Mass political participation without strong party organization is the defining condition of our time, a point made cogently by Belgian historian Anton Jäger. In Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicization without Political Consequences, Jager’s 2026 book, he blames the deinstitutionalization of political life for the evident failure of today’s mass protest movements to create lasting change. Without strong parties, or other membership organizations like unions, churches and civic clubs, protest doesn’t get converted into power, it dissipates. And so, we flail away, wondering why for all our struggle and effort, we simply seem to be mainly treading water. It’s our big disconnect.

The political media doesn’t cover this story, because it’s nowhere near as sexy and compelling as the story of the individual candidate on their hero’s journey, or the story of one imaginary team (aka party faction) as it purportedly challenges another team. The media’s need for simple narrative frames—something Paul Ford called “The Epiphanator” years ago—keeps it focused on these surface manifestations. And political consumers brought up on a diet of horse-race stories and polling updates can hardly be blamed for not realizing how their attention is being misdirected.^[1]

But if you ignore the health of the political parties, and most specifically that of the party that you identify with in the state where you live, you will forever be flummoxed by how little progress you make on whatever cause you care about. Parties, even more than other membership organizations, movements or advocacy groups, are where votes get turned into real power. What they do, or don’t do, to grow and sustain the support they have from voters, is integral to what they can get done. Thus, any attempt to demystify and, forgive me, sex up the importance of party-building must be saluted. All of this is to say: Bravo to Ben Wikler, the state chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party from 2019 to 2025, for making the case for robust party-building so clearly in his new book, This is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy.

Not only that, it’s a fun book to read. Wikler writes about politics as if Ted Lasso were sitting at his shoulder, suggesting lines. The book is chock-a-block with wonky jokes and earnest writing like this: “If only there was some kind of institution tasked with working on all the elections taking place in a particular place, year after year. Where volunteers could get involved in all the different battles and get to know each other and perhaps eventually get married and have volunteers of their own. It sounds fun, right? Almost like…like a party. The party. The Party.”

Maybe, Yes, Believe the Hype

I should say from the start that though I have known Ben casually since 2007, when he was working for Avaaz, and then at Change.org, and then at MoveOn.org, and helped him organize a memorial service for our mutual friend Aaron Swartz at Cooper Union back in 2013, and was an early supporter of his radio program The Flaming Sword of Justice, we aren’t particularly close. I’ve watched his career take off mostly from afar, or through a few mutual friends. Like everyone else who pays attention to Democratic Party politics, I’ve heard plenty about how in recent years the Wisconsin party was one of the few bright spots, where party leaders and organizers were “doing things right.” But as readers of The Connector must know by now, I’m skeptical by nature. If something sounds too good to be true, maybe it isn’t.

So, I’ll admit, I came to read This is the Plan with a bit of a gimlet eye. Ben has been on a national book tour that has been largely laudatory. Some of what he is talking about, both in those appearances and in the book, is beyond the scope of this review: things like how to fix the Supreme Court, why to abolish the filibuster, and the like—big, medium-term goals that we will have to wrestle with in 2028 and beyond. But his central claim has been this: “In addition to being a civic organization and a bank account, a party can be a third thing: a permanent campaign….A strong party can change politics.” [My emphasis.] Even more, he asserts that thanks to his work and that of many colleagues in the Wisconsin Democratic Party, there is now, as he told Politico last month, “a network of neighbor-to-neighbor organizers in every community in Wisconsin, in every county, in every small town, in every big city and suburb that are going to be ready to go” to propel its candidates to victory in the fall.

That’s a big, even audacious, and very checkable claim. And yet, in none of the coverage of Ben’s book have I seen anyone try to verify it. So I did. And I’d say it’s probably 80-90% true. Or true enough. And we should be impressed, though the story of how this has been built and maintained is complicated.

First, the publicly available data from WisDems’ Mobilize.us account as well as state campaign finance disclosure reports shows that, as I noted a few months back, the state party is genuinely invested in a lot of grass-roots community organizing and county-level party-building. As of yesterday, August 18, WisDems listed 546 upcoming in-person events on Mobilize, with just under half described as a canvass, followed by meetings (18%) and community events (10%). Geographically, these aren’t quite “in every county,” as Ben claimed to Politico, but they’re in 55 of the state’s 72 counties (76%). Of the ones that lack events, several are among the state’s smallest counties by population, and several recently had events but don’t have anything fresh listed coming up. (Also, about 20% of all the upcoming events didn’t give clear enough location information, so it’s possible we’re undercounting all the counties covered.)

Many of these WisDems events are taking place in recurring local hubs. Mobilize lists 57 locations that have listed two or more events, of which 17 are explicitly named county-party offices, with the rest split between university student unions and other community venues. We need more of these kinds of places—if every campaign that temporarily rents a grimy, empty storefront to host its field effort instead poured that money into the annual rental costs of a dedicated party or community clubhouse, imagine how different local politics might feel. (Ping me if you want to work on this idea.)

That’s not the only evidence for Ben’s claim about WisDems’ local organizing. In addition to subsidizing county-party office rents, the party also supports about two hundred fifty “neighborhood action teams” that are made up of local volunteers who not only lead canvassing around election time but also do voter education, issue advocacy, candidate forums, persuasion canvasses and more—year-round. Though Ben doesn’t say so in his book, some of these teams date themselves all the way back to the 2008 presidential election, when they started out as Obama organizing hubs. (The one he joined when he moved back to Wisconsin from Washington DC, the Madtown Os, was originally named that way for its Obama connection.) So it turns out OFA didn’t die out everywhere!

This coverage map for Madison shows what a well-organized hothouse of local Democratic activism can look like:

This is not to say that quality of local, grassroots organizing supported by WisDems across the state is as fulsome as the quantity. One contact of mine in a rural part of the state who serves on their county party’s executive committee and asked to remain anonymous wasn’t impressed. They told me, “We get two things from the state party: a few hundred bucks/month toward our office space and an organizer who’s stretched across a huge region and is generally unresponsive to our requests.” They added, “For example, he refuses to cut turf as requested by our volunteer leaders (who’ve been canvassing the community for years, while he’s a transplant who’s been here less than a year). The WisDems organizer is also generally unwilling to support organizing efforts outside the single largest city in our county.”

Another friend who volunteers with a different county’s party, also in a predominantly rural part of the state, said he believed that it was “better organized and better financed this year than in past years, but I think most of that is due to local people stepping up more.” He said that before 2024, this county party “went for years without having their own website, and this is the first year we’ve been able to afford a local office that stays open year-round.” He also complained about the state party’s heavy reliance on NGPVAN for canvassing lists—but as Connector readers know well, that problem is universal and scarcely close to being fixed.

Frankly, it’s hard to judge how well local WisDems groupings do as organizing hubs without more resources than this one-person newsletter. Anecdotal reports are just that. Compared to other Democratic state parties, though, the WisDems still stand out from the pack. Any legal resident 14 or older can become a dues-paying card-carrying member complete with voting privileges in party affairs; 70 of the 72 county parties list contact info for their chairs and hold regular meetings, and the party also has several membership caucuses that bring together likeminded people across the state across common identities. Not only do county parties hold annual conventions, so do some congressional districts.

In both absolute and per-capita terms, the WisDems outclass nearly every other state party for how much it has going on. My analysis of Mobilize event data shows it ahead of every other state, with only Alaska – where the Senate race is a top priority for national Democrats – climbing ahead on the leaderboard at a similar pace of upcoming events. The two charts below show the number of total Mobilize events by party account and per million residents.

One thing this analysis also reveals: a damning number of state Democratic parties are more like insider clubs than organizing machines. The Democratic parties of Washington, DC, Florida, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, New York, Washington, and West Virginia all have Mobilize accounts but show zero upcoming events. Texas, Tennessee, Ohio, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Mississippi all list between one and three events. And Alabama, Colorado, Hawaii, Illinois, Kansas, Louisiana, Nevada, and Rhode Island aren’t on Mobilize at all. This doesn’t mean these state parties and their county affiliates are dormant—but it does mean they aren’t bothering to make it super-easy for interested residents to find their way to them. (This is a best-effort name search, not an authoritative registry — some states may run official field programs under names this search didn’t catch, which would understate their totals.)

So How Did WisDems Do It?

One of the things that makes This is the Plan an invaluable document for today is how Ben uses the Wisconsin experience of the last 16 years as a template for pro-democracy activists everywhere. The MAGA backlash and authoritarian power-grab came to Wisconsin starting in 2010, after all, when Republican Scott Walker won the governorship and began going after key pillars of Democratic power in the state—attacking labor unions’ to organize, undermining access to the ballot for college students and Black voters, and gerrymandering the hell out of state legislative districts. And the Democratic resurgence that Ben is arguing for spreading across the country started really gaining momentum in Wisconsin after the 2018 elections, when his predecessor as party chair, Martha Laning, decided to start building up its grassroots organizing work.

“In the aftermath of Trump’s victory [in 2016],” he writes, “Chair Laning launched what would be a brilliant innovation: What if, instead of building neighborhood teams dedicated to a single candidate, you built them to help every candidate—through the party itself? And then supported and expanded those teams year round?” According to This is the Plan, WisDems knocked on twice as many doors in 2018 as they did in 2016, at half the cost in staff and supplies. Not coincidentally, in 2018, Democrat Tony Evers swept into the governor’s office by what Ben jokes was “a landslide” of 1.1% and the turnaround began. That’s because the WisDems adopted Laning’s core philosophy, as Ben’s cites her saying: “A candidate is like a car. The party builds the roads on which candidates drive.”

But there’s one more crucial ingredient to the story: Money, lots of it.

In 2015, the Wisconsin GOP revised the state’s campaign finance laws, making it legal, Ben writes, for “an infinitely wealthy donor” to “give infinity dollars to a state party (say, the Wisconsin GOP), and the party could transfer infinity dollars to a candidate (say, Scott Walker). We took to calling this the ‘Scott Walker loophole.’”

Ben was elected state party chair in June 2019. At the time the party had a full-time staff of 23, of which half were part of the year-round organizing program launched by Laning. And he immediately set to work fundraising. In his first three months, he raised more than a million dollars. In the next three months, more than twice that. And in 2020, with tremendous national attention on several WI election fights, ten times that. Which he writes, enabled the state party to quadruple its paid staff.

To his credit, Ben doesn’t deny how much this infusion of money has mattered. Nor does his dance around how hard it is for most state party chairs to raise the kind of money he did in Wisconsin. As he writes, while the WisDems are very interested as a party in including and involving ordinary residents as members, what makes state Democratic parties different from other sorts of civic clubs is that they have “a very unusual type of bank account.” Not only that, most of the time, what drives money into that bank account are candidates running for high level office, since the limits on what people can give to federal candidates are more stringent. But that kind of fundraising – where candidates ask their wealthiest donors to give more to their state party—comes with obvious strings: the money is supposed to be spent on their behalf. “When a party leader doesn’t take the hint, campaigns stop raising money for the party,” Ben writes. “That generally leads to the party leader losing their reelection bid and being replaced by a hint taker.”

But in his case, things were a bit different. “Remember the Scott Walker loophole?” he writes at one point. “Well, we drove a truck through it.” (141) In This is the Plan, Ben mainly describes his efforts to motivate small donors to help support WisDems’ party-building work, citing triumphs like a mass Zoom attended by 100,000 people during the height of the Covid lockdown, when most of the case of The Princess Bride appeared to reenact scenes from the movie. That event alone raised $4.25 million, Ben writes. He adds, “I view our approach as building a form of party-based public financing for Democratic candidates in Wisconsin.”

Well, sort of. Because a glance at the Wisconsin campaign finance transparency website shows that of the $136.1 million that the state party has raised into its state bank account since 2018, $48.7 million of that came from just nine billionaires: Reid Hoffman, Karla Jurvetson, J.B. Pritzker (governor of Illinois), George Soros, Sage Weil, Lynn Schusterman, Robert Price, Lynde Uihlein (a scion of the Wisconsin Republican clan who leans the other way), and Robert Rubin. In 2024, those nine gave almost 40% of the total the state party raised to its state account, and while the party’s fundraising overall is lower this cycle, that charmed group of nine is still amounting more than 37% of its haul so far. Only two of them live in state.

In the post-Citizens United world, where Republican billionaires outnumber Democratic billionaires, and one quasi-trillionaire has personally put up hundreds of millions to back GOP candidates, you can’t really fault the WisDems for hoovering up every dollar they can find. But the state party’s reliance on Democratic-leaning billionaires to fund so much of its operations makes Ben’s argument a little shakier. After all, he who pays the money calls the tune. There’s no way around this problem but genuine public financing for political parties (in exchange for them abiding by contribution limits), and that conversation has barely begun. See Lee Drutman’s essay, “Campaign finance reform for a multiparty America,” for a start.

As we slouch towards the elections of 2026 and 2028 and begin to glimpse the possibility of a democracy renewed and strengthened, This is a Plan leaves a critical challenge unresolved. Along with all the other changes to the political process that we desperately need—proportional representation for House elections, fusion voting for Senate seats and other single-office seats, an expanded Supreme Court, statehood for DC, universal voting—if we want a stronger democracy, we also need our political parties to be stronger. One engine for that change can be the dynamic that has played out in Wisconsin, where a harsh Republican takeover led to a fierce Democratic response—albeit built on a mix of grassroots organizing and billionaire largesse. Another engine could be more competition from upstart parties, which could rouse some of the more complacent state branches of the Democratic Party to wake up. But none of this will happen without organized people and committed, visionary leaders. Wisconsin in recent years has been blessed with both, enough to offer the rest of us a model.

Also Worth Reading

—Make time to read both parts of Adam Bonica’s new investigation into Democratic scam PAC, the data story itself which is damning for how much senior abuse it documents, and the backstory of how the DSCC and DCCC intimidated The New York Times into not publishing his investigation (after soliciting it and factchecking it), and then how Mothership Strategies and the Progressive Turnout Project did the same to the Bulwark, which had considered publishing it after the Times rejected it. You’d think that a party that prides itself on fighting to defend the most vulnerable would be addressing the serious abuses Bonica has unearthed, but instead there’s been a deafening silence from Democratic Party electeds and officials (as well as the national press corps) since he posted his reports at the beginning of this week.

—Food for thought for organizers: Garrett Bucks, “Our political movements should be better at organizing than the average megachurch,” The White Pages, August 5, 2026. Very practical comparison between how a typical megachurch welcomes newcomers vs a local Indivisible or DSA chapter.

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^[1] The current wave of stories about some kind of gigantic struggle between “the left” and “the center” or “progressives” and “moderates” inside the Democratic Party is just one recent example of how the media overlays a simple narrative over a much more complex phenomenon. To me, the much more significant story of this primary season is the big surge of Democratic turnout compared to 2018, the last big Blue Wave year: up 122% in Texas, up 95% in Georgia, up 72% in Maine, up 48% in Wisconsin, up 32% in Michigan. (It’s also up in some Republican primaries, most notably Iowa, Georgia and Texas but generally not as much.)

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Together, these two pieces share a common signal amidst all the noise coming at us from all directions: consistent and long-term investment in local community organizing needs to be of at least equal, if not greater, importance than short-term spending on media, messaging, polling, paid field, etc.

First, the story coming out of Minnesota. Here are some key quotes from Bierschbach’s report:

For decades, Democratic organizers in Minnesota have searched for a way to turn moments of outrage into lasting political engagement. Many believe Operation Metro Surge did just that. A sprawling volunteer network that sprang up almost overnight to help immigrant families is now feeding people into the state’s DFL political infrastructure as precinct chairs, convention delegates, campaign volunteers and even candidates for office. Organizers say that transformation wasn’t accidental: Years spent building neighborhood networks and organizing infrastructure meant thousands of first-time volunteers had somewhere to go once the immediate crisis subsided….

For Carl McBurney, the first step was standing outside a school. The south Minneapolis father of two had always voted and followed politics, but activism had taken a back seat to working and raising a family over the last decade. When the immigration crackdown started, he signed up for a school patrol in his neighborhood. “January started with just being in a school patrol trying to make sure kids felt safe,” he said. “It snowballed from there.” Months later, McBurney had attended his first DFL precinct caucus, became a precinct chair and joined his neighborhood association’s board. The experience changed how he thinks about civic engagement. Instead of jumping in only when there’s a crisis, he said, he’s trying to build the relationships that make communities more resilient before one happens. “One person can make a huge difference by just establishing some kind of communication across the block,” he said….

Even in Minnesota, where voter turnout, volunteerism and civic engagement already rank among the nation’s highest, organizers said the response to Operation Metro Surge surprised them. TakeAction Minnesota [a progressive advocacy group] trained more than 2,000 volunteers to observe and document law enforcement activity, coordinated roughly 3,000 patrol shifts a week at the height of the crackdown and helped raise $4 million to keep families fed and housed. Hundreds of people began joining nightly Zoom calls that previously drew 40 or 50 participants. [Amanda] Otero [its co-executive director] said groups like TakeAction weren’t creating new organizations from scratch during the crisis. They were plugging thousands of new volunteers into networks that already existed. Organizers had spent years building toward this moment. After George Floyd’s murder drew enormous demonstrations in 2020, Otero said many struggled to convert that energy into sustained organizing, a challenge compounded by the pandemic. Operation Metro Surge found Minnesota’s organizing infrastructure better prepared. Now, some of those volunteers-turned-activists are connecting with a broader network of groups working to flip the state House to DFL control as well as the rural First District seat in Congress, she said.

The Minnesota DFL Party also trained 10,000 observers in 48 days and tens of thousands more went through trainings through other organizations, said party chair Richard Carlbom. The opportunity was clear, he said: “How do we get you to go from that protest on a roadside or a bridge to door knocking in September?” The party reported record turnout at February’s precinct caucuses, and more than half of the people who attended the DFL convention this spring were brand new to the process, drawn in by the immigration crackdown.<<

Several points to underscore:

• The anti-ICE community defense work didn’t come from nowhere. It was built by and on top of existing community organizing networks, like the more than 90 immigrant, labor, legal, faith and community organizations that make up the state’s Immigrant Defense Network.

• Something like 30,000 people got trained to be constitutional observers in response to “Metro Surge,” along with thousands more volunteers who signed up to deliver food and give rides to at-risk families and provide other kinds of direct aid. That’s almost one percent of the state’s adult population.

• The DFL didn’t stand apart from this work; it was directly and deeply involved, as exemplified by its work doing constitutional observer training.

• Finally, unlike many state Democratic parties, the DFL has a relatively open infrastructure and culture of inclusion, centered on a multi-tiered caucus and convention process for endorsing candidates (the state GOP is similar). Any eligible voter can attend a precinct caucus, put forward resolutions, and run to be a delegate at the party’s convention. Though candidates can bypass that process and get on the primary ballot on their own, the DFL endorsement carries real weight with voters and comes with significant support from the party.

What this all means is the path from activist to party volunteer to influencing power isn’t as steep as it is elsewhere, in part because ordinary people can see how their involvement can make a difference (rather than parties dominated by money or powerful insiders). Likewise, because the DFL is so porous, it has made sense for organizing groups that do ongoing power-building to invest real effort in getting their own activists to get more involved in the party. For some people, this means the convention endorsement process is “too chaotic” or too malleable to the desires of the most politically engaged; others disagree and say this is what makes the DFL a “living, breathing political party.”

No One is Getting Left Behind This Time

If you’ve tuned into any movement-wide mass Zoom meetings called to respond to some Trump outrage or get people revved up for the next big rally, you are probably already familiar with Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson. Her good cheer and southern drawl are a comfort to many. She’s also an important strategist for whatever you want to call the resistance – the Defiance, the No Kings coalition, whatever – though a lot of her work goes on behind the scenes. I don’t see her doing a lot of movement critique in her public work, befitting someone who is in the thick of trying to knit together the biggest possible coalition for us to face the polycrisis we’re in.

So her post from July 29 on Medium caught my eye. Titled, “The Battleground Map is Lying to You,” it reads like a rebuke of a whole generation of Democratic/progressive strategy. She starts by reminding readers of the blatantly racial power grab underway in the South in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Callais ruling that eviscerated the last standing leg of the Voting Rights Act and decided that drawing election districts to remedy racial discrimination against minorities was unconstitutional. In Tennessee, her home state, the majority Black city of Memphis, which was previously the heart of the state’s only majority Black congressional district, has been sliced into three pieces, destroying that community’s main power base. But, Woodard Henderson, writes, “there’s one simple reason most of us aren’t still livid” about this:

“Tennessee isn’t on the map. The one we’ve all been handed, the one that gets pulled up on cable every two years, with the same seven or eight states colored in: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia. The battleground map. It decides where money goes. It decides where field organizers get hired, where doors get knocked, and where candidates fly in for rallies. If your state is on it, you matter. If your state isn’t, you’re “safe,” and safe means skipped, conceded.”

She goes on to point out that similar things have happened in other southern states where GOP-dominated legislatures and governors are taking advantage of the Callais ruling, including Florida, Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi. So far, there’s only one state where the Republicans have backed off: Georgia. That’s where Black-led organizations and coalition partners turned up the heat enough to make Republican state legislators wary of redistricting now. And it’s not a coincidence that the pushback in Georgia was so strong—it’s been on the battleground map for years, drawing lots of outside investment.

Woodard Henderson points out that there’s plenty of solid organizing that’s been going on for a long time in the neglected states, like the Memphis A. Philip Randolph Institute, Memphis for All, Free the 901, MICAH, Tennessee for All, the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, and The Equity Alliance in Tennessee.

Collectively, if we want to make states like Tennessee and Mississippi and Alabama and Florida and Louisiana harder to attack by the forces of white supremacy, we must start prioritizing supporting groups like these in all of those states. The battleground is bigger. Our map has to reflect that.

—For starters, look to the Movement Voter Project and Oath.vote for pointers on how and what to prioritize when you donate to groups and candidates. See MVP’s Southern Plan and Oath’s Show Up for the South portfolio in particular.

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Coda: Where Short-Termism Matters

While I’m making yet another pitch for long-term thinking by citing these two posts, there’s still a much shorter-term emergency on the horizon: the risk that November’s elections will be disrupted by Trump and his minions. Here again, Woodard Henderson is a useful guide. She’s taken the Voting Rights Lab’s Election Risk Heat Map and expanded its scope to cover all fifty states, not just the ones with close contests. Go here to see “The Whole Map” to see where your county fits in the larger picture (and let’s hear it for AI-assisted data munging, too!).

End Times

Yeehaw, indeed!

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A week ago, journalist J. Patrick Coolican of the Minnesota Reformer got ahold of Schrantz’s memo and published this in-depth story about it, with her permission. The full memo is here courtesy Coolican and it’s quite bracing. I strongly urge you to go read both and start discussing and digesting them with whatever groups you are involved with.

As you will see, much of the memo is about connecting the dots illustrating the regime’s power-grab planning and then outlining a very robust form of the usual “protect the vote” work that people have been doing for years:

• preparing local teams of lawyers to do rapid response filings for emergency injunctions,

• preparing political and civic leaders to be ready to speak out,

• mapping which election workers and administrators will need support (or opposition, if they are election deniers), and

• preparing local groups in key places where problems may be expected to flare up.

It’s the bottom third of the memo, which discusses scenarios for fighting back in real time and mass mobilization, that is most helpful in opening up a critical discussion that up until now has mainly be held behind the scenes (and/or fueled by apocalyptic clickbait artists). What do we all need to do to be ready for this? Schrantz envisions large numbers not just of pre-positioned lawyers, but also trained accompaniers at polling places like the 30,000 constitutional observers who helped stop ICE in its tracks last winter in her state.

Finally, she gets to the hardest part, in case all the previous steps don’t ensure that the core democratic institutions surrounding voting and certifying elections hold up. She writes:

We must also prepare for a harder scenario. If duly elected leaders are not seated. If Congress is suspended or its constitutional role is nullified through delay. If the results of a free and fair election are simply refused. In those moments, the courts will be too slow. The lawyers will need time we do not have. The institutions we are counting on to hold will be precisely the ones under attack. In that scenario, civil society cannot wait. It must move, and it must move with the speed,scale, and clarity that only comes from preparation done long before the crisis arrives.

Minnesota was the proof of concept of this approach. In just two weeks, a massive number of Minnesotans joined the state’s first general strike in more than 40 years. Schrantz notes, “When the strategic conditions shift, what was once impossible becomes possible, but only if people and leaders are already prepared. The months of nonviolent direct action, constitutional observer training, and investment in decentralized community leadership made it possible. That synthesized with an acute crisis, and it moved.Given the stakes for our country and our lives, this needs to be the floor. Not the ceiling.”

This requires preparation now. Honestly, it was required long before this, but it’s been insanely hard to get Democratic and progressive donors, organizations and leaders to believe that they had to invest in preparing for such a scenario. As Schrantz notes, “If they try to take our right to free and fair elections, we cannot have a ‘day of action.’ We need to suspend the daily order of things.” That includes coordinated work stoppages, business closures, and economic withdrawal, to put pressure on business elites and corporations.

All the petty infighting right now about which faction of the Democratic party should get the upper hand, etc., etc., pales in importance to this essential task of preparation. Last winter in Minnesota shows that mass nonviolent resistance to Trumpian fascism is possible and can be strong enough to win. But most of the money that’s been invested in community organizing and infrastructure the last few decades has gone to swing states. Which means there are many places—including but not solely blue urban cores in red states—that could be flashpoints for election meddling this fall where the organizing layer is thin. As the recent flareup of violence around Delaney Hall showed, there are many reasons to worry that either well-meaning protest or agents provocateurs could trigger the sort of scenes that would play into the hands of the power-grab. So not preparing now is not an option.

If you are in a power-building organization or network, you probably already are engaged or starting to engage on this work. But if you’re one of the many “irregulars,” the wonderful amateur volunteers who have shown up time and again as the democracy crisis in America has worsened, a good way to get oriented to your role is to join Indivisible’s Hands Off Our Vote national kick-off call on Thursday July 30 at 8pm EST.

In addition, Freedom Trainers has this handy set of election defense resources including an in-depth election defense scenario guide.

Sorry to disturb your summer! It’s still important to recharge your batteries. But forewarned is forearmed.

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After Graham Platner withdrew from being Maine Democrats’ US Senate candidate on July 9, the state Democratic party decided to hold a special delegate convention to pick his replacement. Moving with impressive speed and technical competence, it set up an open process whereby any registered Democrat could put forward their name to be one of 500 delegates who would vote (along with the 101 members of the party’s state committee) to pick that person on July 25. By any measure, this process has been a rousing experiment in bottom-up party democracy. More than 20,000 people pre-registered to vote in one of sixteen counties, and more than 85% voted, taking advantage of a secure online voting system that would put the Iowa Democratic party of 2020 to shame.

Even more intriguing, many of the volunteer leaders who coalesced around Platner’s campaign and built much of its local infrastructure issued an open letter to the state party, stating a set of core commitments that would earn their collective support for its nominee. More than 500 signed on as part of the Maine People Powered Movement, insisting on “healthcare as a right, housing that isn’t a Wall Street commodity, an economy that isn’t rigged for billionaires and corporations, real support for workers and veterans, and a foreign policy that doesn’t treat endless war as the cost of doing business.” They also called for reforms on taxes, money in politics, and term limits.

In some respects, these developments are reminiscent of the progressive power-building work that drove the so-called Minnesota Miracle of 2023 (albeit on a much shorter time-frame), when Democrats elected with the backing of a broad faith-centered organizing network enacted a package of sweeping progressive legislation. That’s because in Minnesota, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party relies heavily on a system of local, county and state delegate conventions to nominate its candidates, making politics more about community organizing than big-dollar fundraising.

Could there be a lesson here for grassroots Democrats elsewhere? I asked Daniel Schlozman, the co-author with Sam Rosenfeld of The Hollow Parties, a seminal book on the current state of American politics. He was cautiously optimistic, saying, “We’re not putting the primary genie back in the bottle and no system is perfect, but what’s happened in Maine is a good indication of how caucus-convention systems can actually be participatory, deliberative, and helpful in getting a strong nominee with buy-in across the party.” And he added, “Also if you want a party that does things, then the party should do things!”

Footnote: Don’t miss “The DNC Against Itself,” a great overview of the Democratic Party, that Schlozman just wrote for the New York Review of Books.

The State of the Disaffected Electorate

Meanwhile, back in the rest of America, it is not news that a huge number of our fellow citizens are deeply disaffected from politics. Many question the value of voting and, indeed, about 90 million out of the total potential electorate of 245 million didn’t bother to vote in 2024. But here’s the interesting wrinkle: not voting doesn’t correspond to not participating in civic life. And there are some encouraging signs that when people feel a greater sense of belonging, they are more likely to take part in the political arena.

A new, comprehensive multiracial survey of the disaffected electorate, done by Dr. Katrina Gamble for the Democracy & Power Innovation Fund, found that members of this demographic are just as likely as the overall population to talk about politics with a friend or family member, search online for political information, contact an elected official, go to a protest or volunteer for a political or civic group. If anything, they are more likely (by a modest degree) to do things such as sign a petition, boycott a product, make political art or music, or help neighbors with childcare or other forms of support. Like the rest of the population, about six in ten of the disaffected electorate say they would like to “feel more connected to people in my community.”

But what makes them different from the rest of the population is a much higher feeling of disillusionment and distrust in institutions. They are younger and have fewer resources, which undoubtedly explains their greater disaffection; the cost of living is a significantly greater concern for this group. They also have lower feelings of agency and higher feelings of powerlessness. And they expressed a significantly lower intention to vote in November, just 56% saying so compared to 65% for the overall population.

Last week, I talked with Dr. Gamble about this new study, which involved a total sample of 4.506 respondents, including 1,147 who were Black, 1,154 who were Hispanic, 1,691 who were white and 1,092 who were Asian/Pacific Islander. She made several additional points.

• “A lot of folks have assumed that this frustration and disillusionment means that people are totally checked out and not participating. And I honestly went into this thinking we would find something similar, but one of the most interesting findings we found is that this the impact on participation is very specifically impacting voting. That folks who have this sense of disaffection aren’t necessarily unengaged in civic life; they’re just choosing to do other things outside of voting, which is interesting--they’ve made some calculation that they’re only going to spend their time doing what matters, and they’ve decided that voting is not one of those things.”

• “The frustration that people are feeling is very specifically about the federal government. Sure, not that the trust at the state and local level is through the roof, but the things that they were describing that were making them feel let down and disillusioned about politics were very specifically about this administration and some of the things that the federal government is doing.”

• “After a regression analysis, where we controlled for a whole host of other factors, we found that belonging was the biggest predictor of whether the people who are disaffected would take some form of civic participation. It you go from the lowest level on that belonging scale to the highest, your likelihood to vote in 2026 goes up by 25%. That’s a hard thing to do, right? To move someone from zero to one on that scale, but if you translate that even into an incremental change, so you went from zero to 0.1 of some sense of increased belonging, the data suggests that that in itself would also increase your likelihood to vote in 2026 two-and-a-half percent relative to someone who’s on the lower end.”

I’m a big fan of DPI’s work and the kind of civic homes that it is investing in building. But I wanted to know if there was anything in the research that said that the kind of belonging or home that would work to address this combination of frustration and distrust trends in the direction of small-d democratic. After all, Turning Point Action or a local gun club or an evangelical church are also places that offer people a strong sense of belonging. Gamble agreed that the right and the left can both create civic homes for people. But she added that the disaffected voters she was focused on also clearly want places that accept them as they are.

“When we talk to folks in the focus groups, we did ask what the qualities that a place, like an organization or a space, would need to have in order for you to join? And folks talked about it being a place where they feel trusted, where they feel safe, where they feel comfortable. So, basically, people want to feel accepted. They want to feel included. They also talked about the fact that they wanted to be a place where they’re getting something out of it, and that’s not necessarily transactional. They talked about making more connections with friends and things like that. They would go with someone that they trusted, who invited them into that space. And so, none of those qualities is about a particular ideology. It’s really just about how people feel and how they are relating to the other people in that space. And so, to your point--there have been people creating civic homes for people to move them in ways that are antithetical to our democracy. But it also means that there is an opportunity for folks who are champions of democracy to create those same spaces and bring people into those spaces.”

One model of this work that Gamble pointed me to is an organization called Power Interfaith in Pennsylvania, a faith-based organizing group that is part of the DPI network. For the last few years, it has been experimenting with hosting “soul food dinners” for small groups in community spaces where people share a meal and have an open-ended conversation about how they’re feeling about what’s going on in their community. “There’s not an immediate ask to do something or vote for someone or turn out for an election,” Gamble noted. Power Interfaith is finding that some people want to continue meeting, and “over the course of that, they’re starting to see that people who come back into those spaces in a in a consistent way have a higher sense of agency.” She added, “It’s still early and they’re still pulling the data. But that’s an example where organizations are just trying to find spaces of community first, build that sense of belonging, like the sentiments that people want, and then kind of move towards the work of building agency and then moving people to take action. It’s just it’s a slower process.”

Gamble argues that the implications of this research and experimentation is clear. “It’s the most significant way to actually move that segment of the electorate in a way that’s sustainable. In some of the focus groups, people talked about this idea that most of their interactions around elections is really transactional. They talked about how people come and they make all these promises and then they don’t deliver and they don’t ever hear from them again.” She added, “I do think that in some ways, the way that the political industry has treated people--there’s almost this assumption that they don’t understand that they’re being used--but people are very clear that they’re being used, and that’s part of what’s driving the frustration. There was like one young woman in a focus group who said ‘I used to really care about elections and I turned out to vote and nothing really happened and I never heard from these people again. So now I don’t bother with it. I just do what I can to take care of my family.’ And so in some ways, we’re actually doing harm by treating, especially this group of people who already have a sense of distrust, in a super transactional way, because it’s only feeding into what they already believe is a system that is not really meant for them and is not engaging them in a real way, but just using them for their vote.”

“Organizing is the antidote to authoritarianism”

After talking with Dr. Gamble, I got in touch with Rev. Greg Edwards, the executive director of Power Interfaith since January of 2025. He told me that when he took over, he decided that, “we would center our work on developing agentic leaders who could make a choice about having a public life, and that we would do that by doubling down on base building and establishing a culture of rigor around organizing at Power Interfaith.” As a result, he said, “We don’t really do a lot of voter registration work or what the industry calls ‘turn and burns’.”

When I asked him why, after years of being a church-based organizer and economic development leader in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and then trying a run for Congress, he had stepped into this role at Power Interfaith, he didn’t mince words. “I was clear that I wanted to lead an organization that is a power vehicle to actually interrupt the racial and economic crisis and injustices happening within Pennsylvania. Organizing everyday ordinary people is the only way to do that. Not necessarily by leading another charitable institution or organization. Organizing is the antidote for authoritarianism. Organizing is the antidote to being able to create more just neighborhoods and communities and create a livable society. It’s not going to happen simply through large turn and burns, or trying to reach a million people six days before a major election.

He added, “We need to create opportunities that are repositories for people to have a political and spiritual home, specifically given the moment that we’re in. And so that organizing is not transactional. Organizing is deeply relational. It’s done in the smallest replicable design through a one-on-one conversation. People talking to people individually and having a human interaction is the best way to enroll people into a thing in which they can no longer be a tourist in their own life, but actually have political imagination to create the life they want to have.”

This is different from issue advocacy organizing, he argued. “The issues that we organize on in those areas are issues that emerge from our staff having one-on-ones with lots of different people in lots of different places and lots of different congregations, and helping them get clear on what keeps them up at night. And then them having to make a choice whether they’re going to actually do something about it, or simply, in some cases admire the issue but be fearful of taking action. We say in organizing we help people cross a bridge that takes them from victimhood and from perhaps apathy and from admiration of the problem actually into their agency, in which they get to make a choice.”

That notion of “admiring” a problem was new to me, so I asked him to explain. He obliged: “I think in lots of circles we have lots of people who are not short on the diagnoses of what’s wrong with their school, what’s wrong with their neighborhood. We’ve got lots of folks who understand lots of problems, and so there can be the quagmire where you can get caught in the paralysis of analysis, or just white-papering your way. I can think of political parties that think that if people just have more information and another white paper, they will actually make a decision. It’s not actually that that causes people to make the decision.”

Power Interfaith is running its soul food dinners as a way to draw people into their world. “We consider our soul food dinners where we gather people the first step into people having a political home, and then what we do is base expansion and absorption,” Edwards said. “We’re expanding in concentric circles the number of people we talk to, and then for example, in this latest iteration, we invited some of the folks at the soul food dinner to join us in a very low risk opportunity. On June 2, we had our annual day of lobbying and advocacy, and we brought everybody to the state capital. We filled up busses, and there were hundreds of us. And some of the people that came were people who were attendees of our dinners. For many of them, that was the first time they actually had gone to the state capital, and then they were also trained on how to do a research meeting with their state representative, so it’s a way to move from the table to dipping their big toe into the water.”

Right now, with DPI’s help, Power Interfaith is continuing to experiment and collect lots of data on how well these intimate encounters and one-to-one conversations are growing their base. I expect we’ll see more information on the results in due course. But in the meantime I asked Rev. Edwards what his biggest needs were, what were the obstacles standing in the way of them doing more of this work. He replied, “Our biggest pain points always are in being able to hire and train the right kind of folk to be able to organize, both in general and in particular. Organizers don’t grow on trees. There’s no pipeline of people standing outside of my office saying sign me up because I want to actually have these conversations with people. I mean, we are in a society that mostly has built by folks who have benefited from very superficial transactional conversations, and so to actually be able to organize is both art and science, and also it’s a coming home to self. To find the right people who have, who are willing to be equipped and trained on how to do that is oftentimes a daunting task.”

He also added that the philanthropic landscape, which Power Interfaith and similar groups depend on, has gotten much tougher in recent years. “Most philanthropists and most funds or foundations don’t invest in the life cycle of our freedom or revolution. Folks will give you some money to do a thing for a specific period of time.” But he saw a silver lining. “I think that that’s beginning to change because people are understanding that if we do what we’ve always done, we’re gonna get what we always got. And so I think I’ve seen a move in philanthropy to actually try to better understand organizing on the ground and the impact that it can have, versus trying to build this large-scale thing that did a million things.”

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Housekeeping Note

Posting will be light for the next two weeks as I’m going to a retreat and then planning to be on a beach in Cape Cod, but I reserve the right to pop in if circumstances warrant. Got any summer reading suggestions? Share yours below!

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I have never been a fan of the so-called “3.5% rule” credited to Harvard Carr Center professor Erica Chenoweth, an expert on anti-authoritarian protest movements worldwide. In its simplest form, the rule, as stated on the Carr center website, says, “Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed [sic] to bring about change.” Advocates, activists and journalists here in America have seized on this formulation as a kind of magical talisman, literally arguing that once we hit that level of nonviolent protest against Trump, the regime would have to fall.

For example, after the Hands Off protests of April 5, 2025, which drew perhaps three million to the streets, the 50501 movement said on Instagram, “April 5 was our fourth national day of action, and it won’t be our last. We are committed to building our peaceful People’s Movement and achieving 3.5% participation. History shows that when just 3.5% of the population engages in sustained peaceful resistance -- transformative change is inevitable.”

Here’s the liberal Center for American Progress hyping the 3.5% rule as enough “to help stop the nation’s slide into authoritarianism,” back in August 2025. Here’s the American Bar Association, in November. Here’s Robert Reich, this past March.

And here’s Rachel Maddow of MSNOW explaining the rule to late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel back on January 8, 2026, as the nation was reeling from ICE’s murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis:

“In political science terms, there’s what’s called the 3.5% Rule, which is that if you look at authoritarian regimes of various kinds all over the world over the last century, once you have 3.5% of a population protesting nonviolently against a dictator or an authoritarian, that is essentially an unstoppable force that they can’t oppose and that precludes them from consolidating dictatorial power. It’s not that much larger a number than what we’re already seeing in the streets against Trump….the key is nonviolent protest.”

Obviously, the 3.5% rule got lots of attention around each of the No Kings protests, as the total number of people participating rose from 5 million in June 2025, to perhaps 7 million in October and then a claimed 8 million this past March. Awareness of it has spread well past hard-core activists. Here is comedian Michael Kosta citing the rule after No Kings 3, for example.

But nothing in politics is inevitable, even if the historical record suggests that sustained and well-organized nonviolent mass movements have a much better success rate than violent ones.

People paying closer attention to Chenoweth’s work have always known this, and Chenoweth has made it clear that the 3.5% threshold wasn’t anything close to a “rule.” This chart, taken from a piece Chenoweth wrote for the Journal of Democracy in 2020, shows that the historic record favors nonviolent movements, but that they aren’t always successful.

And even more concerning, the chart shows that their success rate has been in decline in recent years. Chenoweth mentions the failure of Bahrain’s democracy movement, which achieved more than 6% participation, and we could add Hong Kong and Israel as additional places where sustained mass movements have failed to withstand or dislodge authoritarians. In a more recent memo posted on Harvard’s Carr Center’s website, Chenoweth also notes that “other factors—momentum, organization, strategic leadership, and sustainability—are likely as important as large-scale participation in achieving movement success and are often precursors to achieving 3.5% participation.”

Nevertheless, despite all these provisos and cautions, I think it’s fair to say that if there’s one strategy that captured the imagination of most grassroots opponents of Trump since the beginning of his second term 18 months ago, it was the effort to build mass protest towards the goal of mobilizing something like 12 million Americans (i.e. 3.5%) in coordinated action. And sadly, that effort has not worked, giving people false hope. In my humble opinion, that’s because we’re counting the wrong thing. What matters is not how many people turn out or even how many localities host actions; what matters is how many well-organized, locally-led groups we have.^[1]

The MayDay Strong rallies were the first sign that we weren’t anywhere close to the capacity needed, as I wrote before them and afterwards. And now this coming weekend of “Good Trouble Lives On” protests dedicated to continuing John Lewis’ legacy of fighting for civil and voting rights is another sign of movement weakness. By my count, there are just over 600 rallies scheduled for July 17-19; about three-quarters are under the umbrella of John Lewis Actions, a national group of unclear scope or origin, and the remainder are mostly being hosting by individual Indivisible groups. This is one-third the number of events that happened for MayDay Strong, and one-fifth the number of No Kings 3 rallies. (Barely more than 2,000 people watched the mass call for Good Trouble Lives On that was held last week, another concerning sign.)

Counting the number of rallies and estimating the number of participants is a pretty poor way of figuring out if we’re putting our time, money and attention where it will do the most use. Furthermore, if fewer people are choosing to organize or attend rallies – a downward trend that we’ve been on since No Kings 3 – then maybe we need to figure out what that is telling us.

Introspection is Not Us

Last week, on Rory Truex’s weekly Civic Forum podcast (transcript here), I tried to make this point in conversation with Jess Craven, the movement dervish who writes the daily Chop Wood, Carry Water newsletter. With the November elections just over three months away, I asked, where are the gaps in election protection organizing, as one example. Who is taking responsibility for planning what happens in the top 25 cities where Trump may send ICE to disrupt voting? What fund should people donate to for frontline election defense work? Who are the people offering trainings?

“It’s all in my newsletter,” Craven replied. “I’ve got all that stuff in there every day!” She then mentioned secretive tabletop exercises by “people who don’t want to be known,” Democratic attorneys general “who are sort of scheming,” Democracy Forward’s pro bono legal work, and Indivisible’s “Hands Off Our Vote” program, which was just announced. I felt like we were talking past each other.

I tried again, noting that there’s no significant effort (yet) to organize and train volunteers to do parallel vote tabulation, a very powerful way of generating objective data about vote results that we may very well need if Trump’s thugs impound ballots and then make false claims about election results. And I also noted that while the Indivisible movement was very wide, with roughly 3,000 local groups (a significant rebound from its 2021-24 ebb), most of those groups get no ongoing coaching from movement veterans, leaving their volunteer leaders on their own to figure things out. Paid Indivisible staff dedicated to field organizing in individual states are stretched incredibly thin.

Craven waved me off, arguing this was “a longer-term question” and claiming that “Indivisible does a great deal of trainings for group leaders.” She returned to her mantra of promoting all the stuff that people are doing, like visibility brigades, local visits to their Congress members, protests in front of ICE detention centers, food pantries and the like.

She’s not wrong. A lot of valuable work is being done by locally-led volunteer groups. And I didn’t want to have an argument.

But I’m worried that collectively the pro-democracy movement has not developed the muscles, the structures, or the mentality to keep meeting the moment. Maybe flailing around is a feature, not a bug (god knows past political movements like the Vietnam antiwar movement were unruly messes too). But we seem to be pushing people in many cases to do things that don’t add up, or that allow for one-day bursts of action without much concern for whether they’re building something that can be sustained. This is especially true about the lack of infrastructure and coaching for local organizers. Indivisible has one paid staffer in New York, for example, where we have something like 200 groups. Understandably, she can’t provide individualized attention to any single group in a sustained way. Online trainings and mass calls are not sufficient. And because the national leadership of the movement operates in mostly opaque ways – for example, John Lewis Actions, the sponsor of Good Trouble Lives On, has no named leaders and when I emailed their media department no one replied – it becomes almost impossible to even talk intelligently about where the gaps are and how to help address them.

There is Another Model

Not to end on a sour note, I want to uplift this new essay by Neeraj Mehta of the McKnight Foundation in SSIR on “The Gyms on the Corners” that made Minnesota’s response to ICE’s winter occupation of the Twin Cities metro area so powerful. Here are a few key paragraphs:

“Political scientist Hahrie Han argues that people are not born knowing how to be civically active; they learn it through structures and relationships that build that capacity over time. Her research distinguishes between organizations that mobilize, activating existing capacity when a moment demands it, and organizations that organize, building new capacity through sustained relational work. Both are necessary, and neither replaces the other.

Han uses the metaphor of a gym to make this concrete. People do not become strong by wanting to be strong. They need a place to train, equipment, coaches, and other people to work alongside. Civic capacity works the same way. Many of the people who marched in the Twin Cities on January 23, some for the first time, had been in training long before that moment. They had attended meetings at worker centers, volunteered with faith groups, participated in get-out-the-vote drives, or shown up in smaller ways that taught them collective action was possible and meaningful. The gym was already open. They already knew where it was.

Minnesota has invested in those gyms for a long time. By ‘Minnesota,’ I mean a combination of philanthropic funders, state and local government programs, and community-generated resources, each playing different roles at different scales. That investment has supported organizations on street corners, in community centers, and inside small, under-resourced groups that rarely produce outputs fitting neatly into grant reports, including culturally specific and community-rooted organizations that seldom appear in published research. The results of that investment are not always legible in advance. When a moment like January 2026 arrives, they become unmistakable.

Data from the ground reflects how place-based infrastructure functioned under pressure. Food shelf visits across Minnesota dropped 7% in January 2026 compared to the prior year, and by 17% in Ramsey and Hennepin counties, as people became afraid to leave their homes. The organizations that reached those families were the ones that had built trust over years through consistent local presence—they switched to home delivery, made door-to-door calls, and worked through the relationships that government agencies and larger nonprofits could not replicate.

One illustration of how decentralized organizing infrastructure operates in practice: a rapid response network in northern Minnesota began with approximately 30 people in October 2025. By January 2026, after federal agents killed Renee Good, it was filling entire church sanctuaries. Its model is not coordination from a central hub but distributed capacity-building, training people to train others until knowledge is held broadly and locally. The work is difficult to measure precisely because of how it operates. That difficulty is not accidental. It reflects the decentralized nature of the model.”

Minnesota’s population is 5.83 million. 3.5% of that number is 204,050. The highest estimate I’ve seen for the number of people who marched in the Minneapolis general strike of January 23 is 100,000, though most observers say it was closer to 50,000-75,000.^[2] The 3.5% rule was not met there, but despite all the pain and suffering the state went through, it’s also fair to say that Minnesotans built enough power to force ICE to reverse course, at least for a time. Nazi cosplayer Greg Bovino was given his retirement papers, and ICE Barbie Kristi Noem was stripped of her job as head of Secretary of Homeland Security and given a diplomatic role of little importance.

Six months later, ICE is still acting with impunity, killing two men--Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Maine and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas—in just the last week. Neither had any criminal history (as if that would justify these extrajudicial murders). In ICE detention centers, abuses are rampant and unchecked—with at least 52 people dying in them since Trump’s second term began. Calls for protest are rising. But have we grown our capacity to force the Trump administration to back down?

On My Reading Radar

—David Wildstein, “Sherrill administration will suspend enforcement of new data law,” New Jersey Globe, July 10, 2026. Turns out there’s a bit of a contradiction between protecting people’s “sensitive data” and the needs of the political targeting industry.

—Maeve Buckley Anderson, “The Permanent Electorate,” The Hudson Line, July 9, 2026. The Mamdani effect is real: “Enough of the voters who cast their first primary ballots in the 2025 mayoral race returned in 2026 to make clear that New York City’s primary electorate has not snapped back to what it was before Zohran Mamdani won…. A voter who comes back the next year stops being an oddity. They cease to be a data point that flashed once in the voter file during a bout of civically minded delirium. They assert themselves as part of the persistent electorate of this city.”

—Lauren Gepford, “It Wasn’t a Political Earthquake. It Was a Decade of Creating Left Infrastructure,” Inside the Work of Change, June 24, 2026. Her key insight: the Democratic establishment is being caught flat-footed because it spends too much of its time on “tens of thousands of required committee meetings every year, consuming the energy of volunteers who got involved because they wanted to change the world, not run elections for internal party office.” I like her solutions too: reduce elected party positions, increase ways to participate, strengthen party committees while restricting outside money, and most of all create real membership systems and pre-primary processes. Maybe we should go further and replace primaries (which have become all about who raises the most money) with elected delegate conventions?

—It’s good to see that Mayor Mamdani wants to upgrade how NYC uses technology to deliver better services, announcing the formation of a Public Interest Technology Crew (PIT-CREW for short) to build “in-house” solutions, starting with improving how people apply for and get city permits. But the Mayor’s office should heed what Matthew Burton, a long-time good government nerd, has to say about the limits of this approach: “This would be like hiring one of those 24-hour bathroom makeover services for a house with low water pressure and a cracked soil pipe. The team will likely do a great job on the bathroom, and every non-technical outside observer will be initially impressed by their work. But the achievement won’t last. The underlying systems aren’t strong enough to support it.”

—Bookmark this: New_ Public’s Angela Quicksey and Eli Pariser are crowdsourcing a Google doc “reading list” on AI and the Information Environment.

—Bookmark this too: The Higher Ground Institute has revamped its AI Campaign Stack, which is curating more than 50 tools being used by progressive campaigns for things like fundraising, field and communications.

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Parting Thought

This quote of Senator Lindsey Graham by Richard Fontaine of the Center for a New American Security in The Atlantic may just about explain everything: “When I was first elected to the House,” he recalled, “I looked for the they. They who run things. They who know how things really work. They who know what they are doing. But I couldn’t find the they.” After that, he went on, “I went to the Senate. But there was still no they. And then I started to get invited to the White House, and to closed-door briefings, and to meetings with top officials. No they.” “What I finally realized,” he concluded, “is that there is no they. There is only we, and we usually don’t know what the fuck we’re doing.”

End Times

Britain’s most famous racist politician, Nigel Farage, may have met his match.

^[1] Here’s longtime progressive political consultant Will Robinson, agreeing: “…the left does not have the infrastructure the right has built. We need permanent, always-on communications and organizing - not operations that spring up during campaigns and disappear the day after Election Day. And it cannot just mean supporting a handful of national groups. We need to build a real progressive organizing ecosystem: local, durable, connected, and capable of communicating year-round. That is where people can go to make change after working on a campaign. And full time organizing gets people healthcare and other benefits. Finally, we need far more training. Campaign staff, activists, and local leaders are too dependent on consultants for basic skills. We should be giving grassroots organizers and super-volunteers the tools they need to build power themselves. With the right training, they can do much of what consultants are paid to do - and in areas like digital organizing and local communications, they can often do it better because they know the community, the relationships, and the people. The goal should not be to make campaigns more dependent on consultants. It should be to make communities more powerful.

^[2] Polling after the fact found that one in four Minnesotans either stayed home from work that day or know a relative who did, but I would take that finding with a giant grain of salt—a reflection of an aspiration akin to the Indivisible poll from the first week of April that found that a whopping 7% of registered voters claimed they had participated in the March 28 No Kings 3 rallies. If that had indeed happened, sure Trump would already be gone, right?

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1. Which news media mogul recently declared:

“The companies driving A.I., already among the richest and most powerful in human history, are consolidating their outsize control over our data and our attention. At the same time, they are failing to embrace a core responsibility that comes with this power — to ensure the public has access to trustworthy news and information. Their hijacking of the public square is made possible by the original sin that animates their A.I. products — a brazen theft of intellectual property that has occurred at an unprecedented scale. Tech giants strip-mine news websites without permission or compensation. They repackage these stolen goods as their own, siphoning off the audiences and revenue that otherwise would go to the news organizations that created this work. And this happens not just once during the training process, but countless times every single day.”

A) Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post,

B) A. G. Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times,

C) David Ellison, CEO of Paramount Skydance, which owns CBS News, or

D) Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of The Los Angeles Times.

2. Which big tech mogul sent President Trump a fawning text message of a “letter to the president” that one of their grade-school children had written to him saying that they “looked forward to the golden age of America” (a phrase Trump often uses at his rallies)?

A) Elon Musk, who has at least 8 young children,

B) Mark Zuckerberg, who has three,

C) Peter Thiel, who has two, or

D) Sam Altman, who has one.

3. Which of these is not the name of one of Musk or Zuckerberg’s children?

A) X Æ A-Xii

B) Techno Mechanicus

C) Seldon Lycurgus

D) Maxima

E) Aurelia

F) Arcadia

G) Aston Martin

4. Which truism about politics does the implosion of Graham Platner’s Senate campaign teach us?

A) Don’t believe the hype.

B) Don’t scrimp on doing your own opposition research on yourself before you launch your campaign.

C) Never fall in love with a politician; they will break your heart.

D) Democratic voters care more about politicians who abuse women than Republican voters.

5. Which of these statements made about Platner over the last few months by one of his supporters was never said?

A) “For what it’s worth, Platner might be the only Democratic candidate or congressman I wouldn’t want to mess with, whereas the Republicans have at least half a dozen guys who could put me in a headlock.” – Author Sebastian Junger

B) “I’m impressed that the media is so concerned with the [Nazi] tattoo. We are dealing with a collapsing health care system and you are asking me whether or not a guy should get a tattoo removed?” –Senator Bernie Sanders

C) “Graham Platner isn’t just our best and only chance to beat Susan Collins, he’s a good, decent man who’s struggled and grown and is always trying to do better.” –Jon Favreau, Pod Save America co-host.

D) “Not to overstate it, but this is a crucial moment for the Democratic Party. If they decide that normal people with some small skeletons in their closet (or inked on their chest) are not welcome, they are finished. Because they’ve tried the other way and it didn’t work.” --Ryan Grim, DropSite News co-founder

E) “Platner understood that those years that he came back were not the best years of his life. Then he, unlike others, took accountability for it. And he’s worked to be a better man.” --Rep. Ro Khanna

6. Speaking of dying Senate ambitions, which of these quotes was never said by longtime Republican Senator Mitch McConnell, who was hospitalized on June 14:

A) “The country doesn’t need saving.”

B) “ The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”

C) “One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.’”

D) "Look, we cannot simply hand out stimulus checks; if we feed the American people every single day, they will never learn to photosynthesize."

E) “All Citizens United did was to level the playing field for corporate speech. We now have, I think, the most free and open system we’ve had in modern times.

F) “Where did this notion get going that we were spending too much in campaigns? Compared to what? Americans spent more [last year] on potato chips than they did on politics.”

7. Across America, roughly 75% of people over the age of 45 are registered to vote. What percentage of 18-year-olds are registered to vote?

A) 20%

B) 30%

C) 45%

D) 60%

8. According to a Data for Progress poll of 1,257 likely voters done in August 2025, what percentage of Democratic voters said they would take a favorable view of a hypothetical political figure described this way: “A democratic socialist elected official in your town or city, whose agenda is primarily focused on how to make life more affordable for working people in your community by bringing down the costs of housing, groceries, and electric bills”?

A) 25%

B) 42%

C) 59%

D) 75%

9. According to the same Data for Progress poll, what percentage of Republican voters agreed with the following statement: “Corporations and the wealthy have too much influence in the political party that I usually vote for.”

A) 14%

B) 31%

C) 42%

D) 60%

10. According to the Chapman University annual survey of American fears, what is the number one thing feared by the largest percentage of people:

A) Loved ones dying

B) Economic or financial collapse

C) Cyber-terrorism

D) Corrupt government officials

E) Loved ones becoming seriously ill

Answers: 1-B, 2-B, 3-G, 4-All of the above, 5-None of the Above, 6-D, 7-B, 8-C, 9-D, 10-D.

About that last item on Americans’ top fears

Not only do Americans fear corrupt government officials (69%) more than loved ones becoming seriously ill (59%) or economic/financial collapse (58%), this has been their number one fear for the last ten years. Dr. Steven Pfaff, Professor of Sociology at Chapman University, comments: “As it has for over a decade, the Chapman Survey finds that well over half of all Americans report fear of corrupt government officials. Indeed, fear of corrupt government officials remains the top fear among the many we survey. Majorities of Americans across partisan lines share this fear, which our analysis suggests stems from their perception that money has distorted the political process, and that powerful and resourceful interests achieve their goals even at the expense of the public good and voter preferences.”

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Programming Note

—Tomorrow (Thursday) at 1pm ET: I’ll be talking with super-organizer Jess Craven via Substack Live hosted by Rory Truex (Princeton political scientist and host of the weekly Civic Forum). Our topic: “What Do I Do At A Time Like This?” Here’s the link to join: https://open.substack.com/live-stream/220990.

End Times

Plucky Belgium indeed!

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Last week, two incumbent Democratic House members in New York City were defeated in primaries by more left-wing challengers backed by the city’s highly popular mayor, Zohran Mamdani. In a third House primary for an open seat, the progressive candidate backed by Mamdani defeated a progressive candidate backed by Rep. Nydia Velasquez, who is retiring from office.

These results have generated responses nearing hysteria from all sides. Leftists and centrists are both describing the election as a “political earthquake” and proof that “socialism” is on the march inside the Democratic party. Many are also either celebrating or decrying the ways that harsh criticism of Israel and its American partner AIPAC have now become mainstream.

There are grains of truth in these responses. And if politicians perceive something as earth-shaking, that perception gains traction even if it’s based on shaky evidence. Incumbent Democratic politicians rarely back challengers to other incumbents, so what Mamdani and his allies in DSA-NYC just did is justifiably making waves.

But intra-party conflict isn’t unusual. Everyone should take a chill pill and also recognize that as Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld argued in their book The Hollow Parties, America's political parties have become increasingly incapable of organizing broad constituencies. Last week's New York primaries offered another vivid illustration of what politics looks like under those conditions.

To be clear, I think it’s unstrategic and worrisome to excuse one of those winning candidates, Darializa Avila Chevalier, for her far-left views, just because she took on and defeated an incumbent, Rep. Adriano Espaillat, who was too cozy with real estate, Wall Street and AIPAC. As one of the founders of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, Avila Chevalier is as Hamas-adjacent as they come. Founded in early 2024, the CUAD coalition regularly put out statements that praised the “Al-Aqsa Flood” attack of October 7, argued that Hamas was a “progressive force” because it was advancing the destruction of imperialism, posted a “tribute” to Hamas mastermind Yahya Sinwar after his death, lauded Chairman Mao, and revoked its own apology for a member who had declared that Columbia was lucky he wasn’t killing Zionists, among other effusions.

When asked by a normally leftish local Democratic club, Broadway Democrats, if she would condemn Hamas and its October 7 massacre, Avila Chevalier “point-blank” refused to do so or say anything about “its execution of its own political dissidents, its theocratic view of government and what a society is, its misogyny, its homophobia, its racism,” Curtis Arluck and Paula Diamond Roman, wrote in the club’s newsletter. And for the record, the fact that people are drawing distinctions over a person’s bona fides based on when they decided to start using the word “genocide” to describe Israel’s war crimes in Gaza is yet another example of how today’s left is more interested in purity tests than growth.

But I think current freakout over last week’s primary results is highlighting the wrong explanation for what just happened, because everyone involved—leftwingers and centrists, pro-Palestinian activists and pro-Israel activists—has a shared interest in inflating the salience of what happened around their issue, either as a victory or a threat. Good for clicks, good for fundraising, but not necessarily good for the main task we collectively face, which is beating the fascists now in control in Washington. For people who pay a tremendous amount of attention to politics, yes, what each candidate had to say (or not say) about Israel/Palestine mattered a lot. But most people, including a lot of the tuned-in ones who show up in primaries, do not rate the Middle East as a top concern. A recent Siena College poll, conducted statewide among registered voters June 17-23, found that only 6% listed “Iran and the Middle East” as their top issue, well behind the cost of living, affordable housing, crime, and immigration.

You may not agree with what follows. But hear me out. Last Tuesday’s primary results across New York showed two things most of all: First, that the Democratic party establishment in the state is quite hollow and too beholden to status-quo politics to generate voter excitement for its preferred candidates. And second, that in low-turnout elections, relatively small groups of well-organized people with a good candidate and clear message can mobilize enough voters to win local election fights.

Moderate NY Democrats Aren’t Delivering

Here’s some context that’s been missing from nearly all the commentary on the New York primary: It took place less than a month after Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul and the state legislature delivered a budget that was 57 days late and a giant disappointment to many. The massive bill, which is always negotiated in secret , and then jammed through the legislature without amendment because state Democratic leaders are hypocrites about democracy, weakened the state’s ambitious climate protection law, gave immigration rights activists demanding strong anti-ICE measures half-a-loaf ($82 million rather than a requested $183 million for legal services and direct deportation defense), and most critically avoided taxing the ultra-rich.

As Invest in Our New York, the statewide coalition working for greater fiscal equity and more robust funding of social services, put it, “The final budget does nothing to fill the enormous federal cuts that will strip 1 million New Yorkers of their healthcare (including 460,000 who will lose their Essential Plan coverage on July 1) and endanger 200,000 people’s SNAP benefits. It also does not fund truly universal childcare statewide with living wages for workers or provide the revenue necessary to address the soaring cost of living, or tackle our state’s affordable housing crisis.” Hochul’s only sop to the “tax the rich” movement that confronted her so vocally last October when she rallied with Mamdani before the general election was a modest pied-à-terre tax on luxury second homes in New York City, which will raise a piddling $500 million (the state budget is $268.5 billion).

This is not the kind of “deliverism” that you go to elections with to excite voters, especially those who are increasingly resigned and cynical about the potential of electoral politics to do anything to improve their lives, resentful of the power of the billionaire class, and worried about the precariousness of their current lives and occupations. So, the first point I would make is that last Tuesday’s results showed the failure of imagination and lack of courage of status-quo Democrats in the party’s political establishment everywhere.

This wasn’t just apparent in the loss of incumbents like Espaillat to newcomers like Avila Chevalier, or incumbent-designees like Brooklyn borough president Antonio Reynoso to Mamdani ally Claire Valdez, or in lower-level fights for state assembly seats in several Brooklyn districts. Where I live in Westchester, we saw the weakness of the party establishment in reverse, in the Democratic primary election for supervisor of Greenburgh, a town of about 95,000. There, it was a longtime incumbent, Paul Feiner, an iconoclastic independent Democrat who has held that post for more than 30 years, who held off a challenge from Barry McGoey, an Ardsley village trustee and former head of the Yonkers firefighters union who was backed by everyone from Rep. George Latimer and the county Democratic party to the Greenburgh Democratic Committee and many local mayors, other electeds, and local labor unions.

McGoey and his allies outspent Feiner by somewhere between 2- and 3-to-1, money they used to bombard voters with negative fliers, texts and robocalls. But McGoey still lost to him by 12 points, 4,945 to 3,839. Why? Because Feiner is known by many ordinary voters for his accessibility. Despite trying to gin up concerns about the town’s fiscal management, the McGoey camp never explained sufficiently why it was time to replace one oldish white man with another one. McGoey’s past history as a registered Republican and the amount of money that flowed into his coffers from Yonkers Democrats – a city and claque known to many us locally for rampant cronyism—also didn’t help in his claims to be the “change” candidate. As Monica Joy Taylor wrote in Black Westchester, “Greenburgh wasn’t willing to trade a supervisor known for picking up the phone for every constituent for a candidate manufactured by party leadership.”

Low Turnout Elections Aren’t Earthquakes

The second thing to keep in mind is that Tuesday’s election was nothing like the genuine earthquake that shook New York City a year ago, where turnout among voters under the age of 40 exploded and enabled Mamdani to blow past former governor Andrew Cuomo, the avatar of the state Democratic establishment for decades. The victories of Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez and Brad Lander showed no such surge. Thirty percent of registered voters came out in June 2025, compared to about half as many last week.

Low turnout elections are good for two kinds of politicians. The first are traditional “clientelist” incumbents who maintain personal contact with a real base of reliable voters, either in the manner of a Paul Feiner, who just shows up everywhere, gives out his personal contact info to everyone, and responds to every incoming message, or in the manner of an Adriano Espaillat, whose Dominican immigrant-based political machine has been his longtime source of power.

The other kind are insurgents with sufficient organizational muscle to challenge clientelism. As a veteran of progressive state politics once said to me years ago, “If you have a hundred people who can each move ten or twenty votes, you can win a school board race.” That math explains many of DSA’s wins last week. For example, in East New York/Bushwick, longtime Assemblyman Erik Martin Dilan was unseated by Christian Celeste Tate, 4,054 to 2,479. Four years ago, Dilan won re-election with almost the same number of votes, 2,524 (to 2,313 for a different DSA-backed challenger). The problem with clientelism is its very reliability; you can’t double or triple how much personal attention or patronage you have to dole out if and when a strong challenger arises. The same could be said about Espaillat who lost to Chevalier with 30,464 votes to her 32,790. Four years ago, the last time he faced a primary challenge, he won with 31,582 votes.

Winning in low turnout races can make a relatively small group punch above its weight, but this is hardly the stuff of “earthquakes.” The last time New York experienced a real political earthquake (before Mamdani’s defeat of Cuomo) was in 2018, when the Working Families Party, local union 32BJ, and an army of Indivisible volunteers knocked off seven of the eight Democratic state senators who made up the so-called Independent Democratic Conference in uphill primaries that broke decades of Republican control of the state senate. If Mamdani was such a giant killer, why did he studiously avoid endorsing any progressive challengers to incumbent members of the state assembly, arguably the least progressive branch in Albany? Why didn’t his endorsement of Lindsay Boylan in the special election for an open NYC city council seat in April put her over the top?

In fact, in the days before last Tuesday’s election, DSA organizers were quietly panicking because they could see that early voting numbers were weak compared to last year, and far fewer people were signing up to canvass for their candidates, according to Politico, which said just 20,000 had volunteered, half of the army that swarmed NYC in June 2025. Though that’s still a big number, could there have been a connection between disappointment over Hochul’s budget and lower engagement levels? Or the inevitable letdown in the wake of Mamdani embracing Hochul earlier this year and undercutting his own movement’s “tax the rich” campaign? At the last minute, DSA members living outside the city were pressed to pitch in, and Mayor Mamdani himself headlined two online phonebanking Zooms in the last 24 hours of the election (I got the texts). It was enough to pull off two upsets (Brad Lander would have won regardless because of his deep local roots in his district), but far from a “tsunami.”

What last Tuesday was, in my humble opinion, was another episode in the hollow party wars. The so-called party elites or establishment were shown to have feet of clay, the unions and nonprofit organizations that endorsed reliable progressives rather than Mamdani’s democratic socialists were revealed to have similar weaknesses, and a modest but still real army of DSA volunteers were shown to be capable of knocking enough doors and making enough calls to narrowly replace a political veteran in Espaillat with a novice in Chevalier.

In some better universe, everyone freaking out about these results would calm down and stop talking about “schisms” and instead invest in ongoing local party-building and community organizing. The Democratic party is a roiling, factionally-riven mess. This isn’t news. But right now, it’s facing voters who are increasingly cranky and inclined to taking chances on newcomers who sound like fighters for ordinary people rather than more cautious institutionalists and appeasers. That’s the main shift underway. Let’s focus on that signal amidst all the other noise, OK?

See Also:

—Michael Lange, “The Death of Political Machines,” The Narrative Wars, May 28, 2026, on how Espaillat’s machine started to sputter in recent years as he made a series of bad political choices.

—Eric Blanc, “Thoughts on the limitations of DSA, the WFP, and our unions after Tuesday’s historic election,” Labor Politics, June 24, 2026, for a fairly sober accounting of how much more all three groupings will have to do to build “organized roots in workplaces and working-class neighborhoods [that] do remain alarmingly thin.”

—Steve Rosenthal, “Bad News for Trump,” Soul of the Party, June 27, 2026, on how NY’s primary results “indicate deep public distrust of the corporate establishment.”

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AI AI AI!

—From Salim Ismail’s The Shift newsletter: “29% of all workers in the WRITER study admit they are actively sabotaging the AI rollout. Among Gen Z, the number is 44%. Employee confidence in company AI strategy fell from 47% in 2025 to 31% in 2026. The middle is not opposing the change in the open. It is not refusing to attend the training. It is doing something more durable. It is showing up, complying, and slowing the work down.”

End Times

In case you need images for your next talk on late-stage capitalism.

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Indeed, if you are someone who has ever spent time anywhere on the left, either directly inside its movements and organizations, or indirectly in places infused and confused by left culture, you should read this book. Marom convincingly illustrates in graphic detail how much of the contemporary left is caught in a trap largely of its own making: too devoted to purity tests, too distrustful of leaders, too allergic to hierarchy in any form, and ultimately too unwilling to face hard truths, that it may never escape the cultural cul-de-sac it’s stuck in.

Usually, when I read a book that I plan to keep, I underline and bracket important sections as I go and fold the corner of pages over whenever I find myself really wanting to be able to go back and find those lines. That strategy would have failed me with For Louder Days, because I was underlining almost every page. It’s that good.

For starters, after a brief introductory chapter, Marom takes the reader deep into the heady days of the fall of 2011, when a quixotic call to “Occupy Wall Street” mushroomed into a grassroots movement in more than 800 cities, energizing fights about economic inequality, housing, health care, and financial corruption. Earlier that year, at the tender age of 25, Marom had been part of an effort by local NYC radicals to build a two-week street occupation outside City Hall called “Bloombergville” aimed at stopping then-Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s sweeping budget cuts. As he notes, the unions and community groups that were fighting Bloomberg’s austerity plans backed away before the more disruptive occupation began, leaving just “a small gaggle of radicals without much of a base, without enough power to really achieve our goals.” Bloombergville faded from memory quickly.

That experience made Marom initially wary of the Occupy call, though he did show up for some of its early planning meetings. “We just did an occupation, I thought, and it didn’t fucking work. Americans aren’t ready for their Tahrir Square moment,” he writes. Evidently, that wariness also made him doubly susceptible to diving in with everything he had once Occupy started to take off. Quickly, he became one of the behind-the-scenes leaders of this so-called “leaderless movement,” quietly coordinating what becomes its highpoint, the October 15th mass march from Zuccotti Park to Times Square that anchored a “global day of action” by many Occupy groups around the world.

And here’s a taste of how well Marom writes, describing what happened that night as the crowds converged on Times Square:

“Now that we’re here, eighty-thousand of us by our estimate, streaming here from all corners of the city and even outside of it, I know the gamble was worth it. We are enormous, and it feels like we have taken this thing—this monument to excess and consumption, this symbol of inequality, this holy site of exploitation and illusion—and made it our own, even if only for one night. I know that we are far from upending this system and winning the world we dream of—that revolutions are rare, long, painful processes with no clear beginnings or ends. I know that, if we are lucky, we are merely at the beginning of decades of social movements that might someday bring real transformation to this city, this country, this world. I have been sobered by the history of revolutions that came before and my own small defeats at the hands of this opponent we’re squaring off against. But now—despite all of this good sense, despite my cynicism, despite the layers of armor I have around my heart along the way—I can’t help but be swept away by the moment. I am completely under its spell….

As night falls, I stand on a trash can on the corner of 42^nd and Broadway, my left arm wrapped around scaffolding for balance and I am surrounded by tens of thousands of people. We chant, The whole world is watching! And here that chant feels true. Even my parents are here, lost somewhere in the crowd. They’re here not because their politics have changed dramatically in the past month, but because the movement has expanded its boundaries enough to sweep them up inside of it, because it has taken ideas that were considered fringe not long ago—that all people deserve the basic things that make life good, that the elites have taken too much for too long, that we need to reimagine this society—and revealed them to be common sense, revealed them to be possible. This is one of the things movements do: They expand the imaginations of the people they touch. They have done this to me, too. I can I suddenly realize, imagine us winning.

The ABC building across from where I am standing has a rolling ticker on its face, where breaking news scrolls across a massive screen, and suddenly, as if the world is responding to all these people here together, to our chants, to this dream, the ticker lights up. It puts out, in big, red, block letters: “OCCUPY WALL STREET GOES WORLDWIDE.” It feels like time has stopped.”

Dear readers, I was there that evening and here is the photo I took of that moment. It was indeed, quite a moment to be alive and in New York City, and it changed many lives, including Marom’s.

The next day, Marom recounts, the hard reality of Occupy’s internal contradictions came home to roost. Behind the scenes, he had built that October 15^th action by coordinating the efforts of several hundred organizers via email and face-to-face planning meetings, but now other activists tell him that their work must stop because it wasn’t sanctioned by Occupy’s general assembly, the direct democracy heart of the movement. A few older activists urge him not to disband what he had so painstakingly and successfully built--“Why destroy something that’s working so well? Do you have any idea how hard it is to build a group like this? How rare this moment is? What an opportunity we have to expand this movement?” they implore--but he agrees with his younger and more idealistic peers, writing: “We are out of process…this was never meant to be a permanent body in the movement…it’s important to do our part to protect this grand experiment in direct democracy…it’s not right for me to have so much power…[and] that backing away from a large email list is a small price to pay for the privileges society has imparted on me at the expense of others.”

And so, Marom sends an email disbanding Occupy’s most effective working group. Later, at another one of the secret, informal strategy meetings that had much influence on Occupy’s direction, the argument between the movement’s purists and its pragmatists leads to a breaking point. Eventually, Marom realizes that his critics were also building a separate group claiming to truly speak for Occupy Wall Street but also violating their purported belief in direct democracy. “What was something big and dreamy and porous enough for anyone to be part of—even my parents at Times Square—has become now something official, and guarded, leading almost all of us to wonder simultaneously whether even we belong in it, wonder who decides.” By the time of Occupy’s next big action on November 17, the air is going out of its tires. Plus, winter is coming and the NYPD has been dumping homeless people at the Zuccotti encampment to create chaos. Soon, the mayors of big cities around the US coordinate on the mass evictions that end Occupy’s run.

I loved Marom’s retelling of Occupy’s rise and fall because of how well he goes inside the story that most of us only glimpsed edges of. But for Marom, Occupy was also “a taste of power,” the “louder days” that he yearns for, and a touchstone for many of the lessons he wants his readers to imbibe. Among them:

• “Movement moments are really only possible when thousands and thousands of people see themselves as leaders, take agency, and move with purpose and creative to leverage their own skills and relationships to simply move the thing forward without waiting to be asked or seeking permission. You don’t get a vibrant mini-city like the one we had at Zuccotti Park through command structures.”

• On the other hand, “Our mantra of leaderlessness was a farce. Of course people exercised great leadership to fill every vacuum they could identify, and those people who did it effectively and consistently over time emerged as leaders. This was normal and inevitable, something to be proud of in any other context….Pretending there were no leaders, then, made it impossible to really develop leadership in one another. How could we train new leaders if there weren’t supposed to be any leaders in the first place? Who even wants to be a leader…in a thing that hates leaders altogether?”

• “Unless or until movements are in the position to depose and replace the power structure they are challenging, they need demands, a strategy for getting after them, the power to make their adversaries pay, the strategic wisdom to know when to exact those costs and when to compromise, a legitimate structure for negotiating with their opponents, and more.”

The rest of the book documents his experiences advising a wide array of progressive movement organizations on how to develop and execute their own strategies for building power, which is where all the thickets rise fed by the politics of powerlessness. This, Marom says, is the tendency of left activists to hyper-focus on small, internal battles over power centered on identity politics, language policing and so-called “white supremacy culture” rather than larger struggles to change the material conditions of people’s lives. Though he writes about most of these groups obliquely, without mentioning too many specifics, it’s no secret that as the founding director of the Wildfire Project (a movement consulting and facilitating group), he worked with the Dream Defenders, the Sunrise Movement, and Justice Democrats. He was also a founding member of IfNotNow.

And this is where For Louder Days turns deeply internal, exposing the many contradictions of contemporary leftist activism as well as Marom’s own intense wrestling with his quasi-privileged position as a white, upper-middle-class male, amidst it all. (I say “quasi” because despite all those markers of privilege Marom was not a funder, the class of people who wield the greatest amount of undemocratic power in movement organizing circles.)

What follows will likely feel familiar to anyone who has worked inside liberal-left organizations in the last ten years, or who read Ryan Grim’s “Elephant in the Zoom” article in the Intercept or Maurice Mitchell’s “Building Resilient Organizations.” Marom adds some fresh horror stories to the pile: a facilitation he led for a national organization derailed by a young Black staffer who accuses its mostly white leadership team of racism while himself failing to follow through on deadlines or meet expectations; another retreat where he ultimately was fired after a young woman of color said she was uncomfortable being facilitated by anyone other than a Black woman; an organizational retreat where an older man who didn’t understand what gender pronouns were was shamed brusquely by its facilitators. Marom resists the easy slams that come to mind in these encounters and tries his hardest to stay in relationship in these moments of tension, because he believes wholeheartedly in helping groups learn how to be honest with themselves and work through conflict, “moving toward greater understanding and depth and alignment that will allow them to go into the fire together.”

At the same time, he also does not flinch in telling the truth about the movements he loves. “Much of the way we organize ourselves in relation to identity, even though it is in response to systems that are real, is reductive and essentializing; it’s hurtful to everyone involved, and it is profoundly unstrategic,” he writes. “It is weakening our movements.” He adds, some pages later, “A movement that says that some people are worthy and others are not—based on the identity they are perceived to hold as opposed to the choices they make and their willingness to try to do better—is a movement in which no one is their biggest self, really; in which no one is safe. It is a losing movement.”

Speaking just for myself, Marom’s many stories left me wondering who could possibly ever survive let alone thrive in today’s progressive movement culture? If ,as Oscar Wilde said, “The trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings,” today’s enemy of empire, racial capitalism, patriarchy etc, must be superhuman and give up sleeping too, not just evenings.

Marom ends For Louder Days with two vignettes that present countervailing scenarios of possibility and impossibility. The first is about his experience joining a local pick-up softball game in his Brooklyn neighborhood and being reminded that it can be easy and fun to be part of a community: “The guys at softball didn’t ask me to follow rules that made me feel small and doubt whether I knew anything at all, to recant previous experiences or renounce large parts of myself, nor to guard the perimeters with them. They did the opposite. They invited me to join, trusted that inside me was the capacity to meet the purpose, reminded me how to do it, and pushed me to play hard and try to do right by my team, even if I wasn’t any good. They encouraged me to invite friends. They invited me to show up but didn’t need me to prove myself by always being there or always being good. All of that was accompanied by the unspoken belief that I would gradually improve if given the chance, which made it possible for me to simply play.” Amen to all that!

The second is about the fracture among progressives after October 7, 2023. “I have perhaps never felt more confused about my own belonging before, more disappointed by people I love, more alone really, than in the sleepless nights of the last week,” Marom writes about the days after Hamas’s brutal attack and the left’s response, as he joins the fledgling “Jews for Ceasefire” in their first direct action at the Biden White House on October 16. And he’s also angry at everyone from the “vast swaths” of Israeli society who “want as much Palestinian death as they can get” to Israeli liberals who now say they have no space in their hearts for the Palestinians, to the broad swath of American Democratic and Republican leaders and mainstream Jewish organizations who give Israeli warmongers cover, to his “friends and acquaintances in the movement [who] defend and honestly, celebrate the violence of October 7^th on social media, in protests, and in person:

“A speaker at a rally jokes about how the militants ‘took at least several dozen hipsters’ at a rave, to a chuckling crowd of people I am sure I have been to protests with,” Marom writes. (He’s talking about the same October 8 NYC rally that Darializa Avila Chevalier, the congressional candidate endorsed by DSA and Mayor Zohran Mamdani who is running today to unseat incumbent Democratic Rep. Adriano Espaillat, attended and which she doesn’t express regrets for.) He continues: “A Palestinian activist and thinker I have always admired wrote, while Israeli civilians were still being shot and dragged out of their homes by militants, about how proud he was of his people. A prominent organization comes out with a statement about how all Israelis are settlers and therefore legitimate targets for decolonial violence, and I can’t read it any other way than as a justification for the death even of children, who have never made a choice about much of anything, just because of where they were born.”

This is brave and necessary, and Marom pushes further, asking if the people who embrace Hamas’ actions as “Palestinian resistance” and “decolonial violence” would also agree that “those of us who live here in New York or Detroit or Des Moines—with our own settler colonialism and genocide and chattel slavery, we who wear clothes sewn together by child slaves and walk by houseless people freezing to death outside our doors, who pay taxes that fund prisons and pay for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents that abduct our neighbors off the street? Are we not all of us then, by this logic, legitimate targets for this kind of violence? And our kids?...And what about those of us who have spent decades fighting against systems of oppression, like the peace activists who were murdered on the 7^th along with the others, and my friends in the movement here? Or is it just some of us, just the most complicit? And if just some, then who decides, and based on what? And what kind of world will be left after the reckoning?”

It’s tempting to respond to all of this—not just the post-October 7 hyperpolarization but also the many prior examples of the politics of powerlessness recounted in the book—by shutting down. And as he concludes his memoir, Marom admits that he has started to protect himself from all the minefields strewn across the left landscape, and the danger that someone he might sit with might not care about the same people in the same way as him, and that he is “too afraid to find out; too afraid to disagree” and to think less of that person and be less well thought of, that he is starting “to put little walls around my heart.”

His answer is to call on the power of love, which of course can be a great healer. One has to admire his faith in the value of turning toward each other rather than away. And it is most definitely love that has held our most vital movements together, from the civil rights days to the “neighborism” of Minnesota winter of 2026.

But love without structured community-based groups with clear leadership that is accountable in transparent ways to a clear membership – I think that kind of love will always get broken by the contradictions of mass participation without mass organization. From Occupy to Sunrise to IfNotNow, the movements that Moram has worked with most closely have been bedeviled by frequent internal rancor, high leadership turnover, and confusion about what they stand for--even as they have chased the high visibility moments of the whirlwind made possible by our hyper-mediated age. Dysfunction among progressive activists also isn’t new; just look at how the anti-Vietnam movement and the “New Politics” movement of the late 1960s struggled for coherence and pushed away as many good leaders as they attracted. But today our movements struggle for traction because they are all in a war with each other for scarce attention, and these days everyone can imagine themselves a revolutionary or a disrupter, just with the power of a tweet or a snippet of embarrassing video.

As I’ve written here many times, I think there are other models for purposeful organizing that are making headway despite these challenges, like the groups featured in the Civic Power report put out last year by the Democracy and Power Innovation Fund. Marom himself is making a clear argument for structure over “leaderlessness” one can only hope resonates widely. The eternal optimist has nothing but respect for the people, like Marom, who are still trying to figure out “what is to be done” at a time when nothing we do seems anywhere close to matching the challenges we face. In service of that goal, For Louder Days is more than a cautionary tale; it’s a prayer and a primer for what could come next.

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End Times

Sign of the times.

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Between the NBA Finals, which culminated with my home-town New York Knicks winning their first title in 53 years, and the start of the World Cup, it’s a great time to soak in the communal joy of mass fandom and ponder as well how sport can be a force for social good.

First, the Knicks’ win shows that a lot of people on the progressive left clearly yearn for a relationship with the public that somehow matches both the reach and depth of successful fandom. Here, as just one example, is Waleed Shahid, a progressive Democratic strategist who is now working inside the Mamdani administration as Deputy Communications Director of Economic Justice. On Substack’s Notes channel, he wrote about what it was like to be in NYC Saturday night after the Knicks won:

On BlueSky, Ben Collins, the CEO of the company that owns the satirical newspaper The Onion, wrote, “Fascism’s a fever you break with shit like what happened in New York last night. Create more excuses to feel things like that together.” In lots of places, “collective effervescence” was trending, a term that sociologist Emile Durkheim coined to describe the feeling when thousands of people share the emotions of joy, hope and belonging together at the same time.

Or just watch this:

Ironically, the very fact that it was impossible for most Knicks fans to afford a ticket (when I looked, seats in the very top nosebleed section were going for $7,500 a pop) drove many hungry for the communal experience of fandom to watch-parties all over the city, many spilling all over the sidewalks where everyone normally grimaces silently at each other on their rush to work or home. (This roundup from Curbed.com captures the flavor of those scenes really well.)

One thing to acknowledge is that this moment of mass solidarity and joy was not created by a social movement or a political victory. It was created by capitalism, by a team owner, James Dolan, the scion of a cable magnate, who let’s just say is not a nice person. Indeed, nearly every team across the whole professional sports pantheon, including women’s basketball, which is probably the most progressive sport, is owned by a capitalist. (The one exception in the United States is the NFL’s Green Bay Packers, which is owned by a half million of their fans via shares in a community nonprofit.) The Knicks’ team spirit and charismatic players could not have reached a mass audience without Dolan’s vast media operation.

But hey, we’re living in America. That said, in other ways American sports put our laissez-faire, oligarchic political system to shame. Games have clear rules and referees, and when a team loses it accepts its loss. While billionaires can buy unlimited amounts of influence in politics, in many sports their teams are subject to salary caps, to keep the ones in rich markets from buying up all the talent and dominating the weaker teams. How socialistic of them! Indeed, right now the NBA is investigating billionaire owner Steve Ballmer (gift link) for allegedly circumventing the cap by giving one of his star players on the LA Clippers a lucrative no-show endorsement deal on the side. That’s more billionaires than the Trump administration is investigating, if I’m not mistaken. So how do you like them apples?

Football Belongs to the People

With all this in mind, consider football (aka soccer) and the World Cup, an event that regularly produces collective effervescence on a global scale. As I write this, there are at least three efforts that I know of by American progressive organizers to use the Cup’s presence in the US to focus attention on ICE and its concentration camps. There’s “OurCopa”, backed by Working Families Power and Mijente Support Committee; NoIceintheCup, a sister effort led by artist groups; and LetThemGo.us, a joint initiative by Minuto 90, a Chilean sports media station, and Brave of US, a coalition of US immigration groups.

Of these three, only one—LetThemGo.us—is likely to gain much traction, thanks to its partnership with Minuto90. That’s because there’s a big difference between organically using football to spread a progressive message of solidarity and attempting to claim the sport for the left without doing all the seed work needed to connect with the sport’s massive fan base.

OurCopa’s main call to action is embodied in a petition demanding a moratorium on ICE raids and a lifting of travel bans so that fans from Haiti, Iran, Cote D’Ivoire and Senegal can come cheer their teams on. So far it has just over 1,000 signatures. Less than two dozen people have signed up to volunteer with OurCopa in response to its call for hosts of safe watch parties. Just forty-two signed up to attend its June 9 mass call on Mijente’s page. Without some highly provocative action by ICE at one of the World Cup matches, or by raiding a watch party, it’s doubtful anyone will tune into this effort. “They don’t want us to have joy in this moment,” Nelini Stamp, one of OurCopa’s organizers, told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman last week. Her critique of Trump administration policy is great, but in my humble opinion, political criticism is exactly the kind of thing people tune into sports spectacles to escape.

The podcast launched by OurCopa to accompany the rest of its campaign also illustrates how hard it is to bend all that attention toward leftist politics. I tuned into the first episode, which covered how an underground Algerian soccer team fought for liberation from France, and gave up before it finished. There’s a difference between show and tell, and the program’s three hosts spent far too much time telling listeners that the Algerian team did something noble rather than describing what they did.

Contrast this with Minuto90, a two-year-old digital native media operation that intensively covers football in Chile. According to my friend Felipe Heusser, who is its co-founder and director, across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube, Minuto90 has had 40 million views over the last 30 days. That’s on top of the 450 million views it has garnered in its first 19 months.

This promotional video for Minuto90, which Heusser shared with me, gives you the full flavor of its approach. (Make sure your sound is on.)

Minuto90 covers football the way any sports channel does, with intensive attention to every game, team, player and stats. But it also finds social issues from inside the game, with stories on how rising ticket prices are taxing fans for whom attending games is a family tradition, or how a local team owner screwed his top players by ordering their coach to bench them before they played enough games to trigger an automatic contract renewal.

This video reel gives some examples of how Minuto90 does that coverage.

So far, Minuto90’s initial Instagram posts about the LetThemGo.us effort have garnered half a million views. Next week its team is going to do more reporting from the ground about ICE detention centers near some of the US match cities, and Heusser predicts this will gain more attention as well.

As far as I know, there’s no equivalent in America to Minuto90, in terms of its approach to its country’s favorite sport. But we could sure use something like it.

Towards a Politics of Joy

Starting where people gather for joy rather than where they gather for critique inverts much of what the American liberal-left has done for decades. Back in February, Dakota Hall, the executive director at the Alliance for Youth Action, who writes the Substack newsletter The Ground Game, laid out a striking vision of how this could work (have worked?) around the World Cup:

A FIFA World Cup watch party brings together people across lines that traditional organizing struggles to cross. Young men who work in construction watch next to college students. Recent immigrants sit with third-generation Americans. People who’ve never voted and people who canvass every cycle all show up because they love soccer and they want to watch it with other people who love soccer. That’s the on-ramp. Not a clipboard. Not a ten-page reading on neoliberalism. A World Cup watch party.

The organizing model I’m proposing inverts the traditional pipeline. Instead of recruiting the already-engaged to do more political work, it focuses on bringing new people into the base by creating spaces they actually want to be in. Spaces that start with culture, community, and shared experience, and only later, organically, introduce questions of power, fairness, and collective action.

Here’s what that could look like in practice:

You organize a March Madness watch party at a community center near campus. You make it free, you provide food, you have a big screen and decent sound. You invite everyone, the political science majors show up, sure, but so do the nursing students, the guys from the football team, the international students, the kids who work full-time and go to school part-time. Half the people who show up just want to rep their school, wear the jersey, and scream at a screen with other people who care. You’re not asking anyone to sign anything or commit to anything. You’re just creating a space where people can enjoy something together.

Next week, some of those same people show up to a pickup basketball tournament you’re organizing. Then a few come to a Cultura y Comunidad night with a live banda performance and local food vendors. Then a retro game night. Over time, you’re not just hosting events, you’re building a community of young people who trust each other, who have shared experiences, who feel like they belong to something.

And here’s the thing: When you’ve built that foundation of trust and belonging, the conversations about power, fairness, and collective action emerge naturally. Because these young people are already experiencing economic precarity, they’re just not using that language to describe it. They know healthcare is broken because half of them can’t afford to see a doctor. They understand labor exploitation because they’re working two jobs while going to school. They get that the system is rigged because they’re living it.

The gaming community that started meeting just to play starts talking about how tariffs affect the price of consoles. The fitness group that bonded over training routines has conversations about health access and the politics of bodily autonomy. The anime watch party crew starts connecting the dots between the stories they love and the political fights happening around them.

You didn’t lead with politics. You led with joy. And the politics followed because you created space for people to think together about the systems shaping their lives.

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End Times

The medieval king of pop.

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Original estimated cost in 2016: $300,000,000

Rank among presidential libraries in total cost: 1

Cost of the 99-year lease given to the Obama Foundation for the Jackson Park site by the city of Chicago: $10

Cost of entry to the museum for ages 12 and up: $30

Number of donors who gave $25 million or more to the center: 12

Number who gave between $1 million and $25 million: 119

Annual salary/benefits of Valerie Jarrett, CEO of the Obama Foundation, 2024: $755,000

Total salary/benefits of the top 15 employees of the foundation, 2024: $5.4 million

Total salary/benefits for the entire center/foundation, 2024: $43.7 million

Total funding gap for Movement Voter PAC’s partner organizations in their top 9 states as of September 23, 2024: $165 million.

Cost to America of Kamala Harris losing the 2024 election: Unestimable.

Number of publicly disclosed corporate donors to Trump’s $400 million ballroom: 27

Value of new or increased government contracts to those corporations: Over $50,000,000,000

Number of those donors facing federal enforcement actions and/or have had them suspended by Trump: 16

Number of stock trades Trump made between January and March of 2026: More than 3,600

Amount of Nvidia stock Trump bought in early January a week before the Commerce Department approved selling Nvidia chips to China: Up to $1,000,000

Amount of Dell stock Trump bought between January and March: Between $1,000,000 and $5,000,000

How much Dell stock jumped on after Trump told a White House audience on May 8 to “go out and buy a Dell”: 24%

Estimated amount Trump has enriched himself by using the presidency since 2024: $1,408,000,000

Amount that funds linked Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar have invested in Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners private equity fund: At least $3,500,000,000

Estimated management fees that Kushner has earned from this fund: $100,000,000

Amount that an investment firm tied to the United Arab Emirates invested in World Liberty Financial, a digital token firm founded by Steve Witkoff, Trump and their families, in order to gain a 49% stake: $2,000,000,000

Number of nuclear experts that Kushner and Witkoff consulted with prior to rejecting Iran’s February offer to limit their uranium enrichment level to 3.67% for civilian use only: 0

Number they are consulting with now as they try to finalize a deal that would end the Iran war: 100

Estimated cost of the Iran war to US Treasury since it began February 28: $107,000,000,000

Total consumer burden in increased gas and diesel prices: $56,000,000,000

Amount over ten years that Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” cut in SNAP food benefits to low-income families: $187,000,000,000

Number of Americans who have lost those food benefits between when the bill was passed and February 2026: 3,500,000

Percentage of Americans who were “food insecure” in 2024: 14%

Percentage of Americans who told the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s research team in June 2020 that they had dipped into savings or emergency accounts to cover expenses: 21.8%

Percentage who said the same in February 2026: 36.8%

Percentage of non-white Americans who said in June 2020 that they had trouble finding enough food to eat or had kids who missed meals: 4.5%

Percentage who said the same in February 2026: 19.1%

Percentage of contiguous United States currently at drought levels: 60%

Estimated number of operational AI data centers: 601

Planned additional data centers: 809

Number of those planned centers that are in places in drought locations: 517

Amount of gallons of water all of these data centers will consume per year by 2028: 73,000,000,000

Percentage projected increase in AI data center water use from 2023 level: 329%

Amount of water a 100-word AI prompt consumes for data center cooling: One 500ml (16.9 fl oz) bottle

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Net worth of Kevin O’Leary, who plays a billionaire on Shark Tank: $400,000,000

Number of football fields in size of the Stratos AI data center he is building in Utah, originally: 30,000

Number of views of Gabi Finlayson and Jackie Morgan’s Instagram video mocking O’Leary after he attacked them on Fox News as likely Chinese agents for opposing his Utah data center: 1,900,000

Percentage cut in the size of the data center that O’Leary proposed to make, as of June 4: 50%

Percentage cut in the size that the Utah Senate President is requesting in response to O’Leary: 75%

Odds that O’Leary compared this demand to being able to only use a portion of his home, saying, “A 75% reduction means I’m living in the upstairs toilet on the second floor. Like, how can I do that?”: 100%

Size of the toilets in O’Leary’s four homes: Unknown

Number of upcoming events on progressive organizing platform Mobilize.us: 11,057

Number that mention voting rights/elections: 3,889

Number that mention ICE/immigration: 3,225

Number that mention democracy: 1,892

Number that mention housing: 998

Number that mention poverty/food/SNAP: 107

Number that mention data centers: 55

Number that mention the Iran war specifically: 34

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It’s safe to say that most if not all of the speeches made at these two competing events will focus on attacking the other faction. Corporate-funded Democrats and grassroots progressive Democrats view each other as the main reason the party is struggling to connect with voters, and while they each have some valid points, no one can get this debate to resolve itself. There’s too much money and passion flowing into it to keep it going, and in-group/out-group identity formation is a powerful force.

I scanned both speaker lists to see if there was any sign of common ground and discovered there is only one person speaking at both events: Zoe Stein, the executive director of Contest Every Race. Founded in 2018, the group recruits candidates to run in small towns and rural communities that have been mostly overlooked by national Democratic groups. It also runs an ongoing grant and training program for county parties. In 2025, according to its impact report, Contest Every Race recruited 908 candidates to run for local office. 444 of them won, their strongest win rate yet.

At WelcomeFest, Stein’s talk is titled, “A pragmatic and scaled approach to making Democrats suck less,” which will focus on the case “for a radically pragmatic approach: fix the party where it’s weakest, compete everywhere, and treat innovation as a necessity rather than a luxury.” At Netroots Nation, she’s on a panel called “Recruiting the next generation of candidates to end uncontested races.” I don’t know Stein, but I salute her both for showing up in both places and because she has a message that transcends the narcissism of small differences that Democrats across the party cling to.

According to political scientists, about 90% of a voter’s decision is driven by what party they identify with, not attributes of a specific candidate or their policies. That is because we live in a hyper-polarized time, where the two major parties have sorted themselves and us into two warring camps. Almost nothing a particular candidate does matters. At best, candidates who are more “moderate” see a very slight boost, perhaps two to three percent, in their likely vote share. But a huge amount of energy is devoted to the argument between the moderate and progressive wings of the Democratic party over which way it should swing to claw its way back into power. And neither faction is strong enough or big enough to defeat the other one (unlike the Republican party, where MAGA has annihilated its opponents completely).

So while we live amidst the gravest threat to American democracy since Jim Crow, Democratic activists consume themselves with arguments structured around this internal debate. While there are important differences between these two wings in policy terms, this unending debate keeps the party from offering a clear choice to voters looking for an alternative to Trumpism. Negative partisanship is likely to give Dems—regardless of their particular position on the moderate-to-progressive axis—a lift this fall, but unless you enjoy banging your head against the wall and doing the same thing over and over, it won’t suffice to change the underlying dynamic fueling rising distrust in our political system.

There are two ways out of this trap; one is technical and the other is structural. On the technical side, funders and activists could choose to invest their attention in party-building itself rather than intrapartisan conflicts. Register more young people to vote; in many states, less than one-third of 18-year-olds are registered. Put money and time into efforts to update the Democratic voter file and improve our understanding of what moves voters now, like Swing Left’s Ground Truth project, which is aiming to do a half-million conversations with unlikely voters this year alone. Give to groups like Contest Every Race that attend to the infrastructure of building political homes or next-generation tools that make more efficient and effective use of volunteer time than NGPVAN. More registered Democrats, more active local county parties, and better technology for voter engagement will move the needle more than the two- to three-percent shift that WelcomeFest and Netroots Nation are arguing over.

The other way out is to open the party system itself to more choices. As Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez once said, “In any other country, Joe Biden and I wouldn’t be in the same party, but in America, we are.” The crowds gathering this week in DC and Philly are fighting for control of the Democratic party because it has a monopoly on opposition to the Republican party. But that monopoly is based on an artificial constraint caused by laws that the two major parties passed roughly 125 years ago to make third- and fourth-parties irrelevant. Before then, American politics was more fluid; minor parties regularly arose to organize support for neglected causes and frequently used their leverage to induce major party candidates to move in their direction in exchange for their support.

That worked because back then, parties printed their own ballots and regularly “fused” together onto the same candidates, while maintaining their own distinct identities. A Democrat or Whig who earned the support of say, the Free Soil Party, because of their stance against letting more slave states into the union could win election thanks to that backing, and all the parties could see exactly how many votes the Free Soil party added to the winner’s total. Today we live in an electoral desert because the major parties used their power at the state legislative level to ban multiparty endorsements, effectively forcing minor parties to become spoilers. As a result, America is the only democracy in the world that hasn’t seen a new major party form in more than one hundred years. And you wonder why politics is such a turnoff to so many people.

But, we can change the rules and relegalize fusion voting (now only in use in New York and Connecticut, which never banned it). Here’s how my friend Lee Drutman scopes out how this could work today:

Say 3% of Republicans would vote for a Democrat as a check on Trump—but won’t vote “Democratic Party.” Say another 3% of Democrats feel abandoned on working-class issues and might vote Republican—but won’t vote “Republican Party.”

Create a Moderate Party ballot line and a Working Class Party ballot line. Let candidates compete for their endorsements. Suddenly you have 6% of newly persuadable voters per race. That’s enough to restore genuine competition in some states and districts that have lapsed into lopsided partisan territory.

Fusion voting lets one candidate appear on multiple ballot lines. Think of it as multiple pathways to the same destination. A candidate endorsed by both Democrats and a Moderate Party would appear twice on the ballot. Voters choose which line to pull, but both votes count for the same person. The ballot line choice becomes a message about priorities.

Here’s where it gets interesting strategically. A Democrat might secure the Working Class Party endorsement defensively—say, by backing a $15 minimum wage—to prevent a four-point loss, while pursuing the Moderate Party offensively to bring a four-point swing. A Republican could flip the script—champion working-class economics while showing enough anti-corruption gumption against Trump to win moderate support. The parties would have to compete for these endorsements in every race.

The real competition happens in the pursuit of endorsements. Candidates must address anti-corruption and working-class priorities to win both lines. That competition is what creates new dimensionality. Suddenly elections aren’t just about Democrat versus Republican. They’re about good governance, economic populism, institutional integrity—issues that could cut across the partisan divide and force candidates to distinguish themselves beyond party labels.

Depending on how many voters such fusion parties could attract, House and Senate races would get significantly more competitive, Drutman notes. And politics itself would get less divisive and more multidimensional. Differences over values and policy would still occur, but we’d have a clearer sense of their relative levels of support and importance, instead of the never-ending intra-partisan infighting we have today.

Speaking just for myself, I am increasingly exhausted by the narcissism of small differences and the endless war inside the Democratic party while the world is on fire and arsonists sit in the White House. How about you?

—Related: Dan Cantor, “Fusion Voting, Fusion Parties: Escaping the Two-Party Doom Loop,” Democracy Journal, Winter 2026.

—See also: Eric Blanc, “Why is the Left No Fun? Bouncy Castle Communism is the Solution,” Labor Politics, May 26, 2026.

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Quick takes

—California’s gubernatorial primary shows that we are back in the Wild West of political campaigning. Example one: Heavy spending by billionaire Tom Steyer’s campaign to get “influencers” to promote his candidacy. Example two: At least 3,000 fake accounts that generated 1.3 million views and 42,000 engagements promoting Xavier Becerra’s late rise in the field. Both have the effect of undermining voter trust. Good times.

—The hullaballoo over the disastrous release of the DNC’s aborted post-mortem report on the 2024 election absolutely raises questions about party chair Ken Martin’s ability to manage his fractious organization. But I’m struck by how little attention people have given to the very good organizing playbook his team released earlier this year, which offers a credible path forward for Democrats interested in party-building and in avoiding the kinds of mistakes that doomed the Biden and Harris campaigns.

—There are now 334 events listed on Mobilize for Pride 2026, making it the biggest movement action of June. And they all feature a mix of parades, festivals, tabling and voter registration. Visibility Brigades’ day of action on June 6 and the De-ICE Citizens Bank push on the same day each have about half as many.

End Times

Creepy.

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I’m traveling overseas to speak at a training retreat for democracy campaigners in France, so no regular post this week.

And, quite honestly, I’m grateful for the chance to take a break, step outside the US frame for few days, and hopefully gain some fresh inspiration.

Instead, here’s a small gift video, titled “What Gives Us Hope.”

Since August, in partnership with the Center for Ballot Freedom, a cross-partisan group that works to strengthen American democracy by working to move us toward a multi-party political system, I’ve been hosting a biweekly podcast called, “This Old Democracy.”

I’ve gotten to talk to people working on the front lines of this fight, from across the political spectrum—organizers, politicians, academics and media makers. And at the end of each episode, I’ve asked the same question of all these folks: “How are you personally coping with living through these challenging times? What gives you hope?”

Here’s a short “super-cut” of their best answers. Enjoy! (And if you feel like it, chime in in the comments on what gives you hope.)

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The video features:

• Ian Bassin, Protect Democracy • Dan Cantor, Center for Ballot Freedom • Andy Craig, Rainey Center • Lisa Disch, University of Michigan • Jennifer Dresden, Protect Democracy • Lee Drutman, New America • Aaron Estabrook, United Kansas Party • Bill Kristol, The Bulwark • Didi Kuo, Stanford University • Brad Lander, NYC Comptroller • Lily Mason, Johns Hopkins University • Heather McGhee, Author of The Sum of Us • Miles Rapoport, 100% Democracy • Daniel Schlozman, Johns Hopkins University • Daniel Stid, American Enterprise Institute • Astra Taylor, Author of Democracy May Not Exist But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone • Jeff Timmer, The Lincoln Project.

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P.S. If you really want to get inspired for what’s ahead, listen to what Doran Schrantz had to say to a group of Volunteer Blue organizers about the lessons from Minnesota’s battle with ICE.

Instead, I think it’s important to pay attention to how “the party blob” is working to connect with voters directly, through meetings, face-to-face encounters, visible events and rallies. While the polls suggest that a “Blue wave” is coming this fall in response to Trump’s corruption, incompetence and hard-right policies, the Democratic Party itself also remains deeply unpopular. If the party, campaigns and advocacy groups are pro-actively reaching out to voters, it’s mostly for a transaction: a vote, a donation, or maybe a few hours at a rally. Figuring out a path forward to real power-building through the blur of ongoing outrages and competing demands for attention has never been harder. That’s a feature of our times, not a bug.

Lately, I’ve been playing around with a tool that Claude helped me write that scrapes all the upcoming events from Mobilize.us, one of the main platforms used by thousands of Democratic and progressive groups to host upcoming events. For this week’s edition of The Connector, I want to share some gleanings for what this tells us about the current state of center-left politicking in America.

What follows, though, is not a complete snapshot of political activity across the whole liberal-left. While more than 15,000 organizations have created accounts on Mobilize, there are many that use ActionNetwork, which does not make listings searchable online. So, labor unions, which largely use ActionNetwork, will be undercounted here. So will a variety of left-leaning independent organizations, including Democratic Socialists of America, 50501, CodePink, 350.org, Greenpeace, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Sunrise Movement. Several large nonprofit organizations like Planned Parenthood and the Sierra Club use EveryAction as their primary organizing platform, and that platform is also unscrapeable. And lastly, this is a snapshot during what will probably be seen as a lull period, an ebb in local activity after the giant push for No Kings 3 but before the mid-terms election season really heats up.

Right now, just over 1,700 organizations have at least one upcoming event on Mobilize.[1] Only 22 organizations have more than 50, while 648 have exactly one event. That long tail of one-offs includes everything from a “Die-In to Protect Our Healthcare” in Oakland, California to a National Organization for Women meeting in San Antonio called “Talk Dirty to Me — Conversations with Certified Sex Educator Amy Gonzalez” to a parent-activist group in Miami-Dade County using Mobilize to get people to attend a school board meeting.

Looking forward from May 19, there are 9,784 upcoming events listed across the site. Thirty-one percent are hosted by a swarm of independent grassroots groups. Just a little under a third (28%) are sponsored by state or local Democratic party committees. Another 23% are tied to a candidate campaign.

In each of these broad categories, there are interesting distinctions.

The Independent Swarm

At first glance, Indivisible is the juggernaut of Mobilize with 805 upcoming local events under its national banner, plus dozens more via local affiliates that are heavy users of the platform like Indivisible Charlotte (27), Seattle Indivisible (24), Indivisible Hingham Hull of Massachusetts (21), Indivisible Hawai’i Statewide Network (19), Southend Indivisible between Seattle and Tacoma (17) and Indivisible Tri-Valley around Pleasonton, CA (16). About 60% of these listings are for visibility events and rallies, including many weekly recurring actions, with another 30% focused on local group meetings and community-building. Only 13 Indivisible events listed canvassing and/or phone-banking. Thus right now Indivisible is largely functioning as a permission structure for local weekly resistance as opposed to voter-contact work.

Swing Left, the next biggest independent grassroots organizing group, is in a different lane entirely. Its 115 upcoming events are mostly focused on rolling out its Ground Truth canvasses, where volunteers knock on every door (not just Dems) in targeted neighborhoods and use deep-listening style conversations to try to start rebuilding trust with voters, expand our understanding of what moves people, and update the voter file. More than any other group in the party blob, Swing Left is carrying out a carefully-designed and well-articulated strategy for bottom-up Democratic party renewal called The Big Swing; its main challenge appears to be getting more major donors to invest it that approach to bring it to greater scale.

Other power users of Mobilize in the grassroots organization category include:

—The De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition, which has 85 events listed for its upcoming national day of action on June 6c putting pressure on the bank for its financing of CoreCivic and GEO Group, two businesses that work closely with ICE.

—United Against Fentanyl, a grassroots organization that is hosting a “Walk for Lives” on July 11 in 122 locations around the country.

—Civic Joy Fund, a San Francisco-based community renewal organization focused entirely on neighborhood clean-ups that lists 96 events; and

—Protect Education, an Arizona-focused campaign fighting the privatization of public education that has 81 upcoming events.

—The Visibility Brigade network also shows up as the largest distributed tactic across the Mobilize dataset, with 177 upcoming events, including 50 occurring via Indivisible groups, 23 listed by the national Visibility Brigade organization, and a long tail of individual chapters.

The Democratic Party

Out of the top 100 organizations** listing upcoming events on Mobilize, state Democratic parties and their coordinated campaigns together account for one-third. Here, the data reveals something we already know: a few states like Wisconsin have vibrant party organizations doing a lot to build connections with voters; some are already doing the traditional coordinated campaign work that aims to lift favored candidates on the ballot this fall; and slightly more than a third are doing no meaningful outreach at all.

For the 31 state parties that have upcoming events listed on Mobilize, here’s how they rank after you adjust for variances in state population. The raw number of upcoming events appears after each state’s initials. [2]

Of the remaining 19 state parties, a glance at their websites found that only eight – Alaska, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan and Montana – showed actual upcoming events on their calendars.

If we dig a bit deeper into the data, a few things stand out:

The Wisconsin Democratic Party is doing a lot to live up to its reputation. Many of its 248 upcoming events are what could be fairly described as non-electoral relationship-building: trinket-making with families, environmental caucuses about lake pollution, parade marches with county Dems, highway cleanups, book clubs, and weekly peaceful protests on rotating themes like Medicaid, Social Security, immigration, and women’s rights. There’s also a strong canvassing operation underneath that, but the state party is hard at work building a community-oriented brand.

By contrast, the California Democratic Party appears to be currently focused on the strategic prize of defending the new districts formed by Prop 50 and taking back the House with targeted canvassing in some newly competitive districts. One-fifth of its 176 upcoming events are phone-banks, compared to just 9% of WisDems. The Minnesota and Pennsylvania parties are also much more focused on building an election-day field machine, with a lot of training of new volunteers, office openings, ‘meet your organizer’ coffees and door-knocks.

The most intriguing discovery in the Mobilize data about Democratic party programs was the Hamilton County Democratic Party of Indiana, which boasts 44 upcoming events that are almost all informal community activities that appear to be focused on building up trust in semi-hostile territory. (Trump beat Harris in Indiana 59%-40%; in Hamilton she got 46%.) There are ‘Dems on Draft’ brewery meetups, ‘Dems on Drip’ coffee mornings, ‘Donuts & Dems’ Saturday breakfasts, Earth Day invasive-species removals, Adopt-a-Street cleanups and something I had never heard of until now: Rage Crafting. That’s where people channel intense emotions about politics into creative projects, but you do it with other people rather than alone at home. To be fair, some of the HamCoDems’ list of upcoming meetings is padded with events as far away as this December, but that too is a sign of strong organization. On a per-capita basis, Hamilton County Dems are doing more local events than the whole frigging Wisconsin state party. Is it something in the water?

According to the Indianapolis Star, “Indiana Democrats are running for office in record numbers” this year, both at the statehouse and local level. Kayla Dwyer reports that, “The surge in interest among candidates is not merely spur of the moment, but also owes to concerted efforts over the last several years by local party volunteers to build their organizations, become more present in their communities and recruit a bench of candidates.” It’s the first time in 50 years that Democrats are fielding candidates in all 25 state senate seats, she notes. That includes Hamilton County, where the 54 candidates running up and down the ballot is “the most they’ve ever had.” Josh Lowry, who took over the county party in 2024, told the Star, “If this had happened two years ago, I wouldn’t have believed it.” Dwyer also notes that since becoming chair in 2024, “his party hired a full-time executive director and got a full-time office space.”

Meanwhile here in New York State, where Democrats outnumber Republicans 6.3 million to 3 million (with another 3.9 unaffiliated or registered in minor parties), according to FEC records the state Democratic party has one paid executive director, one paid state coordinated committee director, one paid voter protection director, one deputy paid voter protection director, one paid creative director, one paid rapid response director, one paid chief of staff to the chairman, one paid data director, a paid accountant, and no upcoming events listed on its Mobilize account. (It also pays the salary of Governor Kathy Hochul’s spokesperson.) Its most recent press release is dated March 1, 2025. Good times!

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Candidate Campaigns

A lot of candidates for Congress as well as state offices use Mobilize to schedule upcoming events. I’m wary of drawing conclusions from who shows up the most here because campaigns can have legitimate reasons for filtering volunteers before they plug them into activities like canvassing. That said, it’s interesting to note that several congressional contenders who could reasonably be described as “insurgents” (as opposed to establishment Democrats) show up among the top 50 candidates listing upcoming events on Mobilize. Those include Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner (56), New York incumbent Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (43), Iowa Senate candidate Zach Wahls (23), and NYC Comptroller Brad Lander who is running for a House seat (13).

Platner is running a gigantic get-out-the-vote style canvass operation, with 40 similar events spread across dozens of Maine towns amounting to nearly three-quarters of his upcoming events. In that respect his is one of the more field-heavy campaigns currently underway, though of the 431 campaign committees currently listing events, 45% of those are also canvasses. Campaigns are also far more inclined to in-person engagement compared to other Mobilize users. That said, only a small portion of the candidate campaigns on Mobilize are pushing out ten or more events; a third of them list just one event that is typically something like a campaign launch or kickoff canvass.

AOC is also unusual in that, as a safe incumbent in a very blue district, she doesn’t need to run many local events to get re-elected. Interestingly, about a third of her upcoming 41 events are visibility- rather than direct voter engagement, things like sign-waving and rallies. So in some cases, a candidate campaign on Mobilize is more of a “movement”-style operation than a tradition vote-getting one.

Given how most Democratic campaigns operate using the old playbook, which calls spending much time raising money to spend on expensive paid media and message testing and treats grassroots voter engagement as something to be done mainly in the final months before an election, I’m not surprised by how few candidates are investing heavily in Mobilize-powered volunteer- and voter-engagement. They may also think the blue wave is coming regardless.

If you ask me, though, positive outliers like the Hamilton County Democrats of Indiana suggest that there’s a lot more potential out in the field that isn’t being tapped. And the gap between what most Democrats are doing and, to be frank, what most opposition organizations are doing, and Trump’s outrages, feels wider than ever.

**To see the top 100 list of organizations/campaigns on Mobilize, sorted by upcoming events as of May 19, 2026, go here.

[Dear readers: Did you find this kind of data dive useful? Let me know if you want me to repeat this exercise every few months.]

Congrats are in order!

Kudos to my friend Chris Rabb, an original netroots blogger, and his whole campaign team, for winning the Democratic primary in PA-3 last night by a resounding margin. Onward and upward!

End Times

Say hello to India’s fastest growing new political party.

[1] Why the big gap between active organizations and the total number that Mobilize lists? Many are dormant campaign committees from previous election cycles going back to Mobilize’s founding in 2017; some are groups that registered with Mobilize but never created any events; and others may be hosting events that are marked as “non-public” and thus invisible.

[2] Where Mobilize has state coordinated campaigns listed separate from state parties, the data has been combined, e.g., Minnesota DFL + MN DFL 2026 Coordinated; PA Democratic Party + PA Coordinated 2026; NC Democrats + NC Coordinated; Iowa Dems + Iowa Forward 2026; Texas Democratic Party + Texas Together; Maine Dems + Maine Dems Local Organizing; Democratic Party of Georgia + Georgia 26. Populations are 2024 Census estimates.

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A week ago Saturday, while doing a day of deep canvassing with Canvassing Connectors in Peekskill, NY, my teammate and I finished our rounds having a long conversation with a progressive movement organizer who happened to be on our route. She knew a lot about the neighborhood nearby. “You should go to this group of houses around the corner,” she told us. “They all took their Trump flags down in the last few months.” And indeed none were on display.

Something similar is happening around the country. On the r/newjersey subreddit, a user named “G00G00Daddy” posted two days ago: “I was driving through Cranbury yesterday and a home that’s been flying a trump flag for at least the past 3 years has taken it down. It was still flying in December, so a recent update. Have others noticed the same?” “LaurAdorable” replied, “I know of a house in Clark who had several pro Trump flags and ‘go brandon’ ones a few years ago that suddenly were gone and are just showing American flags now. Interesting.” Another named “mcgeggy” wrote, “Same here in Howell. Multiple Trump flags in front yard for many years, now just American flags.” Someone replied that they also saw a house in Howell that first lowered its Trump flag to half-mast before removing it.

Longer range travelers are reporting the same thing. In r/SLO, which stands for San Luis Obispo County on the central coast of California, user named “Ok_Comfortable4138” wrote eight days ago, “I just spent a long weekend covering many miles around rural SLO and Monterey Counties via rural backroads and was astonished by the lack of MAGA banners on display in front of houses.” In the FoxBrain subreddit, a user named “LonkToTheFuture” reported a month ago, “Recently drove to a wedding in the Texas hill country from Houston. Typically out on the rural state highways I would see at least a handful of Trump flags and signs. Last weekend I saw none at all, except for a big 2024 campaign sign that had Trump’s name ripped off it.” Three days ago, a user named “NoZookeepergame6715” replied, “Same. I drive out to West Texas regularly. It used to be littered with Trump flags. I haven’t seen a single flag in Texas in several months. Means something...”

Indeed it does. Trump’s declining poll numbers have a real-world corollary: many of his most devoted supporters are quietly withdrawing. Some, like Ashley St. Clair, a 27-year-old TikTok influencer who is perhaps best known for mothering a child with Elon Musk, have decided to make a full break with MAGA and are telling tales from out of school. But as buyer’s remorse settles in, more are probably just going to take a break from politics. And some may switch to voting for Democrats, or for less far-out Republicans.

In both the short term and long run, this trend could be as important for the future of American politics as the trend you are probably hearing all about right now: how Republican legislatures are doing more mid-decade gerrymandering and have just given themselves a major advantage in the battle for control of the House of Representatives. Indeed, the trends are connected: there’s no question that Trump allies in Congress and many statehouses can see their declining popularity and therefore are pulling out the stops to tilt the playing field further to their advantage. This is making the path to retaking the House much steeper, as G. Elliott Morris points out. It’s also engendering a lot of despair about how the Rs are rigging the game.

But the question I have for you, dear reader, is which trend are you choosing to fixate on? Because believing that all hope is lost is dangerous, and even more so when so many people are doing all they can to turn the tide.

This is a pivotal year

According to K. Starling’s We the People Dissent newsletter, in the first three months of this year, there were roughly 22,000 demonstrations, rallies, protests, marches and vigils expressing opposition to the Trump regime. This, she says, is about 50% more than 55,000-60,000 protests she and her volunteer helpers tallied in 2025.

Harvard’s Crowd Counting Consortium, which uses a more stringent tallying method, has only released numbers through the first two months of this year, but the trendline is the same. In all of 2025, CCC counted 39,154 protests against Trump across America. Through the end of February 2026, it recorded another 9,447. That puts 2026 to be 45% more active, in terms of on-the-ground protest, than last year.

Neither of these tallies include the burst of activity around No Kings 3 on March 28, “Communities Not Cages” on April 25, and MayDay on May 1. Right now, based on my ongoing tracking of upcoming events on Mobilize.us, the progressive event platform, there’s a surge of attention on voting rights, with immigration and democracy being the other leading topics mentioned across the thousands of events Mobilize displays. The Court’s Callais ruling has prompted several urgent listings, most prominently the “All Roads Lead to the South” national day of action on May 16.

Also, in addition to the annual wave of PRIDE events happening in June, Mobilize is also showing a direct-action campaign targeting Citizens Bank protesting its financing of ICE detention centers. The De-ICE Citizens Bank Coalition is building towards a national day of action on June 6, with 34 across New England, the company’s home territory.

However you slice the data, there will be a record amount of mass protest this year. All this effort, though, is setting us up for one of the classic challenges faced by many protest movements: It’s very rare for us to know in real time the effect of our actions.

Uncertainty about whether you are winning, treading water, or going backwards is a hallmark of mass movements. And when movements grind along for a long period without seeing much, if anything, change in response to their efforts, people often respond in one of two ways. Many give up, while a smaller group gets radicalized. Both moves are understandable. Neither are helpful.

This is one of the great lessons of the anti-Vietnam War movement of the mid-1960s to mid-1970s that is quite relevant to today. I’m in the middle of reading Tom Wells’ magisterial history of that period, The War Within: America’s Battle Over Vietnam. Of the anti-war movement’s challenges, he writes:

“For many, the anti-war fight brought mounting and profound political frustration. Despite the movement’s steady expansion, they observed, the bloodletting in Vietnam only increased. The White House seemed heedless of public protest, its occupants amoral. There was apparently no telling how far the US government would go to impose its designs on the peasantry of Southeast Asia: even World War III was possible. Public support for US policies compounded activists’ distress. The building frustration in the movement bred feelings of desperation in many circles. Gor some protesters the desperation even begot self-sacrifice. ‘What more can we possibly do?’ was a common cry in the movement. The frustration was greatest among amongst youth. And it was particularly pronounced in periods following large national demonstrations, when, despite the dissent, little if anything seemed to change. Few activists fully appreciated the considerable political power they possessed...

One of my theses is that thwarted political hopes were the main (but by no means the only) impetus behind escalations in anti-war tactics. Frustrated hopes were the principal reason for the growing militancy in the movement, including the use of political violence. The only way to stop the war, many protesters concluded, was to make America ungovernable....

Activists’ failure to appreciate their actual political power hurt their cause. That failure spawned defections from the movement. It bred lethargy, stagnation, and despair in the movement’s ranks, impeding the organization of protests and the maintenance of anti-war groups. It fostered antipathy to traditional legal demonstrations, hindering the public display of anti-war sentiment. It hampered efforts to sustain outpourings of dissent, particularly in the early 1970s, when, amid Richard Nixon’s escalations of the war, cynicism about the efficacy of anti-war protest was especially widespread. Not least important, it aggravated dissension over strategies and tactics among activists, thereby depleting energies, hardening internal divisions, and reducing the movements capacity for coordinated action.”

If only movement activists had known the kind of impact they were having, in real-time. Writing twenty years after the fact, and with the benefit of many interviews with Administration officials as well as internal records of conversations, Wells asserts:

“The US government took the antiwar movement quite seriously. If many protesters fail to appreciate their political clout, officials in the Johnson and Nixon administrations did not. They considered the movement a nagging sign of domestic dissatisfaction with the war, a threat to their base of domestic support, a menace to American social stability, and a source of encouragement to the Vietnamese enemy. Officials recognized that protesters were, in fact the cutting edge of domestic anti-war sentiment as a whole. Washington consequently followed the movement’s activities closely, nervously, relentlessly. Officials at the highest levels paid keen attention to them. Presidents Johnson and Nixon both took an active interest in the movement’s doings. The intelligence reports they requested and received on protests exhibited market detail...

The movement played a major role in constraining, de-escalating, and ending the war. The movement inhibited both US air and ground activity in Indochina during the Johnson administration. It fed the mounting unease with the conflict of key administration officials in late 1967 and early 1968. The movement fueled Eugene McCarthy’s presidential bid, which shaped official perceptions in 1968 that the public had turned against the war period it had a significant effect from the influential private Johnson advisors known as the wise men. And it was the most important manifestation of the domestic antiwar mood that forced the Johnson administration to reverse course in Vietnam in 1968.

The peace movement also exerted a substantial impact on the Nixon administration’s policies in Vietnam. It fueled US troop withdrawals from Vietnam. It continued to inhibit both the US air and ground wars in Indochina. It exerted a critical influence on Nixon’s decision not to carry out his 1969 threat to Hanoi of a massive military blow. It shaped his determination to prematurely withdraw U.S. forces from Cambodia in 1970. The movement nourished the deterioration in US troop discipline and morale in Vietnam, which provided additional impetus to US troop withdrawals. It put pressure on the administration to negotiate a settlement of the war. And it gave impetus to congressional legislation that cut off US funds for the war.”

Now apply this insight to the first months of 2026. We already know that the massive nonviolent resistance to ICE in Minnesota, which was buttressed by more than one thousands “ICE Out for Good” protest rallies around the country the weekend of January 24, led to the cashiering of Greg Bovino and the firing of Kristy Noem—though we don’t have the internal records or testimony of administration officials revealing more. Either way, the cause and effect seem plain.

Why hasn’t Trump continued to escalate his war on Iran? Could it be that the reports of eight million people in the streets on March 28 spooked him? Again, we probably won’t know the full answer for years. Trump chickens out for lots of reasons, including stock market crashes and oil price jumps. But considering how much he seems to care about the size of his crowds, the continuing appearance of big crowds opposing him on America’s streets must also be having an impact.

The problem with catastrophism

I felt moved to make this point this week about mass movement confusion after reading Jonathan V. Last’s recent screed in The Bulwark titled “The Enshittified States of America.” Last is the editor of The Bulwark, the breakout publication of the #NeverTrump center-right, and one of its star performers. His work is often smart, even trenchant. On the Bulwark’s many podcasts, he is often one of its more acid commentators. With this piece, though, he was channeling the kind of cynicism that grows when you feel like nothing is changing despite your most passionate, best efforts.

Using tech writer Cory Doctorow’s powerful description of the process by which tech companies rise by being good for their users but then, once they’ve locked them in, “enshittify” by monetizing them in ever more exploitative ways, Last makes a similar claim about America itself:

“Let me tell you a highly stylized version of the American story,” he writes.

“In the beginning, there was a startup called the United States, which we’ll refer to by its stock-ticker symbol, USA. It was young, scrappy, and hungry and needed to figure out how to deliver value to its citizens users.

So it did a bunch of things: It created a central bank. It expanded its territory. It established mass communications (the postal service) and roads and public education. Eventually, it took the painful step of expunging slavery.

This startup grew in size and productivity and market cap. Its user base became enormous. After about 160 years, USA became the biggest company on the planet, at which point it achieved a bunch of important network effects. Because USA benefited from free trade, it developed a military that could enforce a globalized system of free trade. Capital—both human and financial—flowed into USA. People—both users and clients⁴—loved USA. And for another 70 years it delivered good results for both. Its stock couldn’t have been higher.

But then USA went down the road toward enshittification.”

Last goes on to argue that America has been “getting worse, on balance, for coming on a quarter of a century,” specifically listing hyper-partisanship, the Supreme Court’s rightwing turn, Congress giving in to executive power, the rise of the oligarch class, the decline of the rule of law and the hyperscaling of corruption.

Though Last doesn’t quite say so explicitly, I think the recent Court decision in the Callais case undoing the last vestige of sixty years of racial progress on voting rights is weighing heavily here. As he writes about how our “enshittified” system’s current failures:

Everyone knows that gerrymandering is a net negative. There are good (though not perfect) solutions to prevent it. But we’re actually moving backwards on gerrymandering because one party unilaterally disarmed, the Supreme Court has become a partisan entity, and the other party has become anti-democratic. So we know how to fix gerrymandering, most people want to fix gerrymandering, but not only can we not fix it, but it’s getting worse.

This is the kind of “doom and gloom” punditry that I tried to call out here a few weeks ago. Its only effect can be to increase despair and withdrawal, or a tilt towards more radical thinking and tactics. And Last is wrong in particular about solving the gerrymandering problem—we can eliminate it completely by adopting a different paradigm built around proportional representation and fusion voting, and that approach will appeal just as much to Republicans about to be shut out of seats in blue states as it appeals to Democrats worrying about protecting minority representation.

However, it’s harder to offer people realistic hope than it is to sell them unbridled cynicism. There is a path to PR and fusion that is at least as doable as the path to restoring the old status quo of the Voting Rights Act, and it doesn’t require packing the Supreme Court. But if we’re not careful, justified outrage about the ways MAGA Republicans are currently breaking the norms of American politics will have the effect of disabusing people of the value of any path to systemic change.

I asked Claude to read and summarize the hundreds of comments people posted on Last’s essay. Most readers agreed with him. While a few commenters got a lot of support for offering silver linings (Libraries in America are great! Costco is a shining example of “what capitalism could be”!), the overall tone was agreement with his premise. Comments using doom/collapse/hopeless/over/fucked language outnumbered comments using hope/optimism language by roughly 2.5 to 1 (90 vs. 36), and by reactions the gap is wider — about 4.5 to 1 (384 vs. 84). Last replied in-thread with “Hope? lol. Wrong newsletter,” and that captures the room.

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Beware the lure of the dark side

When you think what you’re doing isn’t working, either you give up, or you start pondering more radical ideas. This, for example, is the path writer Chris Armitage—best known for calling for “soft secession”—is taking his readers on. While Armitage still argues that conventional forms of civic political pressure affect the decisions of elected representatives, at a more systemic level he is urging that Blue states stop cooperating with the federal government and adopt what he “oppositional federalism” and “constitutional non-compliance.”

Oppositional federalism means the state using its “sovereign authority” to go on offense against federal officers who break state law, Armitage suggests. (Notice how this can work both ways, though—as segregationist governors once argued.) And constitutional non-compliance means states nullifying federal law within their borders and stopping federal action on state soil, though Armitage goes further, writing: “Think of this tier as, ‘there are literal concentration camps, whether it’s me, or me and my friends, or the mayor ordering the city police, or the governor activating the national guard, we are using every power we have to stop horrific things from happening’.”

We don’t have to go far back in American history to remember where this kind of thinking leads. Whether it was the Bundy ranch standoff in 2014, where Cliven Bundy, a rancher inspired by the so-called “sovereign citizen” movement refused to accept federal jurisdiction over his grazing privileges, or the Weather Underground, which led a bombing campaign targeting government buildings in the early 1970s aiming to overthrow the US “oppressor nation,” small groups of radicalized citizens have turned to violence against what they’ve believed to be illegitimate authorities. And instead of winning, they mainly succeeded in driving support toward the institutions they opposed.

Let’s hope that come this fall, no one repeats this pattern. But for that we need to sustain realistic hope, when nihilistic despair beckons.

End Times

As they say, shift happens.

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I’ve known and been friends with Chris since 2005, when we invited him to speak at Personal Democracy Forum. Six years earlier, in 1999, he had founded Afro-Netizen.com, one of the first hubs for African-Americans online. It started as an e-newsletter that grew from 100 to 10,000 subscribers in 18 months. By late 2003, Chris had entered the blogosphere and less than a year later, he became one of the 37 “credentialed” bloggers at the Democratic Convention — the only one of whom whose readership was majority people of color.

I don’t usually endorse candidates (most of the time politicians will break your heart) but I’m making an exception for Chris both out of friendship and because I think he’s the real deal. So along with some other friends of his from his past lives in the netroots world (and before that, improv comedy!), we’re throwing him an online fundraiser this Saturday from 2-3pm. RSVP here. (details below)

Here is his keynote from PDF 2017.

There’s a lot of wisdom shared in that talk about communing with one’s ancestors and hearing the call to join the fight for freedom, but there’s one line I want to lift up because it shows just how much Chris knew before many of us. In 2005, when he was on a panel at PDF, he noted how much the other speakers, some of whom had just seen their candidate John Kerry defeated, were claiming that “technology was the great equalizer.” Chris said, “I was pushing back as much as a could from the margins saying, no, ‘Justice is the great equalizer.’ The tools are only as good as the people who own those tools.”

Chris has served in the Pennsylvania state assembly with distinction since 2017, where he’s been a leader on climate, fighting corruption and taking on corporate power. As the local state assemblyman, he has very strong roots across much of the 3rd congressional district where he is vying for an open seat. With the primary coming up on May 19, he is currently tied for first, but there’s something like $2.5 million in outside money with AIPAC fingerprints flooding in to back his rivals. His is a classic grassroots campaign versus the machine.

So, this Saturday at 2pm, friends of Chris from across different parts of his life, netroots and comedy (yes, he did improv!), are coming together to help raise some last-minute money to help him over the line. They include:

• Greg Pak: Improv alum, Purple Crayon alum, and the comic book genius behind Planet Hulk will draw Chris as a superhero LIVE during the event.

• Phil LaMarr: The voice of Green Lantern, Static Shock, and Samurai Jack. MadTV legend. Pulp Fiction. He knows Chris from improv work, and he’s showing up for him.

• Not a Purple Crayon alum, but very funny, Kate Willett (Netflix, Colbert).

• Zephyr Teachout, Howard Dean’s national online organizer, 2014 NY gubernatorial candidate against Andrew Cuomo, and Fordham law professor.

• Andrew Boyd, co-founder Billionaires for Bush, Trillionaires for Trump and author of numerous books including Beautiful Trouble and I Want a Better Catastrophe.

• Deanna Zandt, author of Share This! and netroots website whisperer.

• Progressive powerhouse Mike Lux.

Again, the primary is May 19. Your help right now makes a real difference, and it will be an incredibly fun zoom event.

RSVP & chip in here: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/purplecrayon4rabb

See you Saturday!

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Last Wednesday, the Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v Callais that the 1965 Voting Rights Act was effectively no longer the law of the land. From this point going forward, according to the court’s 6-3 right-wing majority, states may legally draw the lines for representative districts in ways that dilute the political power of minority voters if there is no evidence that they are doing so explicitly to discriminate based on race or ethnicity. Doing so in the name of partisan advantage, it said, was totally fine, as long as everyone has an equal right to vote.

For anyone who has been paying attention to this Supreme Court and its prior rulings on voting rights, the Callais decision was a foregone conclusion--the only question was whether the Court would throw out the whole Act or just leave it hanging by the narrowest of threads. Democrats, civil rights organizations and their allies have had plenty of time to prepare for it. Which is why the response from so many of them is a bit troubling. Call it a crisis of political imagination.

“Vote harder” is not a useful response, yet it is the one urged the most, though the prospect of winning a filibuster-proof majority of the Senate along with the House and the White House is a distant dream. Nor can Democrats somehow win majority control in the states now rushing to tilt elections further away from them. “Sue harder,” isn’t that much better, though lawyers may be able to stave off some state level changes for a little while by doing so.

“Counter-gerrymander harder“ to match all the seats Republicans are now going to gerrymander away is the only obvious move in the short run, but it not sufficient. There’s also a practical limit to how far Democrats can go to match Republicans with this tactic, because if they gerrymander the states they control to the absolute extreme, districts that currently elect minority Democratic representatives will also disappear. One suggested map that could turn all 52 of California’s districts blue would eliminate seven Hispanic majority seats along the way.

One group, United for Democracy, had an astonishing response to the Callais decision, pushing out an online petition titled “It’s time to take our power back.” How? By demanding “a plan” from Congress. I kid you not. It even made the top of Jess Craven’s “Orgs to support in light of Callais ruling” list.

Norman Eisen, one of the deans of the pro-democracy advocacy school, tapped three civil rights leaders from the Southern Poverty Law Center, Fair Fight, and LULAC for their thoughts and then offered “15 Ways to Fight Callais” in a post for The Contrarian, where he’s the publisher. If I may summarize them, they come down to:

• Build a bigger coalition for multiracial democracy;

• Find fresh ways to connect with not just current voters but also nonvoters;

• Protect the principle of one-person/one vote;

• Talk candidly about racism;

• Make it more painful for the GOP to redistrict now by making noise in the frontline states;

• Force votes on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act (even though they won’t make it into law as long as the filibuster stands);

• Pass state voting rights laws (even though this won’t affect federal elections or red states);

• Litigate harder;

• Coalition-build harder; and

• Get more people to vote in November (aka “vote harder”).

Oh, they also suggested we invoke the glories of the past, which for anyone steeped in the history of the civil rights movement are indeed inspiring, but which are as far away in time from today as the invention of the airplane was to someone living in 1965.

All this in service of maybe winning enough elections (Congress and then the White House) with a big enough majority to push through a renewed Voting Rights Act (which is embodied in the legislation cited above) plus an expanded Supreme Court packed with more liberal justices.

None of these esteemed advocates explained how they’d keep all of this in place in 2030, when there would be a likely GOP backlash in the midterms followed by yet more losses by blue states as population shifts move seats toward more red states. Beyond vote harder, again!

Time for a fresh approach

Like I said, we’re dealing with a crisis of political imagination. Though here and there, there are signs that some are inching towards a different paradigm that would free us from the gerrymandering wars and make good on the promise of fair representation for all. Thursday night, speaking in the lead slot on a rapid response mass call organized by No Kings, Janae Nelson of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who argued Callais before the Court, said that perhaps it was time to explore “alternative voting systems” like cumulative voting and proportional representation. She didn’t put any emphasis on those ideas, though.

So far, only one Member of Congress, Rep. Jamie Raskin, has shown that he’s thinking afresh about the problem. In his statement denouncing Callais as a “catastrophe for American democracy,” he declared: “I call for congressional establishment nationwide of nonpartisan independent redistricting commissions to permanently take map-drawing out of politicians’ hands, and for Congress to authorize multi-member congressional districts with proportional representation systems to prevent partisan shut-outs and drown-outs across the country. Congress must act, right now, to pull the country out of the abyss of constitutional double standards and partisan authoritarianism.”

Understand what Raskin is suggesting here: with multi-member districts, gerrymandering goes away as a problem, since each district elects members in proportion to their vote. According to my friend Lee Drutman, another important proponent of PR, “The larger the district, the more proportional the outcome. At three members you get modest proportionality. At five you get solid proportionality. States with at least five seats account for 89% of the House. States with at least three account for 96%.”

As Lee notes, shifting to proportional representation also has the merit of defusing the two-party zero-sum warfare that is now threatening to take us all into a black hole of “maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,” as Rep. Hakeem Jeffries has been saying. Since PR only works for multi-member districts, we would need a different mechanism for insuring minority interests get a seat at the table for single-member offices like Senator and Governor, and the best answer is to bring back fusion voting, which gave smaller parties a way to constructively participate in politics throughout the 1800s in America. Protect Democracy, the anti-authoritarian group that has led much of the legal and intellectual work behind the pro-democracy movement, has argued that if we want to ultimately get to proportional representation in American elections, reviving fusion voting – which would foster stronger minor parties than the fringe ones we have today – would build the political demand for PR most effectively.

So as we stand in the wreckage of the Voting Rights Act, we face a choice. Do more of the same in the hopes that banging our heads against the wall will yield a different result? Or try a new path to democracy instead?

—See also: Dan Cantor, “After the Voting Rights Act,” Center for Ballot Freedom, April 29, 2026, Michael Latner, Guy-Uriel E. Charles and Luis Fuentes-Rohwer, “The best response to the Supreme Court’s Callais ruling: proportional representation,” MSNOW, May 2, 2026, and David Callahan, “Toplines,” InsidePhilanthropy.com, May 2, 2026.

MayDay Post-Mortem

According to an email sent by May Day Strong late last Friday night, “millions of people took action in over 5,000 events across the country” on May 1. This is almost certainly an exaggeration.

Yes, there was some disruption of business as usual. Young activists with the Sunrise Movement held sit-ins in hotel lobbies where ICE agents were known to be staying, while others blocked roads near offices of major carbon polluters, interfered with access to the Oakland and San Francisco airports, got arrested chaining themselves to the entrances to the NY Stock Exchange, marched near Amazon warehouses, and tied local strikes and labor actions in places like New Orleans, Raleigh, Minneapolis, and Chicago to the larger national push.

But there is no way that millions took action, because if they did, we’d have pictures of big rallies in major cities showing such numbers. According to the Union of Social Service Workers, more than 10,000 people hit the streets in Raleigh. Thousands, but not tens of thousands, rallied at New York City’s Union Square where they heard speakers like Mayor Zohran Mamdani express their support for labor organizing. The same was true in places like Los Angeles and Washington, DC. This photo-montage of rallies in six major cities made by Indivisible is underwhelming.

Interest in MayDay was also a fraction of the attention seen a month earlier for No Kings, judging by this chart of Google search trends.

It’s also worth noting that of people who searched for MayDay, the second most likely follow-up after “Mayday parade” was “What is mayday,” a sign that most Americans have little fluency in the symbols of the old Left.

Dana Fisher, a professor at American University, worked with MayDay Strong to survey event hosts and participants, tapping the people who had signed up via Mobilize.us, and found that of all the day’s calls-to-action, “no shopping” was by far the one that survey respondents were most likely to say they were doing (see her chart below). If indeed people didn’t shop last Friday, we’ve seen no evidence that it had any impact on retailers.

Fisher also found that “Like participation in the big days of action against the Trump Administration and its policies (including the three No Kings Days), participants in May Day were majority female (76%), predominantly White (94%), older (the mean age of participants was 68), had voted for the democratic candidate in the previous presidential election (97%), and were highly educated (78% of participants reported having a university degree or more).” So, at least for the people who brought themselves to a MayDay action via MayDayStrong’s website and distributed organizing platform, this was not a rising of the working class.

As a “structure test” that the No Kings coalition endorsed as the first major call to action after “eight million” marched on March 28, what did MayDay Strong demonstrate? I think it showed that the movement against authoritarianism and oligarchy is a mile-wide and only a few inches deep in most of America. It also showed the limits of what unpaid volunteers can do compared to what unions with staff can do. How is that going to be addressed? No one is saying. There’s a “what’s next” zoom meeting tonight, but if it’s anything like all the other mass zoom meetings that organizers have led, it will focus on the lowest-common-denominator: keeping morale up with rabble-rousing speeches about all the things that outrage folks with few details about anything else.

I get that movement organizers want to play up the aspects of MayDay that were more courageous and disruptive and want to skate past the very modest numbers of physical participants. In an age where everything is spin, go ahead and claim big numbers. But count me among the people who find this whole approach deeply confusing. Leaders of the pro-democracy side stress that they want accountable government, but when it comes to how they make decisions, there isn’t even transparency, let alone accountability.

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Duly Noted

—Mark Engler and Matthew Miles Goodrich think that Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s new “Organize NYC” initiative, the first major project to come out of the city’s new Office of Mass Engagement, is a big deal. Eric Blanc, who is closer to the NYC-DSA world, thinks it’s not enough. My two cents: Given all the challenges Mamdani is facing moving his agenda forward, he’s doing well so far. And community organizing is an ongoing process.

—If you’re working at the intersection of local community civic renewal and technology, then the Trust for Civic Life’s new report “Online for Offline” is a must-read. Connector readers already know this, but it’s great to see research reaffirm this core truth: “There is no silver bullet in digital form. Generative AI, the latest public good platform, and niche apps all risk irrelevance without the right community conditions in place…. The same principles that make community-led organizing work apply directly to how we should think about funding digital: relationships first, locally-led decisions over outside-imposed tools, and connections built through real participation that online platforms can rarely replicate on their own.” (h/t Matt Stempeck)

—The most interesting revelation in the Wall Street Journal’s May 2 story about changes at ActBlue since Regina Wallace-Jones became its CEO in 2023: “Wallace-Jones also has grown increasingly worried that Democratic presidential candidates will have their own fundraising platforms unaffiliated with ActBlue on their campaign websites, and has focused on acquiring other political tech startups to diversify ActBlue’s offerings, describing her vision as “campaign in a box. The CEO began discussions in mid-2024 to acquire Universe, a campaign-management platform, without bringing in top staffers until months into the discussions. Later, the organization abruptly decided not to move forward with the acquisition. ActBlue ended up having to pay $250,000 to walk away from the deal.”

—Kudos to Debilyn Molineaux, former CEO of the Bridge Alliance and a longtime leader in the cross-partisan field of political bridge building, for sharing how she is rethinking the value of such work. She writes: “I’m proud of this work of organizing, creating and inspiring coalition building. Yet the work itself was insufficient to strengthen democracy in the United States. We’ve seen the continued erosion of respect, trust and healthy engagement across differences. The theory of change that if we just understood each other better, healing would happen organically has been debunked. Thoroughly…. What we missed were the effects of toxic polarization that dialogue alone cannot fix. A workshop is not enough time to “correct” our misperceptions about others when we return to our in-group and social media feeds…. the heat we are feeling is not a glitch in the system; it is what mobilization for structural change looks like. Treating that heat as the problem—rather than the conditions that produced it—mistakes a symptom for a cause. Bridging often seeks to smooth over that conflict instead of addressing it.”

One Long Read

--Give yourself some time to read my friend Panthea Lee’s personal essay about her experience doing the nine-day, 300 kilometer Baishatun Mazu pilgrimage across Taiwan. At a time when we mostly live alone together, Panthea suggests that the pilgrimage showed “human beings living their fullest humanity.” On the pilgrimage, she writes, “eye contact had been constant.” Back in Taipei, “eyes stayed lowered—towards phones, to the ground, to somewhere I couldn’t reach. Nothing passed between us.” And yet another world is possible.

That winter day, perhaps as many as 75,000 people galvanized by ICE’s violent and murderous occupation of the Twin Cities turned out to march in sub-zero temperatures and hundreds of local businesses closed in solidarity. A subsequent poll by Blue Rose Research found that about one in four Minnesota voters either participated directly or had a family member who did.

That kind of participation didn’t simply coalesce out of thin air. Not only did major unions and labor federations, including the executive board of the state AFL-CIO, endorse the strike, a thick array of local community groups and power-building organizations were also integral to the call. Even before January 23, they were doing a lot of solidarity work focused on helping immigrants under siege, including grocery runs, rent support, and school carpools. Before the citywide strike, with far less visibility, many locals also did intensive work to insure that their members wouldn’t be punished for taking a day away from work.

At first glance, it doesn’t look like May Day will be anything like that across America, and this isn’t just because it’s taking place on a Friday rather than Saturday like all the No Kings protests. Most events listed on MayDay Strong’s national map do not describe work stoppages or school walkouts. But more, in fact, is going on than is readily visible. The problem, though, is if you aren’t in a trusted network, like ones set up by local activists, unions or Sunrise Movement chapters, you probably have no idea what’s on tap for this Friday beyond a local rally. As a result, there’s a weird disconnect at work: untold numbers of people who participated in the March 28 No Kings 3 rallies have been asked by movement leaders (like Indivisible) to organize or sign up for local MayDay actions, but on their own most of those folks have struggled to do more than set up rallies or visibility events. The power to stop work or close a school is being built elsewhere, out of sight.

For the last few days, I’ve been exploring the universe of events listed on Mobilize.us, one of the two main platforms* used by the whole Democratic/progressive ecosystem to schedule local activities like rallies, canvases, phone-banks, house-parties and the like. As of yesterday, April 27, there were 1,927 events mentioning MayDay, of which a little more than 1,359 were on May 1. (The rest are either pre-MayDay trainings, sign-making sessions and planning meetings, plus a handful of Saturday follow-on events.)

About 62% of the MayDay events (849) listed on Mobilize are tied to MayDay Strong. Five other organizational hubs account for another 22%, led by the National Education Association (120) which is sponsoring lots of “school walk-ins,” Indivisible locals (116), the AFL-CIO (30), Sunrise Movement (23) and RefuseFascism.org (14). Of all of these, only Sunrise is advertising any of its actions as “walkouts,” like a planned walkout across the New Haven, CT, school district, though NEA chapters are calling for support for school walkouts in a few other places (like Belmont, MA). The AFL-CIO’s listed events are solidarity rallies, not strikes. The words “no work”/”no school”/”no shopping” appear in the majority of Mobilize events listed, but rarely in their titles, mostly in the fine print.

When I asked representatives of MayDay Strong about this, they told me that perhaps only 20%-25% of all the actions that will take place on May 1 will make it onto their national Mobilize map. For example, they expect nearly 170 school actions across Minnesota and two likely strikes along with rolling picket lines, but none of that is findable online. (Some school districts in Minnesota and North Carolina have canceled all classes so teachers can join in.) Many anticipated union strike actions across the country do not appear on the map, though one is already starting in Chicago, where graduate student employees at the University of Illinois went on strike Monday. Overall, MayDay Strong says they are expecting at least 3,000 actions nationwide and expect to surpass the breadth of No Kings 3 by the time Friday rolls around.

Chicago, in fact, is one of the epicenters of labor militancy behind the MayDay Strong coalition, where the Chicago Teachers Union has been a key driver (and where May Day originated, in 1886). The union won the right to make May Day “a day of civic action” in the contract it ratified last year, and it has been quite assertive about that intention as the date has approached, coordinating with city agencies, parks, libraries and public school authorities to plan for the day. On April 9, the Chicago Board of Education voted to authorize making May 1 a professional development day to maximize district participation, though there’s still some confusion about whether the district superintendent has endorsed that plan. As of now, there is a full slate of activities planned, including neighborhood rallies, protests at Amazon, Target and an ICE detention center, high school hosted block parties and then a mass rally and march midday through downtown.

Many of those events are listed on Mobilize, though as a union with its own member infrastructure CTU doesn’t need a platform like Mobilize to turn out people. The same will likely be the case with other Rustbelt and Northeast cities that remain centers of union activity. (*Also, many unions use the AFL-CIO-backed platform ActionNetwork for their digital organizing; ActionNetwork events are not visible to the general public.)

In its online participation guide for May Day, Indivisible notes that “May Day offers us an opportunity to test our movement’s ability to do nonviolent, economic disruption. We need to gauge our strength, identify what power we still need to build, and implement a collective plan to get there. We can’t wait to figure this out after Trump has stolen an election–that work must happen now, before it’s too late.” It exhorts readers to do hard things like stay out of work or school but offers little real help in figuring out how to make that happen at any meaningful scale.

So, as a structure test, May Day is likely going to show something we should already know. The places where labor and community organizing are already thick are stepping up with meaningful actions affecting workplaces and schools, and in a handful of other places where the local conditions are also good, walkouts are going to happen. But the base of activism conjured up by online distributed organizing for #NoKings isn’t anywhere up to speed on how to get people to do that kind of work, and without a much bigger investment in local training and coaching, it has a long way to go.

California Scheming

As a New Yorker, I’m just an interloper when it comes to knowing much about the politics of the Golden State, so I’m not about to weigh in on who the many Connector readers who live there should support as they choose between candidates for Governor. That said, I do want to inject one new question into the discourse: Could someone please ask San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, the Democrat who is apparently the favorite candidate of Silicon Valley mega-donors, what exactly he did as CEO of Causes and co-founder of Brigade between 2008 and 2019—the years when surveillance capitalism expanded with few limits? Causes and Brigade are two failed civic tech start-ups that Mahan touts in his official campaign bio, claiming that Causes grew to 190 million users and helped individuals fundraise over $50 million for US nonprofits, and boasting that Brigade “built the world’s first voter network: a nonpartisan platform for voters to discuss issues, advocate to their elected officials, and vote for candidates who reflect their values.”

These claims are laughable to anyone who has followed this field (and indeed, back in 2014, when Brigade launched, I predicted on-the-record to the San Francisco Chronicle that it would fail like all previous attempts to build a online network for generic civic engagement). But that’s not all—he even asserts that “Brigade ultimately reached millions of voters and its innovative engagement solutions and early success led it to be acquired in 2019 by Pinterest and Countable, respectively.” Actually, it wasn’t any “early success” that led to those acquisitions; it was a fire sale forced by Brigade’s evident failure and its main funders’ unwillingness to keep propping it up. Back then Mahan didn’t try to spin Brigade’s failure as an “early success,” telling TechCrunch that the deal with Pinterest was an “acquhire” aimed at taking care of as many people on Brigade’s team as possible before it shut down. There were rumors that Brigade burned through as much as $55 million before folding — an amount that could have done a lot to support civic tech nonprofits doing valuable democracy work.

Given that Mahan is running to oversee a state government with a $321.1 billion operating budget, the eleven years he spent in the private sector building these two companies, more than half of which he spent at their head, far outweigh the three-and-a-half years he has served San Jose as mayor. But as best as I can tell, his time running these two civic tech start-ups has received almost no attention from the press. That may be because until the race was shaken up by frontrunner Eric Swalwell’s sudden implosion over credible allegations of sexual abuse, Mahan was not getting much attention in the first place and was languishing in the low single digits in polls. That may change now, and while he has far less money than billionaire Tom Steyer is spending on his own candidacy, Mahan has raised $13.4 million since joining the race in January and has many deep-pocketed backers who could give him a lot more if his campaign really takes off. (Also, Code for America founder Jen Pahlka has been saying nice things about Mahan on her Substack, so consider her point of view as well.)

There are many questions one could ask about Causes and Brigade, ranging from deep ones like the degree to which they depended on harvesting user data to make money, to more ephemeral ones like why in naming Brigade Mahan and his cofounders took no note of the existing civic tech Brigades being run by nearby nonprofit Code for America. But the question a good reporter should really ask would be this: As a for-profit in the civic arena, you pitched Brigade as a social network that would help connect people to the issues they cared about, but since you needed to make money from paying clients, how exactly did you monetize user data? In particular, why did your team brag about using Causes to help Fortune 500 companies? Brigade was very circumspect about its model, which appeared to invite users to state their positions on a range of issues up for debate and then served them information about groups involved with those issues. Behind the scenes, they were rumored to be selling that hyper-targetable information to others.

A clue: It was never clear why Brigade president James Windon said that at Causes he told Fortune 500 clients that “if you believed in minimum wage reform, we could put you in touch with Macy’s who passed minimum wage reform.” (At the time in question, Macy’s was trying to stop the popular Fight for $15 campaign, so whatever reform the retailer might have been for it wasn’t exactly very civic-minded.) We covered this story at techPresident back in 2014, and at the time the folks at Brigade insisted this was just a hypothetical example of what they could do. Well, if there’s nothing to hide, Mahan should have no problem sharing the whole story of what Causes and Brigade actually did.

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Last But Not Least

A very happy 10^th birthday to the Civic Tech Field Guide, a labor of love and global community that my friend Matt Stempeck has sustained and grown with a host of volunteer helpers. Ten years ago, he, Erin Simpson and I sat in a workroom at Civic Hall in Manhattan and put hundreds of post-its on a wall, beginning the bottom-up mapping of a field that we knew had only a rough working definition and fuzzy boundaries. Our idea was to start grouping projects by function and see where that took us, rather than begin with a top-down definition. We quickly saw that the approach worked to help lots of people find their way in and around the ecosystem. So, we built a Wordpress site and adopted one rule: the project had to be “too cheap too fail.” That’s because we had seen many fancier guides launched by a variety of well-meaning groups fall by the wayside and stop getting updated because they were too expensive to maintain!

When we launched the guide, we had about 4,000 projects listed and categorized; now there are more than 10,000. For anyone who is building, maintaining or even just dreaming about their own civic tech project, the guide is your essential entry point. And it doesn’t just list projects—some of its most popular sections list jobs, funding opportunities, conferences and reports that are also building the field. Check it out at civictech.guide, and while you’re at it, buy Matt a cupcake to express your thanks!

End Times

Only in New York!

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How did insurgent candidate Péter Magyar come from nowhere to defeat Hungarian strongman Victor Orbán, winning 53% of the vote and a supermajority in the country’s parliament in last week’s national elections? This despite Orbán having rewritten Hungary’s constitution to favor his ruling Fidesz party, stacked the courts, tilted the electoral system heavily in his favor, taken over nearly all the media, and shut down or bought off most other sources of opposition? What lessons can the pro-democracy movement here in the United States learn from his win?

While we can draw inspiration from Magyar’s defeat of Orbán, we should also recognize the limits of comparing Hungary’s experience to America’s. It’s a small, landlocked country of a bit less than 10 million people. After World War II, it was a repressed but also rebellious member of the Eastern Bloc until the revolutions of 1989. Orbán’s loss came after sixteen years of increasingly corrupt one-party rule and amidst a serious economic downturn. And the ins-and-outs of the election campaign were unique to Hungary and can’t be transposed elsewhere. These included a honey trap of Magyar by Orbán’s intelligence services, a potential fake assassination of Orbán by Russian allies hoping to boost his chances, dirty tricks meant to fool voters into thinking Ukraine was plotting against Orbán, allegations of vote-buying in Orbán strongholds, and lots of exposes of regime corruption by independent media. So take what follows with a big grain of salt.

At the same time, I think there are enough parallels between what we’re facing here and what Hungarians have been dealing with for us to ponder further. There’s been a rapid consolidation of authoritarian power here (albeit with some rising pushback); very troubling trends in both legacy and digital media; and a hyper-polarized electorate that has made it hard for opposition forces here to pry Trump fans away from him. Yes, Trump’s approval ratings have dropped significantly, but the Democratic Party is also quite unpopular – which doesn’t bode well for getting out of the doom loop we’re stuck in. A blue wave in 2026 that gives Democrats control of the House and maybe the Senate could also tee up a very unhappy electorate in 2028, or 2030, when the stakes will be even higher (as my friend Lee Drutman cogently argues). And Magyar’s meteoric rise may offer some clues about how much can change in volatile times.

So, with all that said, here are nine lessons that I’ve gleaned from mulling the news and listening to experts on Hungary.

One: Magyar, who was a top diplomat married to a Fidesz Justice Minister, left the ruling party just two years ago, after its president pardoned a felon who had covered up child abuse at a state-run children’s home. This is when he went public, going after his own side and breaking with his own social cohort, including his then ex-wife. This made his crusade for change all the more authentic. His first, breakout interview with the independent YouTube news site Partizan about this decision garnered more than 2.4 million views. In an instant, he transformed Hungary’s political landscape.

LESSON: Insiders who run on their experience or credentials won’t excite voters; when the status quo is intensely unpopular you want leaders who will genuinely break with the past.

Two: Coming from inside the belly of the ruling party gave Magyar a reach that no other opposition politician before him had. He could appeal to other disillusioned Fidesz voters, who could see in his break permission to make their own. Plus, his new, adopted party, Tisza, didn’t carry the baggage of the other opposition parties, whose leaders and adherents could make such former Orbán supporters feel judged for their past votes for the regime. And by all accounts, Magyar didn’t make his own switch into a big deal that could also have scared off potential supporters. On top of that, he shamelessly appealed to the same patriotic symbols that Orbán had used to consolidate his reign. The flag was up for grabs and he grabbed it.

LESSON: The pro-democracy side must make it easy for former Trump voters to join the opposition and not judge them for past mistakes or incomplete conversions. It also can’t be afraid to speak in patriotic language.

Three: At the same time, Magyar was well positioned to also draw progressive and other anti-Orbán voters who had lost enthusiasm for the old opposition parties after their failure to make headway in Hungary’s 2022 national election. He didn’t promise them all the things they wanted, instead acknowledging that as a conservative himself, some voters didn’t share all his values. But they could still support him because he alone represented change and wanted to restore the rule of law. And while he isn’t about to turn Hungary to the left, he has promised to reorient it back towards the European Union and away from Russia. Plus, his singular focus on corruption and how it has hurt public services suggests he will bring many Orbán cronies to account and try to rebuild the public sector. And parts of his platform sound pretty progressive to me, like a call for wealth tax, home energy modernization, and big subsidies for public health.

LESSON: If we want to really crush Trumpism and MAGA, we may have to lower some of our expectations for what comes next. This is not because goals like universal health care are unrealistic; it’s because aggressive ideological agendas generate strong responses both from supporters and opponents. That said, I have a feeling a lot of hard-core anti-Trumpers would rather win 51-49 than 67-33 in 2028—or maybe they just haven’t thought this whole thing through. Maybe we will feel differently after sixteen years of this shit, the way Hungarians must have felt.

Four: Orbán, who had been quite a wily politician until now, couldn’t run the playbook he had successfully used against all of Hungary’s other opposition parties to stave off Magyar’s rise. In past elections, Orbán always demonized former Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsány, the one-time leader of the Socialist Party who had the misfortune of being in office for the 2008 global financial crisis and who then pushed harsh austerity measures—leading Orbán’s Fidesz party to take power in 2010. As late as Hungary’s 2022 elections, Orbán relentlessly tied his opponent back to Gyurcsány (who also faced personal corruption allegations). Since Magyar came out of Fidesz itself (and also since Gyurcsány had been recently pushed out of politics by a small party he later joined), Orbán couldn’t play this card. He tried to pin Magyar to other potentially unpopular actors, claiming that Ukraine’s Volodymir Zelensky was planning to invade Hungary, but his inability to find a convincing boogeyman to scare voters about was a big factor in his loss.

LESSON FOR 2028: Don’t let Democrats nominate anyone close to former Presidents Biden or Obama or Clinton—unless they run as truth-tellers exposing their side’s failings too. On the other hand, if Democrats consolidate around a party retread, that may open a bigger lane for a Magyar-style independent running as a pox on both houses.

Five: Simply being the opposite of Orbán was not enough to beat him, as more than a decade of past failures by Hungary’s liberal-left parties showed. As Hungarian political theorist and podcaster Nóra Schultz wrote Saturday in The Guardian, “If Orbán took a stand on something, they took a directly opposing view. They tried to win people over by moral superiority, but with little regard for the viability or popularity, for instance, of opposition demands such as the dismantling of the anti-migration border fence.” By contrast, she argued, Magyar avoided emphasizing the core causes of people who were already anti-Orbán. He, she writes, “was never in the business of convincing those who were already politically active and who voted for the opposition throughout the Orbán era. He campaigned almost exclusively in rural areas and talked about issues relevant to the majority of Hungarian people. This meant a rigorous focus on a narrow list of topics: the cost-of-living crisis, the collapse of state-run services such as education, healthcare and transport, and the enrichment of a few Orbán-friendly families while everyone else experienced a decline in their prospects.”

LESSON: Don’t be distracted by rightwing bait. Or left-wing litmus tests.

Six: Some commentators have suggested that Magyar won by “dodging divisive policy questions and preferring to speak about the most universal issues in the broadest possible terms: rooting out corruption, restoring power to the people,” as Andrew Marantz wrote in The New Yorker. “This was,” Marantz added, “of course, an astute political strategy. It also makes him something of a cipher. He has the square jaw and coiffed blond hair of an action figure.” Magyar means Hungarian, after all, leading Marantz to suggest that the US equivalent would be “a strapping guy named Joe America, running as the nominee of the Freedom and Grilled-Meat Party.”

Well, yes, Magyar is the perfect candidate for the moment, straight from central casting. Robert Redford in The Candidate, if you will. But this leaves out another key differentiator that mattered to Magyar’s victory: how he campaigned. Instead of sitting in a TV studio trying to beat Orbán inside a media system he dominated, Magyar spent the last two years campaigning across Hungary, making as many seven or eight campaign stops a day in hundreds of rural settlements.

This past Monday, I tuned into a webinar organized by D-HUB, an international network of anti-authoritarian activists, whose speakers had been in the thick of the fight, to hear their insights. According to Mate Vargo, the founder and executive director of aHang, a leading civic action platform in Hungary, Magyar and Tisza built a huge grassroots network of some 50,000 volunteers centered on small “islands” of citizen activists rather than large organizations. (In a country Hungary’s size, that’s an Obama- or Mamdani-level of grassroots organizing). To become one of Tisza’s parliamentary candidates, contenders had to prove that they had the phone numbers of at least one thousand local constituents, Vargo also noted.

In the face of a biased media system, Magyar himself used social media astutely, growing his Facebook page to half a million followers in the first three months after joined Tisza and led its 2024 campaign in the European Union elections, and ultimately to a million by this month’s election, according to Anita Seprenyi, a local political strategist who spoke on the D-HUB call. Taking a page from Elizabeth Warren and others, he took hundreds of thousands of selfies with fans while out campaigning. And he livestreamed all his local events on Facebook, sometimes to tens of thousands of watchers, Seprenyi related. Circumventing the country’s existing newspapers, Tisza circulated its own broadsheets, getting them into many hands with a “print it yourself” campaign that encouraged people to give copes to their neighbors.

LESSON: Show up everywhere and build up a hyper-local civic army, and especially not just in blue dots.

Seven: While Magyar ran a professionally organized digital and field campaign, there were two big differences to what he did compared to the system here in the US: microtargeting isn’t allowed in Europe thanks to strong privacy laws. And after 2022, when the EU banned political advertising on the big social media platforms, it became harder for Orbán to spread disinformation there. So, unlike in the US, where billions of dollars go to test and deploy a panoply of finely targeted messages, in Hungary Magyar had to stick with a broadly appealing message.

As a fresh, youthful face, Magyar also ignited hopes among Hungary’s young people, who were frustrated by the country’s stagnation but also cynical about the chances of any of the old opposition parties managing to beat Orbán. There was a TikTok trend of young people lip-syncing along to his speeches, for example, which was by all signs organic – not something you can make happen via a paid influencer program.

Finally, though Magyar was a former Fidesz insider, the people Tisza chose to run for the assembly were almost all newcomers to politics. They had to build up a base from afresh. From some accounts I’ve heard, Magyar was quite critical of the legacy opposition parties and even people who had bravely gotten involved in fighting Orban starting in 2010 were shunted aside by Tisza.

LESSON: Hope someone not cobbled together by and overmanaged by consultants catches fire; don’t settle for fake passion. To attract less likely voters and young people, be demonstrably from outside the whole political establishment.

Eight: Hungary’s electoral system chooses about half the members of the national assembly from single-member districts and the other half from nationwide party lists, producing a flexible multiparty system that made it harder for the several competing parties in the anti-Orbán opposition to unify in prior elections. Two things helped Magyar avoid this problem. First, by launching with his bombshell break from Fidesz in early 2024 and then steering his followers into his new party, Tisza, in time for the upcoming European Parliament elections, he was able to steal oxygen from the legacy parties. Then, when Tisza scored 30% of the vote in those elections in June 2024, it proved that it was not a marginal new player but a real phenomenon. And then, by refusing to cut deals with those older parties, Magyar cemented his standing as an independent force. By the time Hungary’s parliamentary elections rolled around, the legacy parties had decided to either dissolve or stand aside—creating a clear path for the center-right Magyar to tackle the fascist Orban head on.

LESSON: Well, that would be a nice dream, right? Our rigid two-party system makes the possibility of a Magyar-type breakout unlikely. There are too many ambitious Democrats who think 2028 is going to be “their” year to stand aside in the interests of completely clobbering MAGA. Unlike Hungary’s legacy opposition parties, in most if not all the states, the Democratic Party isn’t going to wither away even if a popular independent somehow emerges and captures the public’s attention.

Nine: When it came to election protection, the opposition movement was ready in Hungary. A consortium of independent journalists put out a documentary called The Price of a Vote a few weeks before the election to focus attention on allegations of vote-buying and voter intimidation in rural areas, and they reportedly built a 2,400-person strong observer network in more than 100 locations prepared to document fraud. Tisza and Fidesz both made their own preparations, both for bottom-up reporting and to call foul, and in one case a top Fidesz official warned darkly about the opposition planning to storm the prime minister’s residence if the results were unfavorable to it. But Magyar’s huge win meant that Hungary avoided the kind of post-election chaos that other countries have gone through when a crucial election is hotly contested.

LESSON: A huge opposition turnout is the best guarantee of a democratic resurgence. Magyar’s win was too big to rig against, and Orban conceded quickly. If there’s any single reason to push for a Magyar-style candidate and campaign in 2028 against whomever succeeds Trump, this is the best one.

Further reading:

—Justin Florence at Protect Democracy’s If You Can Keep It Substack explains why it’s so important to prepare for threats to voting in the midterms, in the context of Hungary.

—Daniel Hunter in Waging Nonviolence also sets Magyar’s victory in the context of democracy defense.

—Laszlo Gendler writes in The UnPopulist about how Hungarians drew on their own history of fighting Soviet oppression and identification with Europe to overcome fear of challenging the Orban regime.

—Kim Lane Scheppele’s conversation with Paul Krugman is the single best discussion I’ve seen so far about the many contingencies and curlicues that made Magyar’s run so singularly successful.

—Democracy scholar Rachel Kleinfeld writes that Stacey Abrams has a new plan for unleashing the energy and ability of millions of Americans who want to advocate for democracy. Learn more here.

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End Times

Can RFK Jr. dance like this?

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Stuck With VANxiety

A month ago, Ezra Levin, the co-founder and co-director of Indivisible, told grassroots Indivisible group leaders some important news about the tools they use to organize with. After a careful review of its options, Indivisible was going to be sticking with Bonterra—the foreign conglomerate that runs NGPVAN, EveryAction, Mobilize and ActionKit—for the 2026 cycle. Despite many concerns about these legacy systems, which the entire Democratic and progressive ecosystem has been dependent on for more than a decade, the challenge of transitioning off them to better ones was too costly and time-consuming to consider.

A glance at the latest reports in the Federal Election Commission database shows that Indivisible is not alone. Dozens of House and Senate campaigns and a plethora of blue-leaning PACs and advocacy organizations are cutting regular checks to Bonterra or one of its subsidiaries. And the biggest Democratic committees, the DNC, the DCCC and the DSCC are at the head of the pack, paying NGP VAN more than $500,000 in just the first two months of 2026 (and that’s a partial count since the quarterly reports aren’t complete). Like it or not, we are going to go through another election cycle relying on outdated tech.

This is a crying shame, a collective “own goal” if you will. The case for a new suite of tech tools for engaging with voters has been evident to many Democratic operatives and activists for a very long time, years before I documented how everyone was “Living with VANxiety” in a long report I published in April 2023. Indeed, it was nine years ago this May that a collection of tech upstarts called UnlockTheVan launched an effort to get the Democratic National Committee to open up access to the voter data then managed, with the party’s full agreement, by just one de facto monopoly, NGPVAN. That monopoly was indeed loosened in time for the 2024 cycle, and there are now a bevy of impressive startups whose offerings run circles around Bonterra.

But the overwhelming odds are that the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who are going to do the grunt work of contacting and engaging with voters this cycle, along with the campaign teams that manage them, will be stuck using lousy tools that make them less good at their work and using lists that are missing the correct information (or any information) on millions of likely or registered Democratic voters. To just give a few examples:

• Canvassers that use Open Field instead of Minivan to guide their door-knocking are ten to twenty percent more productive, because the former allows them to work more easily in teams and to add new names to the voter files as they encounter voters.

• Campaigns relying solely on the current Democratic voter file (which is what VAN works with for everything from cutting turf to logging voter contacts) actively miss millions of potential supporters. A 2021 study found that these “politically invisible” voters are far more likely to be Black or Hispanic, younger and less wealthy than the ones in the file.

• VAN and EveryAction, its nonprofit twin, do not make it easy to track and measure the impact of friend-to-friend and online relational outreach, do nothing to capture rich conversational data that volunteers may collect from voters, and reward the tracking of contact attempts rather than the nurturing of relationships over time.

• Problems with high-volume access to VAN during last months of the 2024 election forced Democrats to scramble to keep the system functioning, as the New York Times reported.

All of these are solvable problems--but for the fact that almost no one cares enough to cough up the money to solve them. And we’re not talking about a lot of money—perhaps $10 million, though it is almost clearly too late to change course for 2026.

When you consider how much attention the entire Democratic arena pays to the problem of Republican voter suppression, as well as the new threat of the SAVE Act, which would potentially disenfranchise or at least severely inconvenience millions of currently registered voters, you would think that fixing the Democratic tech gap would rank even higher up on everyone’s priority list. But I suppose it’s much more on brand for Dems and their allied groups to complain about the horrible things Republicans do. And indeed, some of the worst “scam PACs” do great work extracting contributions from gullible seniors and others by bombarding them with sky-is-falling warnings about what the other side is up to.

Still, as Linda Loman says of her husband Willy in the new revival of the ever-current play Death of a Salesman, “Attention must be paid.”

Winning NASCAR in a Crank-Engine Studebaker?

Listen to Julia Barnes, the CEO of The Movement Cooperative, a centralized data infrastructure and technology hub for the movement made up of about one hundred progressive groups that share costs for software tools and data (plus hundreds of smaller groups that benefit from the lowered costs and services it makes available). She told me last week:

“If you care about winning elections and social change, you don’t need to understand tech, you don’t need to understand data, but you do need to understand that we’re racing the tech investment of the Right, essentially trying to win a NASCAR race in a crank engine Studebaker while they’re driving a top-of-the-line stock car built by and cheered on by GOP billionaires. From TMC’s perspective, what’s so frustrating is that we have organizing groups who are ready to adopt new, innovative tech or who are trying to build it with next to no resources. Just this year, if there were a funder willing to part with at least $10 million, we could have organizations - at scale - testing and using new tech, with money dedicated to that tech’s development. And everyone is having a damned hard time finding it.”

Which, to circle back, is why organizations like Indivisible, which support thousands of local groups, have little choice about what tools they can use at scale. And Dem tech - including NGPVAN - is at a comparable disadvantage in speed of innovation, development of new platforms, and technical agility when stacked up to the hundreds of millions of dollars the Right is throwing at their AI-based technology.

This is not for a lack of trying on the part of both independent outfits like The Movement Cooperative or by decision-makers at the Democratic National Committee. Last year, in the wake of Trump’s re-election, they both put out detailed RFPs (requests for proposals) to kickstart the next generation of Democratic tech, with an emphasis on driving authentic engagement. Dozens of companies responded. In October 2025, the DNC announced its support for four new tools: Winnable, an events platform that could replace Bonterra’s Mobilize and which enables volunteers to easily sign up for multiple events at once; Matchbook, a tool/database for tracking support and finding voters and volunteers more easily; OpenField, a canvassing app that enables the easy capture of qualitative data from conversations along with other improvements over VAN; and OutOrganize, which centralizes volunteer outreach information and provides organizers with valuable insights on past interactions to foster more personalized relationships with volunteers.

The DNC is also not being shy about highlighting the new for a whole new organizing playbook, which after all is what tech tools either enable or hinder. While I wouldn’t be surprised, dear reader, if you’ve heard about the controversy over the as-yet-unreleased DNC post-mortem on the 2024 election, or the fact that the DNC recently rejected a resolution condemning AIPAC’s influence on elections, since a lot of people are focused on the Palestine issue, I bet that you didn’t know that two weeks ago, the committee issued a 208-page organizing playbook. Designed for coordinated campaigns and state parties, this playbook explicitly embraces a critique that many of us have been making for a while about fundamental problems with how Democrats connect with voters.

As the playbook’s introduction states, “Over the past decade, the Democratic campaign industry and its funders have become obsessed with massive, shiny output numbers from traditional tactics: Millions of calls made and hundreds of thousands of doors knocked. Yet this fixation with output has created an illusion of progress that fails to answer the questions that determine electoral success: how many voters were meaningfully contacted? What was the impact of those conversations, and what was the follow up? Which voters did we not reach through these traditional tactics and how are we effectively engaging those voters in other ways to ensure they turn out?”

It goes on, offering a glimpse at some of the data that is probably still locked up in that unreleased post-mortem:

“At scale, this organizing model rewards transactional voter contact: call the voter, repeat the script, log a result, and move on. This model provides no incentive for organizers and volunteers to actually build relationships with the voter, follow up, and feel ownership to move them closer towards turnout over the course of the cycle. The problem goes a step further: varying contact rates across different demographics using ‘traditional’ tactics has limited who the campaign can actually reach. In 2024, the Harris campaign contacted 28% of Black women registered to vote over the age of 65; meanwhile, they contacted only 7.5% of Latino men registered under the age of 25.

In this model, the role of an organizer has become significantly more narrow. When success for an organizer is defined by quantity over quality, they spend most of their day tethered to their laptop inside a field office, disconnected from their turf, focused on making hundreds of cold calls rather than showing up and building connections face-to-face with voters.”

Instead of sending canvassers out to identify likely supporters for a candidate and move quickly to a “can we count on your vote” closer, the playbook envision a new conversation model that might go something like this: “Hey there! I’m your neighbor, Brittany. I live/work just around the corner in [COMMUNITY] and I’m out listening to voters today with [CANDIDATE] campaign. How’s your Saturday?”…“I’m out here in the neighborhood today because costs are out of control - it’s really been a struggle for me and some of our other neighbors. How have things been for you and your family lately?”…“I really appreciate you sharing that with me. What things might you like to see a politician do to solve that/these problems?”/ “What makes you hopeful/ doubtful things will get better?”…“It sounds like a lot of politicians haven’t delivered on their promises and I know how frustrating that can be. I’m out knocking doors because l’ve been waiting for a candidate I can count on to actually deliver. I have gone long stretches without any medical insurance and it always left me feeling so vulnerable. I am so filled with hope because [CANDIDATE] has followed through on [X tangible plan] to make life better for people like us.”…“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you sharing your thoughts with me - I know how personal these issues can be. Are you open to voting for someone like [CANDIDATE]?”…“I’m so glad we connected today, it’s been great getting to know you better. We get together every Thursday at [X Office] for dinner - we’d love to have you and your family sometime. Here’s an invite! I’Il swing by again down the road to check in, have a great day!”

If state parties and coordinated campaigns start doing this kind of sustained outreach, well, I’m tempted to say, I’ll eat my hat. But none of this is rocket science, and the fact that the DNC is putting this kind of playbook out can only be seen as encouraging. Imagine neighbors talking to neighbors, engaging in an empathetic conversation centered on listening to their struggles, and then not just seeking a vote but inviting them to dinner as a follow up. Amanda Litman, are you tracking this?

Of course, engineering this shift also requires a change in the infrastructure campaigns use to plan and manage their voter outreach. So it’s quite notable that the DNC’s new organizing playbook makes absolutely no mention of NGPVAN or any of the other Bonterra tools that everyone still relies on. Instead, it lays out lots of reasons why the status quo isn’t working: organizers spend too much time on manual and repetitive data entry and list-pulling rather than relationship-building, the tech they use customizes poorly to state-specific rules about voter registration, they waste too much time on unanswered phone-calls and door-knocks, campaign managers ignore feedback collected by volunteers, and existing tech requires multiple tools for different types of outreach. All of these, the DNC says, are solved by Winnable, OpenField, Matchbook and OutOrganize, though each of these platforms need more investment to improve further.

But that money is nowhere in sight.

As Julia Barnes told me, the problem is bigger than just an infusion of $10 million that would help these new platforms grow to the scale needed. “The other reason the left’s tech stagnation is so immovable is that we don’t have the resources to underwrite the change management required for these groups to try something else,” she said.

“Huge organizing groups that provide hundreds of millions of successful voter contacts or registrations are starving for resources. [Emphasis added.] It makes it even harder to pay inflated prices for tech and tools, to try new things, and to build new tactics that work on tech that will grow with them. It’s April of 2026. We can’t just take our midterm success for granted, and we certainly cannot pretend that winning the midterms is enough to turn the tide against the cultural rejection of our values and our candidates that we’ve experienced. Tech is tied to every single piece of work we do in political organizing. If the tech is struggling, we will not win. If the tech doesn’t evolve, we’ll never have long-term wins again. The Right will run away with the tech and data game.”

If you’re thinking, why worry – Democrats are going to have another Blue Wave in 2026 and these tech problems can be sorted out in 2027 – consider this argument about the realities of software development and deployment, which was made to me by a source in the thick of trying to fix this mess. Ideally, to get through the change management needed so that Democrats are all comfortable with these next-generation platforms by the beginning of the presidential primaries in early 2028, these new tools would be getting a major workout now, and some forward-leaning organizations would be getting the support they need to migrate off their existing constituent-relationship management systems to these new ones. Fixing bugs, adding improvements and learning how to manage usage at national scales (when several hundred thousand people might be simultaneously using these systems) takes time. That’s what $10 million could pay for now. Without it, none of these new tools are going to be ready to replace the Bonterra suite in 2027—they won’t be anywhere close to ready for prime time. But that’s where we are, in a field where if you just tread water, you fall behind.

Contact The Movement Cooperative here if you want to help do something about this challenge.

Related:

—Last week, Higher Ground Labs announced its latest funding round, seeking proposals for systems, platforms and tools that aim to support sustained engagement, surface authentic insights for “community-led messaging,” reach beyond traditional channels or use LLMs and agentic AI to make campaign systems more efficient. They are also looking to invest in tools that improve the relationship between institutions and the public, help people navigate how government works, or that strengthen connection, reduce polarization and support sustained community-building over time.

Notably, HGL, which has marshaled more than $50 million into several waves of tech-enabled start-ups since its founding in 2017, prefaces its call by stating that “The 2024 election exposed a hard truth: more spending and more outreach no longer guarantee meaningful impact. Rather than a failure of effort, the cycle suggested a failure of fit between existing infrastructure and the realities of today’s media and technology landscape: fragmented attention across hard-to-reach channels, messaging disconnected from community sentiment, and slow or incomplete feedback on what actually shifts voters. That gap is not just tactical, but structural. The progressive ecosystem needs new ways to adapt in real time, operate with better intelligence, and build capacity that persists beyond election cycles.”

—For more on how NGPVAN tools hinder organizing, read this recent piece by Susan Labandibar in The Grassroots Connector.

—And to learn more about many alternative options available, check out Higher Ground Labs’ Progressive CRM Guide.

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Also Noted

—In the parallel universe that is focused on improving how government works using tech and design thinking, a fascinating debate is playing out over how much to push for the use of AI. Here’s Erie Meyer, a co-founder of the U.S. Digital Service, warning in FedScoop that “well-meaning civic tech reformers are getting quietly pushed by philanthropic funding with strings attached toward a single answer regardless of the question: AI.” Here’s Code for America founder Jen Pahlka responding that the question isn’t whether to use AI, but whether “we let it entrench the status quo or use it to finally put government in control of its own destiny.” And here’s Mikey Dickerson, who helped rescue Healthcare.gov and then becaome the first administrator of the USDS, standing in the middle parsing their arguments. And also sharing that he’s “running a project called Tech Viaduct, where we are trying to prepare for a bolder, more muscular progressive-ish presidency, should we ever get that chance.” Stay tuned!

—The anti-Trump group 50501 used Pol.is to crowdsource ideas on how to respond to President Trump’s threats to destroy Iran’s civilization. More than 900 people participated casting nearly 21,500 votes. No breakthroughs were made, but it’s still cool to see a big protest group trying new tools for mass participation.

End Times

More political ads like this one, please!

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