Tony Dejak/AP Photo
Katie Paris speaks to members of the grassroots group Red Wine and Blue, September 28, 2020, in Cleveland. The group was founded in 2019 to mobilize suburban women voters.
This article is part of the Prospect’s series on The Future of Organizing.
Four years ago this month, I watched group after group go from “Who’s our congressman and how do we call him?” to “Here are the signature sheets and precinct map: We have three weeks to get you on the ballot for town council” in the space of two meetings.
Since 2017, progressive grassroots groups have been building from the bottom up, both inside the Democratic party and outside it. This is probably the single most important fact that media narratives never quite captured about the “resistance”: People who were launched into intense political action by the national election of Donald Trump very rapidly came to care a lot about non-national politics.
The dynamic was decentralized, organic, and strikingly consistent. As regular folks found themselves brainstorming face-to-face with like-minded acquaintances and neighbors about how to fix the political system that elected Trump, they very quickly identified meaningful targets for collective political action within their own collective grasp.
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The scope of those targets necessarily varied from place to place. Newly engaged collectives in rural regions’ big towns and small cities worked to win town council seats that hadn’t elected a Democrat within memory. In urban areas, it was often existing local Democratic machines, which had shown little interest in making room for younger, more diverse, or more progressive voices, that found themselves targeted for change. And in politically purple upscale suburbs and exurbs, new local activists’ biggest achievable target was often an incumbent Republican congressperson.
Thus it was exactly these suburban communities where new activists found themselves particularly well aligned with a political tool kit that was placed online in December 2016 and began being passed along like wildfire. It was what became known as the Indivisible Guide, and it had been drafted by people who had experienced 2009 from the vantage point of congressional staffers fielding irate calls from incensed right-wing constituents eager to obstruct the Obama agenda and vote out congresspeople who supported it. In 2017, the congressional districts ripe for this kind of angry flip were disproportionately ones that encompassed upscale suburbs: once the bastion of country-club conservatives, often places that had swung from Romney to Clinton in rejection of Donald Trump’s style and priorities.
Which is to say, there is a concrete historical reason why the strongest uptake for the Indivisible tool kit and initial embrace of the Indivisible network identity came from moderate and largely white suburbs.
The story of the evolving relationship between the thousands of hyper-energized, largely self-made and self-directed new grassroots political groups and the Indivisible Guide’s originators, who found themselves catapulted into the role of national faces of that ungainly whole, is captured in Theda Skocpol and Caroline Tervo’s recent essay in these pages.
Skocpol and Tervo raise multiple important questions about what kinds of interconnections can best link the local and national levels to build effective political change. The Indivisible network, Skocpol and Tervo argue, had great potential to play a bridging role, linking local groups that had genuine members—not astroturf or email-list vaporware—into a cohesive and mutually supportive whole.
The creation of the Indivisible website and map in early 2017 made it possible for emerging organizers—the duos and small clusters who had made plans on the bus back from the Women’s March or canvassed alongside each other in the Clinton campaign’s last days—to announce their presence to potential recruits, and to each other. That made it easy for people who lived near each other but were not yet connected to find each other and start working together, in an ongoing, face-to-face way, with all of the benefits of deepened engagement that we know come with that.
With the creation of the website and guide, that is, Indivisible’s national leaders had created a kind of third tissue: one that tied digitally distributed organizing in to sustained relational organizing.
And as with any digitally scalable service benefitting from network effects, once the Indivisible platform began to play that role, it had advantages that made it hard for newcomers or alternatives to gain traction. That positioning helps explain engaged observers’ frustration (captured by Micah Sifry in this series, and by volunteer leaders here) over the lost opportunities that followed, as national leaders declined to prioritize the lateral information flows and connections that the organization had been so well placed to foster.
Skocpol and Tervo focus as well on ideological divergence: the fact that Indivisible National HQ is more consistently ideologically left than many local chapters or members, and more eager to use grassroots pressure (and primary challenges, and endorsements) to push congressional representatives to commit to maximally progressive policy goals. In contrast, local groups and local leaders tend to be both more varied in their ideological coordinates and more pragmatic.
People who were launched into intense political action by the national election of Donald Trump very rapidly came to care a lot about non-national politics.
More fundamental, in my view, is the difference in personal experience and resultant theories of political change, even if not articulated as such: that rapid embrace by anti-Trump grassroots of local and state-level campaigns alongside national ones. Leaders at Indivisible National HQ have in practice prioritized those levers of change that are most visible from within the Beltway. They have sought to shape who is elected to Congress, what they hear in constituents’ phone calls and emails, and what policy moves they feel pressured enough to embrace or denounce as a result.
That’s an important part of our national political process, but it was hardly an unfilled niche within the progressive ecosystem circa 2017. On the contrary, as Robert Kuttner’s tour de force review of the progressive organizational terrain spelled out in these pages, there are lots of organizations geared at just that: at channeling an outreach list of constituents into policy advocacy via the congressional switchboard.
The Tea Party in fact encompassed much more than that, as Skocpol’s own foundational research with Vanessa Williamson made clear. Tea Party groups had steady local meetings and a broad eye for political goals. Indeed, in many places they grew out of nuclei that had been involved in local Christian coalition organizing, including school board campaigns and more. That engagement with the practice of local politics was not a minor footnote to Tea Party activists’ impact on national politics. It was a crucial vector of it.
In practice, the fact that Indivisible as an organization has played little structuring role at the state or sub-state level has probably accelerated the flow of mobilized individuals and groups into alternative channels—which may well be just where they should be. Two alternative trajectories have emerged, one more issue-focused and left-looking, the other more candidate- and party-centered and ideologically broad.
First, the former. Some individuals or groups who jumped into activism post 2016 have moved toward alignment with formally nonpartisan organizations, often linked to the more progressive end of the labor movement, to the Poor People’s Campaign, and to local organizing groups of the kind often supported by the Movement Voter Project. I’ll call this the “movement-network” space.
With their focus on the “rising American electorate” of young people, unmarried women, and people of color, the pre-existing array of such organizations had been concentrated in urban areas and in working-class African American and Latino suburban or rural communities. The post-2016 born-as-anti-Trump grassroots surge has contributed new individual supporters and new groups to that panorama, broadening it both demographically and geographically. In cities, there are now more channels guiding the kind of older, economically comfortable, and whiter folks spurred into activism by Donald Trump’s election into meaningful sustained allyship and coalition-building with these movement networks.
Meanwhile, some of the post-2016 grassroots groups that grew in largely white rural and once-industrial areas have too. To many activists in such places, where local prosperity and the Democratic brand have been waning in tandem, it seems self-evident that the route to rebuilding lies in a Sanders-style populism rather than the defensive “Republican-lite” stances they have watched Democrats offering here to little avail.
Thus one legacy of Trump’s election and the reaction it spawned has been a geographic broadening and demographic diversification of the movement-network array. That’s helped accelerate the viability of statewide progressive coalitions, which compared to four years ago now more often encompass membership groups across a wider range of spaces, draw a greater range of dues-based and small-donor funding, and are less dependent on the presidential cycle–driven attention of distant major donors. Smart observers like Hahrie Han, leader of the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, see these statewide independent power coalitions as a crucial vehicle for progressive political change moving forward.
Two alternative trajectories have emerged, one more issue-focused and left-looking, the other more candidate- and party-centered and ideologically broad.
Meanwhile, in the suburbs where the anti-Trump surge and associated new group formation were most intense, grassroots energies have often ended up flowing into and revitalizing local Democratic party structures. With the winds of white Americans’ education-linked realignment at their back, such groups can reasonably aspire to flip down-ballot seats not 20 years from now but now, and are working to do so. Unsurprisingly, they are embracing a pragmatic, big-tent approach to electoral politics, which includes active volunteer support (not always in primaries but certainly in general elections) for Democratic candidates who believe a moderate policy stance is the route to win persuadable suburban swing voters.
Looking at these two trends through an ideological lens would suggest they are opposites: issue-oriented left-committed outsiders on one side, centrist triangulating Democratic party-builders on the other. However, observing them in context and through their practice of politics, it is their similarities that stand out. All of these groups—movement-network and party-adjacent alike—embrace a whole-ballot and local-outward practice of politics, with sharp attention to the small-scale elective offices and procedural bodies where key pieces of government in America are accomplished or hijacked.
It’s not a local focus at the expense of national or state-level issues but rather a recognition that all impact each other, dynamically. Thus in Pennsylvania in December 2020, groups from across this panorama were conducting postmortems on state legislature losses, lobbying their congresspeople and senators in Washington in regard to the certification of Electoral College results, holding informational sessions on a state Republican proposal to change the rules for state supreme court elections—and writing postcards to voters in Georgia’s special elections.
There is quite a gap between this approach to politics and the Washington-centric “call your congressperson and donate again” game plan that myriad national organizations—ones inside and outside the party, centrist and left alike—send to my in-box daily.
Importantly, new grassroots’ infusion into movement-network structures on the one hand and institutional-party ones on the other has brought new potential for synergies between them, aided by the crosscutting personal relationships that the last four years have built. Of course, deeply felt differences often exist regarding policy or strategies. But where potential points of coalition do exist, they are less likely to pass unnoticed. Significantly, each of these channels has its own ongoing ties to branches and incarnations of the labor movement, shaping agendas and adding capacity in crucial ways.
In sum: Far outside the Beltway, grassroots energies have been reshaping the infrastructure of progressive organizing for several years now, in ways that differ systematically across political geography but also build bridges that span it. Maybe the future is already now.
