We Have More Friends Everywhere

Notes on how we are organizing ourselves nine months into Trump II. And why status quo Democrats can't win the moment or the future.

The first thing to be said about Saturday’s No Kings rallies is that, as organizers hoped, they were bigger than last June’s protests. If there was a “barrier of fear” keeping some people away (for understandable reasons), that didn’t stop millions from marching. No Kings’ national organizers are claiming that seven million people turned out, compared to about five million on June 14 (and around three million at the Hands Off rallies of April 5). But it’s not clear, yet, if we hit that number based on reported crowd counts. Data journalist G. Elliott Morris, who has built unofficial, crowd-sourced tallies for both events, offered a median estimate of 5.0 million for October 18, with an upper range of 6.5 million; he estimated that between 4.3 million and 5.8 million people turned out for June 14.

But the exact number of attendees matters far less than the breadth and diversity of who turned out, and where. The official No Kings map had registered 2,650 locations, a healthy increase over the 2,200 or so rallies back in June. And 2,650 is definitely an undercount, because there were plenty of local rallies that didn’t make it onto the No Kings map, either because national managers rejected some submissions because they were “too close” to other gatherings that had already registered (as happened to the Concerned Families of Westchester group, which held a well-attended rally in my hometown despite not being able to get on the Mobilize platform), or because they didn’t bother publicizing their event (like the seniors at the independent living residence where my in-laws live).

As I wrote back in June, “If the main value of mass protest is that it shows people that they are not alone and it spreads millions of word-of-mouth stories to bystanders, helping to shift public opinion away from support for the regime, then for my money the most important of the No Kings protests weren’t the ones in all the reliably blue cities.”

ProtestMap.info for October 18’s No Kings rallies. Blue=Harris stronghold; Purple=multiple events including red and blue ones; Red=Trump stronghold; Orange=missing data.

The most interesting map of Saturday’s No Kings efforts then, is not the official one at NoKings.org, but a homemade one built by a team at the “We (the People) Dissent” Substack overseen by a journalist and fantasy novelist who goes by the pen-name K. Starling. Her map, which is largely drawn from scraping all the Mobilize protest data on the official map, is color-coded by how each location voted in 2024 (see screenshot above). And this makes it possible to see the most important thing about the rising movement against Trumpian authoritarianism: it is reaching many towns and cities in the heart of “red” America.

Examples:

—In Jamestown, North Dakota (population 15,789), where Trump beat Harris by 38% in 2024, 300 people came out. “It’s really heartening to see this many people show up,” Olivia Schloegel, an organizer of the event who is a former federal worker, told The Jamestown Sun. “I also am struck by the various ages and people from all ways of life and political affiliations that are here.”

—In Kearney, Nebraska (population 34,741, +21% Trump over Harris), more than 200 people turned out, according to the Kearney Hub. Protestors questioned why Trump was sending billions in aid to Argentina while US agriculture is battling its loss over overseas markets in Trump’s trade war.

—In Hamilton, Montana (population 5,383, +10% Trump), more than 700 people lined several blocks of US Highway 93 downtown, according to a report in the Daily Montanan. In Dillon, Montana (population 4,242, +32% Trump), a bit further south, about 200 people lined North Montana Street through the center of town.

—In Fort Walton Beach, Florida (population 21,188, +27% Trump), deep in the panhandle, about 600 people gathered, a “noticeably larger turnout than the one held in June,” the MidBay News reported. Not far away, in Panama City Beach, an even redder area where Trump beat Harris by 50 points, a long line of demonstrators stood on Hathaway Bridge.

—In Amarillo, Texas (population 203,729, +32% Trump), more than 500 people gathered outside of the old city hall to wave flags and protest. One of the local coordinators, Laina Seaberg, told the Amarillo Globe-News that the turnout exceeded expectations and reflected growing civic engagement across the area. In San Angelo, Texas (population 100,159, +22% Trump), hundreds of No Kings protestors came out, according to the local Fox News channel.

—Even in tiny Cottonwood Falls, Kansas, home to about 833 people, where Trump beat Harris by 65 points, thirteen people came together under the banner of a group called “An Hour of Love in Action.” A local activist, Kay Krause, has collected more than $5,000 to support detainees in a nearby detention center, providing them with postcards, stamps, soccer balls, games and other jail-sanctioned gifts. One participant, Thomas Muther, who carried a sign reading “’Poisoning the Blood of our Nation?’ Nazism 101,” told the Kansas Reflector that he has protested for 164 days straight across the entire state.

This reach of No Kings into Trump country was also noted by researchers Erica Chenoweth, Soha Hammam, Jeremy Pressman, and Christopher Wiley Shay, who run the Crowd Counting Consortium. Their most recent article in Waging Nonviolence notes a modest but real increase in protests in counties that Trump won between his first term and second one. Using much more granular data, they observe that, “In counties Trump won by at least 5 percentage points, his first term saw an average total of 2 protesters per 10,000 residents per month, while his second term has seen an average of 7 protesters per 10,000 residents per month.” Chenoweth notes that these are places where “protest is costly” because counter-demonstrators often show up to challenge anti-Trump activists.

This is a good thing, but…

It’s heartening to see more No Kings protests in pro-Trump areas, but this is where the polarized nature of American politics makes things tricky. The most interesting comment I’ve seen in recent days (which I unfortunately can’t find now to link to) was something a friend shared on Facebook. The post argued that while some Trump voters may be feeling the equivalent of “buyer’s remorse,” many of them voted for Trump in the first place because they were convinced that a Kamala Harris administration would have resulted in the destruction of all that is good and worth saving in America—while Trump, despite his obvious flaws, was promising to make changes that they supported. In a two-party system, if you think one choice is absolutely worse than the other, you will keep supporting the lesser of two evils as a result.

So while I agree with people like my friend Marc Cooper, who argues that we are in the middle of a global tide of reactionary populism that can’t simply be beaten at the ballot box, which requires that we build a “counter social movement” to out-compete all the attractions that MAGA holds for so many, we also can’t ignore how the two-party system produces perverse effects on the public. If we aren’t careful, energy poured into organizing anti-Trump protests can also harden the hearts of people who like him more because he represents “change” than anything else. Indeed, if you pay attention to how Republicans are responding to the protests, in many cases what they are doing is insisting that they are the real change agents while the people who want to stop Trump are the real authoritarians who want to boss people around.

Listen to how Trump supporters are pushing back on the “no kings” frame: For example, they’re sharing this recent quote from Florida Republican congressman and gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds, who said on No Kings Day, “If Democrats want to talk about ‘No Kings,’ let’s REALLY talk about it. They attacked their opponents with lawfare. They blatantly ignored SCOTUS rulings. They censored the press & social media. They sicced the FBI on parents & Catholics. They locked-down our cities & schools. They forced a vax to participate in society. They covered-up Biden’s mental decline. They ran our country with an autopen. They broke our border on purpose. Yes, this ALL HAPPENED under Biden-Harris. Yes, this was completely un-American. Yes, this was authoritarian. Yes, this was wrong. And yes, this is why President Donald Trump won in an electoral college landslide back on November 5th.” Or they’re pointing out that Kamala Harris didn’t earn her nomination but was simply “gifted” it by Biden. Or, as the cartoon below suggests, they see the “No Kings” slogan as hypocritical.

What this means, I think, is that unless Democrats show up as different than their current incarnation, Trump voters with some degree of buyer’s remorse are not going to jump ship if they think the alternative is going back to what Biden and Harris represent to them. In healthier democracies, when the party in power suffers a repudiation the way Democrats did in 2024, the old leadership steps aside or is pushed out by new leaders who understand that their only path back to power is to offer voters something different and better. But that didn’t happen here. Instead, what the opposition to Trump is promising voters is that in 2026 we will put Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries and other status-quo Democrats back into power. And this is our Achilles heel.

The most interesting Democrat running statewide today

For these reasons, I think New York Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado, who has broken with incumbent Governor Kathy Hochul and is running to replace her in next year’s Democratic primary, is one of the most interesting Democrats running for statewide office in today’s America. Not only is he criticizing her mostly cautious, low-key response to Trump’s attacks on democracy, the law, immigrants, academic freedom and the safety net, he’s laid out a full-blown plan for radically overhauling New York’s corrupt and moribund state Democratic party. On Saturday, he gave the closing keynote speech at the No Kings rally in Brewster, a blue-ish dot in a purple part of upstate New York, where 4,000 people had gathered (double from June, as The Nation’s Joan Walsh reported).

dei_bedfordny

A post shared by @dei_bedfordny

Here’s a snippet of what Delgado said:

We love democracy. We love freedom. We love that no one man is above the law. We love that we are a nation of immigrants. We love that every single one of us, irrespective of your race, your class, your gender, your religion, your sexual orientation, you’re equal. You’re all God’s children. We all count, right here in America.

We love who we are and when you love, like we do when you love, just like a parent might do with a child or a grandparent might do with a child, when you see something you love, act out of character, step out of line, you correct him, you hold him accountable. You say, we can be better, and that’s what this moment is about. We are taking the love that we have for our country, the love that we have for our ideals and our values and saying we can be better.

Because when we look when we look out and we see an assault on the rule of law, it is love that says no, no, no, we can be better. We look out and we see immigrants, our neighbors, our brothers, our sisters, our families, being ripped away from each other, by masked ICE agents. We say, no, no, no, love. Love demands better. When we say, Where’s the due process? Love demands due process. We see our veterans--our veterans who sacrificed for this country, who fought the greatest generation, fought to beat back Nazism, fascism, totalitarianism [cheers], but when we see an administration that’s kicking our veterans out of supportive housing, we say, no! Love demands more of who we are as Americans. When we see an administration that’s weaponizing the DOJ, weaponizing the IRS, silencing press, silencing the media, silencing dissent, silencing truth, silencing science. We say no, love commands more. Love demands accountability.

In this moment, everything that drives us here today is rooted in our shared commitment to this beautiful American project, rooted in our shared humanity, from which our dignity flows, and when we see a president and an administration that is hell bent on extremism, on violence, on division, we have to meet that with unconditional, unflinching, demanding and strong love. That is what history has taught us, that is what every single struggle before us has taught us. We wouldn’t be where we are today, overcoming what we’ve overcome, if not for the power of love.

I think he mentioned the word love more than three dozen times over the course of a twelve minute speech. His speech also talked about the underlying conditions that have alienated so many Americans from our teetering democracy, citing how many are living paycheck to paycheck despite this being the richest country in the world. While it wasn’t a political speech (rally organizers asked all the politicians attending to avoid being partisan), there’s no way Kathy Hochul could give a speech like this one. Now the big question for New York Democrats is whether they care enough about the future of their own state to back the change candidate over the status quo, because if they don’t, GOP nominee Elise Stefanik will own the “change” mantle.

You can watch the whole thing here.

—Related: Andrew Solender reports for Axios on the wave of Democratic congressional candidates who, “feeding off voter fury, are raging against their leadership and vowing to be ruthless.” More of this, please.

Democracy, Ever Experience It?

The Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation has launched a new monthly webinar series called The Breakdown on the ongoing struggle for American democracy with scholars Erica Chenoweth and Steven Levitsky—two of our leading experts on how democracies die and how anti-authoritarian movements succeed.

During yesterday’s inaugural session, I managed to inject this question into their conversation (around the 50-minute mark): “In terms of the response of civil society to rising authoritarianism, have institutions that are relatively more internally democratic in their own practice been more resistant to Trump’s power grab than those that are not internally democratic? (Academia vs law firms vs big media companies) Does it make sense to expect pro-democracy behavior from institutions that are generally not very democratic in the first place?” Chenoweth added the example of “organized labor, or institutions that are themselves inherently more democratic compared to those that are more kind of corporatist.”

Levitsky answered first. “Most of the institutions that you listed, including labor unions if we’re being frank, are not especially internally democratic. Most large organizations in this country are not particularly democratic. Until October 7, 2023, we used to talk about faculty governance here at Harvard and other universities, but it became very clear that universities are not very internally democratic either. So there is some anecdotal evidence that both businesses and especially law firms, where they actually consulted partners or consulted widely within, ultimately took tougher responses, more independent responses [that] pushed back against the Trump administration, then did ones that made centralized decisions. So where more people were consulted, you were more likely to get a more independent, vigorous response.”

He added that there wasn’t much hard data to cite for this observation. Then he noted, “In general, our civil society, we can’t rely just on internally democratic [ones]--I wish we could, but … most of our civil society, churches, universities, law firms, businesses, and media companies are not particularly democratic institutions. We need them to fight for democracy. Nevertheless, if democracy depended only on internally democratic organizations, we wouldn’t have a democracy. I know that may sound a little paradoxical.”

Chenoweth offered two thoughts of their own. The first was about the value of strong, centralized leadership when opposition movements have to bid for power. “There are a lot of studies that that show that movements that are relatively more coherent and somewhat centralized are often in a better position both to organize and mobilize and negotiate and consolidate in the aftermath of a mass mobilization, then are the more kind of disorganized, horizontally organized movements.” (They didn’t have to mention how the Muslim Brotherhood was in a much stronger position than the student, labor and human rights activists who toppled Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak when it came time to hold new elections and compete against the Egyptian army for power.)

They added, “There are lots of reasons for that, based on bargaining theory and things like that, that it is much easier to be able to make credible commitments and the like, if you have a clear structure that allows you to mobilize and stop mobilizing, equally important when concessions are on the way. So I think you know that’s not exactly about democracy versus non democracy, but more about whether a movement is able to act as one. And sometimes that’s not necessarily democracy in action, but is more a structure that allows for accountability and and coordination.”

Chenoweth’s second point was much closer to the heart of my question. “The second thing I would say … is more about something that our colleague Marshall Ganz has sometimes said about the need for people to experience democracy in their daily lives in order to understand why it’s so important to fight for on a more grand and structural level.” They commented to Levitsky, “So Steve, while I agree with what you just said, that we have to sort of struggle with the civil society that we have, not the one we wish we had -- at the same time, I think an important organizing principle is to try to link the things that people say they care about on a daily basis to the experience of democracy, not just the idea of democracy. And that does mean that it wouldn’t hurt our civil society to have more places where people get to experiment with that and actually experience it for themselves, so that they can then really concretely see how the things that concern them on the daily basis must relate to a democratic way more generally in the country.”

Levitsky replied, “To your point, you know, our top-down organizations and institutions have not responded very impressively in these last nine or 10 months.”

Ya think?

Quick Note

—Dear Pod Save America co-host Tommy Vietor: When a prospective Senate candidate (Graham Platner of Maine) uses your show to reveal that he has a skull-and-bones tattoo from Croatia with Nazi connotations (what is called a “Totenkopf”) on his chest, but insists that it was all innocent and no one ever told him at the beach that his tattoo was troubling, you don’t laugh supportively and let him off the hook – you ask him if he’s gotten the tattoo removed.

End Times

This may be the nerdiest thing I’ve ever found online.