As the clock struck noon on January 20, 2021, liberals across America let out sighs of relief. But relaxation has been transitory, as it dawns on activists that Trump’s departure is just one moment in an ongoing, dire struggle to save U.S. democracy and make government work for the majority—as the Republican Party ever more tightly embraces violent authoritarian tendencies.
How to proceed? Many left advocates see this as a moment to rev up progressive demands on newly installed Democratic officials. However, we also need to understand how and why the momentum gained in fights to save Obamacare and win congressional and down-ballot elections in 2017 and 2018 did not fully carry over into 2020, when Democrats suffered net losses in the House and in many states. For the American left that carries the fate of U.S. democracy on its shoulders, this is a moment to learn from past shortfalls and not just mount new Beltway demands.
In recent times, the U.S. left has been bedeviled by growing chasms between metropolitan versus non-metropolitan constituencies, a formula for failure in a political system that privileges the Electoral College and Senate seats with very unequal populations. November 2016 was a wake-up call. Shocked by the victories of both Trump and the right-tilted GOP, between 2,000 and 3,000 grassroots anti-Trump groups sprang to life within weeks—more than the numbers of local Tea Parties that formed from 2009 to 2012. Remarkably, those local resistance groups were distributed more evenly across the U.S. political geography than local Tea Parties.
More than any other part of the massive post-2016 resistance surge, the newly formed Indivisible network looked as if it might play a unique civic role, bridging long-standing divides between national and local levels and perhaps filling in the crucial middle tier of state-level and regional coordinating bodies. Building civic ties alongside the Democratic Party at all levels portended an enormously constructive achievement for the American center-left. Unfortunately, Indivisible, so far, has not realized that potential. Since 2017, national Indivisible leaders have raised tens of millions of dollars from major donors, but have not devolved significant resources away from Washington, D.C., to empower democratically accountable state and local leaders. Instead, Indivisible directors have invested most of their resources into running a large, professionally staffed national advocacy organization, leaving local groups and networks largely on their own. This shift in priorities comes at a time when persistent organizing by locally rooted groups between as well as during elections remains more urgent than ever.
For this article and our other research, we have assembled comprehensive lists of local groups across half a dozen key states, and gathered questionnaires from grassroots resistance leaders and participants. We’ve also tracked national Indivisible’s initiatives, staff growth, and fundraising; discussed key issues directly with Indivisible’s national leaders; and conducted confidential interviews with people around the country who know the network’s inner workings. Our findings and arguments may not please everyone, but we think this is an opportune moment to highlight some problematic dynamics and begin a conversation to inspire midcourse corrections by activists and donors.
Indivisible in the Post-2016 Resistance
As liberal-minded women and men started to organize everywhere within days of Hillary Clinton’s defeat, a plucky young husband-wife team of D.C.-based professionals, Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg, launched the Washington, D.C.–based “Indivisible” project. Along with other young people employed in nonprofits and advocacy organizations, Levin and Greenberg hoped to imitate the Tea Party mobilizations they had personally experienced back in the early Obama presidency, when they had served as congressional aides (respectively) to Austin, Texas, Rep. Lloyd Doggett and Central Virginia Rep. Tom Perriello.
To advise and inspire local collective activism soon after the November 2016 election, Levin, Greenberg, and friends began by writing and posting a Google document called “Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda.” The authors were surprised that the document attracted immediate widespread interest, and their team soon set up a website with an interactive national map where local resistance projects could register to attract new participants and receive further tips about how best to fight Trump initiatives in Congress. Early viewers of the Indivisible map thrilled to see the dots proliferate into the thousands. Many of those early map points did not refer to actual groups or to new, post-2016 projects, but by late 2017 about half did link to newly launched local groups (many though not all of which eventually affiliated formally with D.C. Indivisible).
From field visits, interviews, and online questionnaires, we have learned that many grassroots group founders used local contacting tools added right after November 8, 2016, to the national Pantsuit Nation Facebook site (set up before the election to celebrate Hillary Clinton’s anticipated victory). After local Hillary supporters connected to mourn, many started organizing. Other local group founders met on buses or trains traveling to the January 21, 2017, Women’s Marches. After the word spread electronically and through personal networks, local meetings convened in living rooms, restaurants, libraries, and church basements, attracting dozens to hundreds of people, three-quarters or more of them older white women determined to oppose the Trump-GOP agenda and support Democrats in the next rounds of local, state, and national elections. The D.C. Indivisible founders did not create this grassroots wave—indeed, many local groups were launched before the Indivisible Guide appeared. Nevertheless, most local groups sooner or later read the Guide to learn how local actions could influence Congress, and many local people used the ZIP-coded map listings to find nearby groups to join.
The authors of the original Indivisible Guide proclaimed, “We’re not starting an organization and we’re not selling anything.” Both back then and in their later book We Are Indivisible, founders Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg spoke dismissively of “the DC-based nonprofit industrial complex” consisting of “professional advocacy organizations … think tanks, foundations, and political action committees.” Nevertheless, abstinence from similar organization-building soon fell by the wayside. In January 2017, Levin and Greenberg quit their earlier nonprofit jobs and, with help from the Tides Foundation, set up a legal nonprofit (which later became the intertwined 501(c)(4) Indivisible Project and the 501(c)(3) Indivisible Civics). They rented office space and advertised paid staff positions for a “hybrid volunteer and staff” startup, stating a clear preference for applicants in the D.C. area.
Within six months, dozens of socially diverse 30-somethings were at work, and that was just the start. During its crucial expansion period between September 2017 and April 2018, the new national Indivisible organization called for applications for a remarkable 54 professional staff positions sorted into Operations, Communications, Policy, Politics, and (both digital and regional) Organizing departments. To help pay the tab, the Indivisible website had a button to accept “grassroots donations.”
Serious small-dollar funding was never in the cards, however. Starting early in 2017, Indivisible founders were flying off to major metro centers to meet potential deep-pocketed donors—and soon Indivisible directors were featured guests at donor-sponsored gatherings, including at the semi-annual March 2017 iteration of the Democracy Alliance’s recurrent conference of left-leaning millionaires and billionaires plus affiliated foundations and unions. Like all liberals, Democracy Alliance donors were alarmed by the 2016 election outcomes and were looking for new undertakings to support. A number of them later made substantial contributions to Indivisible.
As 2017 unfolded across the country, most volunteer-led resistance groups operated autonomously and took “big tent” approaches to recruiting as many participants as possible—in many places, opening their doors to independents and disgruntled Republicans as well as to Democrats and progressives of various stripes. For many months, D.C.-based Indivisible directors did not actually know very much about the growing numbers of local groups registered on their website. Detailed information about who, where, and how began to flow to national headquarters only after the first organizing director orchestrated a “listening tour” between June and September of 2017—conducted mostly through questionnaires and phone conversations with about 180 group leaders spread across 25 states. By December 2017, national Indivisible also pulled together an internal list of local Indivisible-labeled groups categorized by states and congressional districts.
From these steps, the D.C. people learned that most local resistance group leaders and members were older white women, not the young adults or people of color usually touted as the progressive vanguard. The locals, they discovered, were also not easy to coordinate. When national Indivisible staffers asked if local groups closely followed emails sent out from the national office, many reported paying only sporadic attention; and when local groups were asked if they collected participant emails they could share with the national office, more than two-thirds of those that responded said they did not collect emails or would not hand them over.
Since 2017, national Indivisible leaders have raised tens of millions of dollars from major donors, but have not devolved significant resources away from Washington, D.C.
By the end of 2017, national Indivisible directors must have realized that many of the almost 6,000 entities registered on their map were not actual groups, and they surely also understood that the 2,000 to 3,000 local groups actually operating across the country were not following any shared ideological script and were not interested in close guidance from above. Nevertheless, when speaking to donor groups and national audiences, Indivisible’s leaders claimed close to 6,000 local “chapters” and held out the prospect that the Indivisible network grounded in every congressional district could elect more progressive Democrats and advance such left-progressive policy goals as Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and welcoming rules for immigrants and refugees.
This message was music to leftist donor ears—and contributions soon flowed in from foundations and wealthy progressives. Not only did Indivisible do better at early fundraising than other post-2016 resistance startups, it also lapped its earlier counterpart on the right, the Tea Party Patriots operation founded back in April 2009 to encourage and coordinate local Tea Party activists. Back then, many leftist observers claimed that TPP enjoyed unlimited resources from big-pocketed right-wing donors, but in fact it took more than a year for TPP to attract its first million-dollar donation. National Indivisible rapidly raised many millions more.
Like many nonprofits on the right and left, national Indivisible leaders do not reveal the names of major donors, and recent IRS filings are not yet available. However, Indivisible does post annual summaries of broad sources of revenue and categories of expenditures. For 2017, the Indivisible Project plus Indivisible Civics reported receiving $6.5 million, 35 percent from small donations, 25 percent from major gifts, and 40 percent from foundation grants. By 2018, the haul grew to $14.7 million, of which less than one-fifth (19 percent) came from small donations, while 32 percent came from major donations, and a whopping 47 percent from foundation grants. Millions raised in earlier years appear to have been carried over into 2019, when Indivisible reports receiving an additional $14.9 million, 53 percent from foundation grants and 27.8 percent from major gifts. Only 17.3 percent of Indivisible’s 2019 intake came from small donations.
Early on, Indivisible spokesperson Sarah Dohl declared that the organization would not allow big donors to provide a “majority” of revenues, in order to “maintain our independence from both the funders and from the [Democratic] party.” This statement was (and remains) profoundly misleading, because the fine print of Indivisible’s “fundraising philosophy” merely prohibits any single major donor or foundation from contributing a greater share than all “small dollar” donations combined. Each year of Indivisible’s existence, nothing has prevented unnamed wealthy donors and foundations from providing two-thirds to four-fifths of its total revenues. Over the first three years, the cumulative total from all sources was at least $35 million, and more millions surely arrived to buoy Indivisible for 2020, a big election year. According to IRS reports, almost all of the donated funds go to cover salaries, benefits, equipment, and travel expenses for dozens of professional Indivisible staffers, most housed in the D.C. headquarters, as well as to pay for a proliferation of nationally announced programs under their control—and not to underwrite local organizing.
The Opportunity Costs of Overcentralization
As national Indivisible raised tens of millions of dollars over the first three years, only bite-sized portions made it directly onto the plates of groups or projects controlled by subnational leaders. Modest grants sent from D.C. to boost selected projects are always appreciated by groups that get them, yet these sporadic allocations are made at the discretion of national leaders and in tight alignment with national’s priorities.
By far the largest chunks of Indivisible funds have fueled extraordinary staff growth, with millions each year devoted to salaries, benefits, office fittings, and travel needs for dozens of professionals, as well as to the costs of programs they directly devise and control. Unlike other nonprofits, Indivisible has no public staff list or contact information (because employees fear for their safety, we are told). We have had to piece together evidence about staffers and their duties, using information from the internet Wayback Machine and documents shared by informants. In summary, such data show that by the fall of 2017, Indivisible’s paid staff numbered about 40 people, all but a handful situated in Washington, D.C. By August 2019, an official staff roster listed 75 positions, mostly filled by young professionals doing jobs with national or regional scope from the D.C. headquarters. More than 130 different job titles announced over the organization’s lifetime have been sorted into functional departments and three to four hierarchical reporting levels.
To put this professionalization into perspective, consider that, at just age three and a half, national Indivisible had already staffed up much more than long-standing liberal organizations that produce expert products. When the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (founded in 1981) was more than three decades old in 2013, it had 127 staffers. In that same year, the Brennan Center for Justice (founded in 1995) had 76 staffers at age 18. Indivisible has also quickly surpassed the Center for Community Change, a national coordinator of community groups (founded in 1968 and reorganized in the 2000s), which had a staff of 64 in 2013. For another kind of comparison, we can juxtapose Indivisible to MoveOn.org, an internet-enabled organization that operates cost-effectively without a brick-and-mortar headquarters. Within a few years, Indivisible already had many more than the 22 employees that worked full-time for MoveOn when it was nine years old in 2007.
Indivisible leaders stress their unique need to support and “train” local groups and point to Organizing as their largest functional department. There are important caveats, however. A third or more of Organizing staffers have always focused on digital tactics or performed supervisory duties from the D.C. headquarters. More important, Indivisible struggles to recruit and retain field organizers, who are modestly compensated compared to D.C. staffers yet must perform challenging tasks with little authority. Some states and regions are served by experienced organizers who have risen from the ranks of local resistance groups or other native organizations and know their way around. But most past and current field organizers are young men and women who often stay only for a short time before following typical lateral career paths on the left—moving on to other liberal advocacy operations or election campaigns.
Once in place, new incumbents may spend months just getting to know the lay of the land, because the D.C. office does not have current information on local groups. One organizer recounted using the same kinds of electronic and networking techniques our research group employs to find groups; and after groups in the territory were contacted, their leaders expressed low expectations based on experiences with predecessors who were spread quite thin and did not stay in the job for long. As of the spring of 2020, about 26 staffers on a “turf team” serve as “day-to-day points of contact” for groups across states or regions. According to Indivisible’s current claim of about 4,312 affiliated locals, this means each organizer is the day-to-day contact for 166 groups. Our research suggests that there are actually thousands fewer surviving groups affiliated with Indivisible, but that still leaves organizers responsible for mediating between national headquarters and dozens of local groups accustomed to doing their own thing.
Almost everywhere, local resistance groups have already invested years in building the kinds of ties needed to accomplish real changes.
In retrospect, Indivisible’s organization-building approach and struggles with field outreach are hardly surprising. To actually orchestrate widely dispersed locals operating in very diverse social and political settings, Levin, Greenberg, and others in the founding group would have had to hit the road starting in January 2017, not only to visit potential funders in liberal metropoles but also to get to know the emerging local groups and indigenous leaders in many states across America. Had they pulled off such an enormous investment in making ground-level contacts far from Washington, D.C., they might have been able to identify promising state and regional coordinators to serve on a part- or full-time basis. In turn, such intermediate organizers could have been given sufficient resources to build ongoing state or regional associations accountable to and able to magnify the state and national impact of local resistance groups. But nothing like this happened. Instead, Indivisible’s founders took a much more top-down approach, stressing media relations, staff buildup, and fundraising for what became a very large professionally staffed headquarters with departments trying to reinvent all the “nonprofit industrial complex” wheels at once.
As one observer noted to us, virtually all early staffers were former mid-level nonprofit professionals or campaign operatives, and the key originators had worked in hierarchical House staff offices where there are clear overriding goals: making the boss look good, communicating his or her policy goals, and winning primary as well as general elections. Once the early Indivisible Guide and map attracted huge attention and cascades of website “clicks,” the young founders set out to hire friends and peers like themselves to provide “guidance,” and catapulted them into a larger version of the kinds of offices to which they were accustomed. Quickly raising and spending millions of dollars, they did new versions of what was familiar without any real experience at managing a huge organization, much less at training mostly older and often more experienced grassroots organizers and volunteers. We have heard many stories about the awkward cross-generational dynamics at work here. Sometimes the grassroots group participants regard the young D.C. crew with appreciative maternal pride; at other times, they take offense at dogmatic instructions or brush off the young professionals’ suggestions as naïve or inappropriate.
No matter how understandable in retrospect, Indivisible’s bureaucratic centralization has had unfortunate opportunity costs. If, from the start, greater shares of attention, money, and authority had been deployed downward and outward from D.C., the network might have been able to foster intermediate associations accountable to wide arrays of local groups and been better equipped both to help those groups and to influence state legislatures as well as congressional politics. Back in the heady days of 2017, Google searches turned up many articles about grassroots-driven attempts to set up Indivisible-labeled state associations all over the country. In several instances we have heard about in detail, national Indivisible directors were reluctant to fund or formalize already-emerging state-level efforts, perhaps because they felt they could not adequately control them or because they did not want to support initiatives in some places without simultaneously established parallel projects in all 50 states. As a consequence, early Indivisible lost opportunities to help dozens of local groups in most states establish ongoing regional associations. By now, most web pages for state-labeled Indivisible entities link to little more than occasional internet exchanges or periodic conventions spearheaded by a few vibrant local groups. There are some exceptions in liberal-leaning states. The state of California, for instance, boasts a vibrant association run by volunteers who are praised but not subsidized by national Indivisible. And in a few other blue states, certain Indivisible locals cooperated with other liberal organizations through the 2020 elections. Such efforts are mostly just cheered on by Indivisible regional organizers, who have many other tasks on their slates.
How National and Locals Pulled Apart After a Joint Start
Like the Tea Party in its early days, the overall anti-Trump resistance movement—including the Indivisible network—was originally a loosely interconnected field of separately controlled organizations, encompassing top-down advocacy and funding operations along with thousands of local volunteer-run groups. In both the Tea Party and the resistance, the early scene was as chaotic as it was energetic, with no single cockpit. Still, at the start of both civic outpourings, professionally led national organizations and local volunteer groups pushed together in battles about health reform. Back in 2009, local Tea Partiers urged on by national advocates crowded town halls, staged public protests, and sent waves of emails, phone calls, and citizen delegations to push representatives and senators, with media outlets covering every step.
Similarly, during 2017 local resistance activists enthusiastically welcomed D.C. Indivisible’s notifications, policy “explainers,” and calls for action to influence congressional procedures and votes. In Indivisible and beyond, this interplay between local group energy and national expertise about Congress helped resisters everywhere synchronize grassroots lobbying to save the Affordable Care Act. By the time the last votes were finally taken in the Senate over the summer of 2017, national Indivisible was able to orchestrate extra pressure from groups in Arizona, Alaska, and Maine; and after GOP senators from those three states voted against repeal, the national Indivisible leaders could pen a plausible Washington Post op-ed claiming victory on behalf of the entire Indivisible network, top to bottom.
But then what? After the end of the months-long fight against Obamacare repeal, local and national resistance groups were no longer as readily linked in joint campaigns, not even during (ultimately unsuccessful) struggles to block massive Trump tax cuts fast-tracked by the GOP Congress. By the fall of 2017, local resistance groups we have followed were looking ahead toward the 2018 elections and creating internal divisions of labor to allow subsets of participants to focus on various election tasks, and also address issues of local concern such as environmental causes or local school matters. During that same period, leaders in Indivisible’s national D.C. headquarters turned toward other national progressive advocates—engaging with what national Indivisible leaders call “partner organizations” such as MoveOn, the Working Families Party, Planned Parenthood, Americans for Tax Fairness, United We Dream, and with the National Immigration Law Center and other immigrant rights groups. Recapitulating a process that has played out repeatedly in U.S. liberal life since the 1970s, Indivisible’s national professionals moved to take part in D.C.-focused efforts in ways often detached from local concerns.
Early Indivisible lost opportunities to help dozens of local groups in most states establish ongoing regional associations.
Repeatedly from late 2017 to the present, D.C. Indivisible leaders have signed and publicized letters and petitions negotiated with fellow progressive advocacy executives—usually missives berating Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate leader Chuck Schumer for making legislative compromises or taking insufficient action on behalf of progressive goals. As they have explained in various venues, D.C. Indivisible executives leaned into symbolic advocacy politics because they see it as the best way to move the Democratic Party toward the left, imitating what they think the Tea Party did to move the GOP rightward.
National advocacy campaigns, of course, are most effective when linked to widespread and persistent local constituency pressure. Members of the House and Senate pay more attention to their own grassroots. Yet as Indivisible directors orchestrate advocacy petitions and issue “calls” for supporters to pressure Congress, local groups in their network have increasingly paid little heed. As one grassroots leader explained, she simply “files away the emails [from D.C. headquarters]” so her group can continue with local and state projects. Even when their concerns parallel national priorities, local activists usually approach issues in less ideologically hectoring ways—for example, by holding a community forum on practical environmental issues or engaging local churchgoers in discussions of racial justice and refugee assistance. As they became less interested in the incessant national calls, some groups decided to drop their formal Indivisible affiliations. “We are changing our name!” the leader of one such group explained in the summer of 2018. “Our original purpose, name, and many activities were informed by the Indivisible Guide,” but “we have had very little involvement with the national Indivisible Organization” and “we have found ourselves increasingly involved with engagement rather than resistance.”
To be sure, many still-active local groups continue their Indivisible affiliation because they value the label and sense of connection to other volunteer groups and appreciate some of the tips, tools, and training sessions on offer from D.C. headquarters. Yet locals tend to pick and choose—and indeed most access resources from other national or regional organizations beyond Indivisible. Some local leaders report that national Indivisible offerings require reporting procedures that they lack skills or staff to process; and some resist sharing because they do not want their members inundated with appeals from the D.C. staff. By now, following the typical script, those D.C. Indivisible emails always include appeals to “donate” to the latest nationally directed campaign.
Divergent Election Strategies
National Indivisible advocates and local groups started to take different approaches to elections even during the first two years when all resistance forces pushed to defeat the GOP at the polls. By mid-2017, many local resistance groups were working to register new voters and urging new people to run for offices (including for posts such as town clerk or school board seats). Most also organized to canvass door-to-door for listening tours or to promote Democratic candidates. To learn about activities in the 2018 cycle, our team collected information from 82 leaders of resistance groups located in 55 of Pennsylvania’s 67 counties, including groups affiliated and not affiliated with D.C. Indivisible. At least three-fourths reported that their members canvassed door-to-door, a time-consuming and emotionally demanding endeavor. During the 2017–2018 special elections in conservative Alabama and Western Pennsylvania, and on through November 2018 in hundreds of suburban, urban, and small-city districts across the Keystone State and many others, local resisters knocked on doors, gave money, registered voters, held community forums, and volunteered at the polls to fuel the huge blue wave of election victories that started to reverse the Trump-GOP dominance.
Win or lose, the experience of canvassing in red and purple as well as blue districts introduced local activists to the varied outlooks of their neighbors, who were united mainly by their desire to contain Trump. Especially in suburbs and less-populous counties, real-world conversations drove home just how challenging it would be to advance left priorities and win elections.
National Indivisible leaders, meanwhile, stressed electoral activities coordinated with broader progressive efforts to pull Democrats to the left. Starting in late 2017, Indivisible’s fledgling political department called for local groups to endorse progressive candidates in primaries, including in districts with moderate Democratic incumbents. In some areas of the country, local groups find this approach congenial and feasible; but in other areas, groups have resisted primary endorsements, fearing that such efforts might divide their flocks and divert from preparations to displace Republicans. For the 2018 midterms, only a small share of local affiliates heeded national Indivisible’s call to make primary endorsements; and the vast majority of endorsed candidates lost.
Indeed, in the November 2018 “blue wave” elections, most of the Democrats who won congressional seats—with or without Indivisible endorsements—were moderate liberals, not left progressives. Many women and persons of color joined the ranks of congressional Democrats, but most of them, as well as most of the white male Democrats who prevailed, were mainstream liberals. Grassroots resistance efforts not only boosted many moderates to flip suburban congressional districts to the Democrats; those efforts also increased turnout and Democratic vote shares for prominent moderate Democratic statewide victors, such as Pennsylvanians Sen. Bob Casey Jr. and Gov. Tom Wolf. Our research on resistance efforts in Pennsylvania and other states shows that, more often than not, realistically minded local volunteers worked very hard to boost Democrats they understood held more moderate views than theirs.
After November 2018, D.C. Indivisible directors touted victory but never acknowledged the predominantly moderate-liberal class of Democratic winners. Thereafter, they doubled down on calls for local groups to coalesce around left-progressive candidates and policy campaigns. During the Democratic presidential primaries, national Indivisible leaders made repeated efforts to get local groups to endorse a progressive contender (Elizabeth Warren was their preference). But when headquarters surveyed group leaders and members in March 2019, they learned that only 18 percent favored making an endorsement, while 48 percent were opposed. As journalist Joan Walsh later explained in The Nation, more than 30 local groups “big and small, in areas blue, red, and purple, signed a letter asking the national leaders to stand down.” During the summer of 2019, further surveys reporting tiny response rates came back with divided candidate preferences—in large part because even progressive-minded Indivisible activists diverge between those who stress racial diversity and others who prioritize economic populism. In August 2019, the endorsement issue was again inconclusively debated at the Indivisible network’s first national convening of some 300 participants from a hundred or more groups.
Not giving up, the national office proceeded to ask Democrats running for president to fill out a lengthy questionnaire covering a catalog of left-progressive priorities. When some Democratic presidential candidates did not respond, D.C. headquarters used campaign materials to fill out questionnaires for them. Scores were tallied up to show Warren slightly ahead of Bernie Sanders. Thereafter, local Indivisible-affiliated groups were supposed to use the questionnaires to decide for themselves whether to make a presidential-primary endorsement—and the D.C. headquarters even hired an outside “conflict resolution” consultant to help groups resolve disputes in the process.
Local activists are more likely to know which sheriffs, police chiefs, mayors, and district attorneys have to be replaced or pushed to adopt fundamentally new practices.
Despite all of this prodding from above, it appears that only one local group, Indivisible Action Tampa Bay, produced a 44 percent plurality endorsement of Elizabeth Warren—an endorsement issued in February 2020, just two weeks before Warren dropped out of the race. By early March 2020, just as African American voters (plus many white suburbanites) were delivering commanding primary victories to Joe Biden, D.C. Indivisible leaders issued denunciations of him as a corporate, big-money Democrat not aligned with their movement’s “values.” When Biden won anyway, the national leaders went silent before issuing a belated endorsement of the ticket that still did not praise Biden. In the meantime, after briefly mourning Warren’s withdrawal, most local resistance groups had quickly moved on to start organizing for Biden.
These days, both funders and leaders of advocacy groups on the U.S. left share a fervent belief that Democrats can be pressured to the left using tactics they think of as similar to the means the Koch network and the Tea Party have used to transform the GOP. Unfortunately, this is more faith than fact, because the two sides of America’s polarized polity are not symmetrical. Although U.S. voters and elites who support the Republican Party have themselves moved ever further to the free-market and ethno-nationalist right, those open to supporting Democrats remain split between moderate liberals and left-progressives. As he promised during the campaign and is now attempting from the White House, Joe Biden looks to unite moderates, progressives, and some disillusioned Trump supporters by governing as a moderate progressive. His most popular proposals focus tightly on current crises and display a kind of “soft populism”—substantial relief checks, better disseminations of vaccines, infrastructure programs that produce jobs. The chief problem faced by the new Biden administration is GOP stonewalling, not insufficient progressivism, and its success depends on sustained grassroots organizing through 2022 and 2024, especially in purple states and districts.
National Indivisible currently seems off track for the tasks at hand. As it has turned to pressure politics, the D.C. office regularly emails hundreds of thousands of adherents, asking them to take virtual actions regardless of whether they belong to any local groups. By now, responses come from only a tiny percent of individuals on the national contact lists, and we estimate that the D.C. headquarters has ongoing involvements with only hundreds, not thousands, of local groups. What is more, the local groups that remain closely in touch seem to be more clustered in liberal states and larger cities than was the case for the original array of some 3,000 groups that signed up with the Indivisible network back in 2017.
Although we cannot prove a counterfactual, early state-level devolutions of authority and resources within the overall Indivisible network might well have sustained a wider array of grassroots groups. The entire history of U.S. voluntary association-building since the 19th century shows that intermediate associations accountable to locals are absolutely vital to the institutionalization of widespread civic activity. Especially for civic movements that aim to influence politics at local, state, and national levels, it does not work simply to “coordinate” thousands of local efforts from a controlling national office.
What Could Still Happen
Devolution and state-level association-building of this sort might still be possible in the Indivisible network—and in the larger center-left civic grassroots—but only if left-leaning donors and foundations stop giving large checks to new waves of professional bureaucratization for symbolic “progressive movement” advocacy. Going forward, liberal resources should go to locally rooted and state-based projects and to sub-nationally accountable organizers who are in touch with the varied civic and political realities of different parts of America. For the Indivisible network overall, that would mean shrinking the share of money and staff time devoted to activities orchestrated from D.C. headquarters, while allowing state and local leaders to control predictable funding and enjoy fractions of paid staff help. The groups and networks they lead could then further progressive values in different ways in, say, Missouri, Georgia, and Utah versus California, Massachusetts, and New York. In addition to keeping in touch from below with congressional representatives, all leaders in a truly multitiered Indivisible network could foster effective ties with state and local officials, candidates, and party groups.
In fact, such efforts are already happening, with or without extra resources. Across the state of Pennsylvania and in many other places, local resistance groups overlap in membership and cooperate informally with Democratic Party committees and elected officeholders. Resisters everywhere criticize and push officeholders and previously entrenched party officials, but they do not merely harangue or oppose them from without. Many recently elected Democrats won local, state, and congressional offices with vibrant support from volunteer resistance groups, and they keep in touch with those groups as well as other constituents. Similarly, many grassroots activists have run for and won party offices and are trying to revitalize party activities. Grassroots resistance people have not “joined the Democratic Party establishment,” but they are not just bashing it either. They are looking for ways to promote reform and openness—while increasing ongoing citizen engagement with party candidates and officeholders at all levels.
Our ongoing research shows that most of the grassroots resistance participants who undertook new heights of engagement starting the day after November 8, 2016, are still forging practical ways forward—and plan to stay at it. During 2020, most not only worked for Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and other Democratic nominees, but they also participated in anti-racism demonstrations against police brutality. Well before radical reform of public-safety services jumped to the top of the national progressive agenda, most local resistance groups were already concerned with community issues important to themselves and their neighbors, including to African Americans, Latinx people, and immigrants in their areas. National Indivisible directors have always hired racially diverse staffers and stressed support for the Black Lives Matter movement, yet real-world progress on nitty-gritty issues relevant to racial justice and economic equality is much more likely to be made by local groups, whether or not they are Indivisible affiliates. Local activists are more likely to know which sheriffs, police chiefs, mayors, and district attorneys have to be replaced or pushed to adopt fundamentally new practices. Almost everywhere, local resistance groups have already invested years in building the kinds of ties needed to accomplish real changes—ties to local officials, NAACP chapters and minority rights activists, churches, and immigrant-serving organizations.
To give just one of many examples, a resistance group in one North Carolina city—a vibrant network of mostly college-educated white women, founded in late 2016 and listed on early Indivisible maps but never formally affiliated with that network—posts information on when the city council will vote to allocate funds to the police department and promotes action requests by the area’s young Black organizers. Group members are asked to call and weigh in about specific demands, including the institution of a citizen review board, cultural competency training, and body cameras, and “deprioritizing misdemeanor drug offenses.” National Indivisible, by contrast, simply asks its email list recipients to “call your local officials and tell them to defund your local police department.” Whatever one thinks of that demand, it is only an abstract slogan. Effective collective action to change official decisions about policing practices requires strong local ties and specific knowledge.
Whether the issues are about policing, education, jobs, or environmental measures—and whether the matter at hand is winning elections in places where most voters are not self-avowed progressives or in places where everyone is—sustained local organizing is the only realistic way forward. Efforts are best advanced by local and state-level groups that engage volunteer citizens as well as paid staffers. Fostering such groups, as the Indivisible network has had opportunities to do, is the best way for liberal politics to become, over time, more than a series of ephemeral MSNBC appearances by celebrity advocates. If progressive-minded Americans want real change, most of the expertise, money, and time we can muster should stop flowing into national advocacy bureaucracies engaged in symbolic maneuvers and purist politics. These resources should flow instead to participatory citizens’ groups intertwined with reformed Democratic Party committees in every state and local community.
Theda Skocpol and Caroline Tervo are the co-editors of Upending American Politics: Polarizing Parties, Ideological Elites, and Citizen Activists from the Tea Party to the Anti-Trump Resistance (Oxford University Press, 2020).
