The Resistance isn't just marches and pink hats

The 2018 election officially began on Tuesday with the first day of early voting ahead of Texas’ March 6th primaries. Evidently, a lot of people got the message. In Harris County, which includes Houston and is the state’s largest population center, Republican turnout was 25-percent higher than the first day of early-voting in the 2014 primaries. That makes some sense—there’s an expensive state house of representatives race in the county and an open Republican-leaning congressional district.

But what’s more surprising is the turnout jump on the Democratic side—a full 300 percent.

The tidal shift underway has little in common with the precedents pundits lean on. This is not a leftist Tea Party, because newly engaged suburban activists hail from across the broad ideological range from center to left. It’s not a Sanders versus Clinton redux, because that “last year’s news” divide is flatly irrelevant to the people working shoulder-to-shoulder in the present. It’s not an Occupy Wall Street-type questioning of liberal democracy, because these activists believe laws can make good government as strong and transparent as possible. It’s not the 1960s, with young people leading the way—although there are lots of helpful teenagers in the background saying, “Mom, it’s fine: go to your meeting; I’ll get dinner myself.”

The protagonists of the trends we report on are mainly college-educated suburban white women. We tell their stories not because college-educated white women are the most Democratic slice of the electorate (they aren’t) or because they are the most progressive voices within the Democratic Party (they aren’t) or because they have a special claim to lead the left moving forward (they don’t: nor do they pretend to). Rather, what we report here is that it is among these college-educated, middle-aged women in the suburbs that political practices have most changed under Trump. If your question is how the panorama of political possibility has shifted since November 2016, your story needs to begin here.

What’s Going On Out There?
Pundits regularly portray the action underway since November 2016 as a national movement—“The Resistance.” This can enshrine a common misperception, however: an understandable one, though, since the metropolitan advocates to whom the national media turn to explain the “newly energized grassroots” at times exaggerate the left-progressive focus of the activism underway and overestimate their own importance in coordinating it. Moreover, since this mobilization is both decentralized and based in face-to-face rather than virtual actions, it is impossible to scope from a distance. This revolution is not being tweeted; and even in the private Facebook groups most local groups maintain, the most prolific posters may not represent the views and focus of the members most active in real life. Local interviews and observations are, therefore, the best way to understand what is going on.

To be sure, new national resistance organizations like Indivisible, Sister District, Run for Something, Action Together, Swing Left, Women’s March, and many others have stepped up—and staffed up—to offer encouragement and tools via Internet outreach; and many of these national groups aspire to coordinate and speak for more widespread local activism. Most local founders of post-November 2016 grassroots groups say that they did indeed (sooner or later) read the Indivisible Guide; and they also testify to using ideas and tools from many of these national organizations. Nevertheless, it is clear that the national organizations did not themselves create the dizzying array of local groups—the “pop-up groups,” one bemused but grateful Virginia campaign manager called them—that spread like wildfire in the days, weeks, and early months after November 2016.

Though not nationally directed, the new activism cannot be understood as just local, either. As similar small groups have emerged in parallel across America, they have taken inspiration from one another, looked for ways to link up in regions and states, and continued to take pointers from national sources. Still, we know of no local group whose vision, plans, capabilities, or ties are limited to those offered by just one national-level advocacy organization or coordinating framework. Instead, local leaders seek out many ideas, tools, and connections, actively picking and choosing what they and their fellow participants find most helpful in their particular circumstances. We suspect that leaders and funders of national “resistance” organizations may fail to grasp the degree to which local citizen activists are eclectically leveraging varied menus of assistance, taking what they need from various offerings rather than lining up under any particular national flagship.

Again, these local stories have been similar across the country. Regular citizens bitterly disappointed with the 2016 results emerged from what many call a “period of mourning” to start planning activities, coordinated by pairs or trios or handfuls of self-appointed leaders. Some of these sparkplugs already knew one another, while others connected on buses to the 2017 Women’s Marches or “met” online, sometimes facilitated by the PantSuit Nation Facebook group that connected hundreds of thousands of women in anticipation of the first female President. Although men are certainly involved in the local groups that have taken shape since the election, women are indeed very much in the vanguard making up about 70 percent of the participants and most members of the leadership teams.

Often employed or retired from teaching, business, nonprofits, or government social service posts, these organizers already knew how to put out messages, plan gatherings, and share information. Word spread through churches, unions, PTAs, and local good government groups, and dozens of friends, neighbors, and co-workers assembled for founding meetings in living rooms, in libraries or church basements, or at local restaurants. Aware of the homogeneity of their communities, many sought to take on board the calls for attention to race-based disparities that came to the fore around the first Women’s March. In localities where few minority people are directly involved, leaders regularly sponsor discussions of racial justice issues or reach out to cosponsor events or campaigns with NAACP chapters and immigrant-supporting groups.

More than a national movement, then, what is underway is a national pattern of mutually energizing local engagement. Sociologically, what we are witnessing is an inflection point—a shift in long-standing trends—concentrated in one large demographic group, as college-educated women have ramped up their political participation en masse. The visible collective protests they have joined in response to national events are just a small piece of a far more consequential rebuilding of the face-to-face structures of political life that the same people have ended up leading. The grassroots are leaning in, and their little-d democratic commitments are as important as their capital-D Democratic alignment.