace can be like, ‘Hey, it’s not that hard, I can do this.’”
Political candidates had a similar take, saying that while mutual aid and community aren’t exactly synonymous with political power, they overlap.
“People who have stronger relationships are more able to respond to whatever political or economic crises may come,” Lawrence said, “and that’s why we see even today that labor unions and churches remain some of the strongest bases of political power in this country.” Those are the organizations with enduring relationships, and those are the ones able to mobilize for the sake of doing politics.”
Community is also what will catch people in the face of a defeat, El-Sayed said, so strengthening it is a strategic advantage to keep people going.
“There’s a lot of risk in this environment; I think the biggest risk of all you have to inspire people to confront is the risk that they might not succeed. That is the essence of cynicism, that it cannot change,” he said.
His job is to get people to see that “the gift they give themselves is the gift of their own agency, even if they don’t succeed at first,” he said. “The joy and power of flexing that muscle becomes its own end. Even if I don’t succeed in this thing, even if I don’t succeed the next time, the only way is if all of us come together.”
This article appears in Oct 2026 Issue.
