You can make a difference–Working together we will win this fight
Summary of New Indivisible Guide (Read it all at indivisible.org. It’s full of great insights and ideas for concrete and effective actions)
Chapter 1: What Happened and Why it Matters. Heading into the 2024 election, Americans were angry about inflation and frustrated with the status quo. Some voters either flipped to Trump or didn’t vote at all. That gave Trump the margins to win — but it doesn’t give him a mandate for dictatorship or Project 2025. Americans of all stripes are going to be pissed when Trump 2.0 comes to town dressed in chaos, corruption, and cruelty. We can stoke that backlash to break up their coalition and build ours.
Voters rejected the status quo — they didn’t embrace fascism.
Chapter 2: A Quick Primer on Constituent Power. Trump wants us to believe that the presidency is all-powerful. It ain’t true. Political power in our democracy overlaps between local, state, and federal electeds. Your power comes from your ability to be a source of support (or a pain in the ass) to those electeds. You can use this power to get them to stand up to Trump 2.0 or face political consequences.
THREE MAIN TAKEAWAYS
- Trump is not all powerful.
He has to contend with a slim congressional majority and non-MAGA states and cities across the country. Don’t relinquish your power or give him power he doesn’t have. - Even now, local constituent power is real. Democracy is imperiled but your electeds still care about reelection. The best way to combat Trump 2.0 is to identify which electeds – local, city, state, federal – you can influence. Offer support or be a pain in the ass.
You’ll plug into the plays that make the most sense for where you live and the leverage you have. Think of it as a giant national pro-democracy team — some of us are playing offense, some are playing defense, but if we all play our roles, we’ll make it through together.
Chapter 3: The Plan to Get Through the Next 2 Years
THREE MAIN TAKEAWAYS
- This is a time-limited plan to make it to 2026. Winning in 2026 won’t guarantee democracy is safe in the long-term – but it gives us a shot.
- Success requires each of us to play a different role based on our geography. Some will play defense, some will play offense. We’re all operating as one team.
Three Big Plays
- We will all throw in to say NO to the Project 2025 agenda pushed by the White House and Congress. We’ll stop what we can and pick strategic fights to drive national backlash to win in 2026.
- We will play hardball wherever we’ve got Democrats in local, city, or state office — pushing them to block, delay, and challenge MAGA’s attacks.
- We will work to protect and win elections — defending against election deniers in swing states and turning all that national backlash into an electoral majority coalition that delivers big wins in 2026.
What are we going to do? We’ll fight to win, to delay, or to land a political blow. We’ll push Democrats to stand in lockstep opposition, hold Republicans accountable every step of the way for unpopular actions, and tell the story of what’s happening — with a focus on the tangible ways it’s causing harm to regular people.
Trump’s agenda is chock-full of policies that will cause direct harm to regular Americans — but that doesn’t mean they’ll hear about it or know who’s to blame. From the very beginning, organized political opposition is how we tell the story of what’s happening, fracture Trump’s unstable coalition, and build ours.
YOU’VE GOT A DEMOCRATIC REPRESENTATIVE/SENATOR
Maintaining lockstep opposition to Trump will be crucial — any Democratic support at all will give him cover to portray his gruesome policies as “bipartisan.” That means your job is to support, cheerlead, or berate your Democratic Representative and/or Senators to be active fighters for every battle we fight on the Trump agenda. That work should be loud and public — whether positive or negative. Let your representatives know you expect of them.
Play #2: Get Dems To Play Hardball In Local, City, And State Offices
Blue state, city, and local organizing is incredibly urgent in this moment. Blue areas have enormous power to shape the terms of the national debate, to leverage their economic and political power to protect the things we care about, and to pick fights that help us highlight the rotten core of Project 2025. You have a crucial role in ensuring they do it.
Chapter 3 outlines strategies and tactics we can take. But there’s more:
We need plans to combat disinformation, to develop our own independent communications systems, and to take on the corporate billionaires that are enabling the fascists. We will need to work with other Indivisibles and other progressive groups.
Chapter 4: Protect and Prepare. Things are about to get much worse, and we need to treat an attack on one as an attack on all of us.
This is going to look different in different places, but depending on where you are, it might include:
- Participating in mutual aid: This could beworking with immigrant rights groups on deportation defense, raising money for, or volunteering with, local actors helping patients access abortions, or supporting your local teachers union in their fight against a new draconian education policy.
- Fighting back against dangerous state and/or local legislation. We can anticipate a spree of additional legislation in red states escalating attacks on targeted communities or taking advantage of new openings created by federal action. We’ll raise awareness of such efforts, push back against their passage, and highlight the harm they create if they successfully pass. At local levels it will include things like organizing to fight back against local school board efforts to attack trans kids or eradicate DEI and civil rights history from schools.
- Story-telling. You have tremendous storytelling power. We will need stories from the frontlines of MAGA-world. Stories are how we will re-engage folks who have checked out and how we’ll break up MAGA’s base.
Here are some general guidelines on how to get started:
- Get connected locally. Plug into existing work, where you can add value and strength to ongoing fights and deliver the kinds of support that are being asked for
- Focus on tangible ways to help. This is not about posting the right message on social media in solidarity. It’s about actual, material support for people who are facing material harm. Communities are under threat, and the organizations that serve them are about to face extraordinary challenges. They will need money, local organizing support, mutual aid, and volunteers who can show up to help.
Chapter 5: Practical steps for finding or forming your local Indivisible group. We have a strong local group, but if you know people who don’t, refer them to this great chapter.
5 LESSONS FROM GLOBAL HISTORICAL FIGHTS AGAINST FASCISM
- Build Broad Coalitions: Grassroots movements are strongest when they unite lots of groups with shared democratic values, even if they don’t agree on everything. E.g.the solidarity movement in Poland, which united workers, students, and academics.
- Wage Nonviolence: Nonviolent tactics—earned media, protests, civil disobedience—are more effective than violent resistance. Nonviolence is harder for authoritarians to justify suppressing without risking backlash. E.g. see Gandhi in India or the U.S. civil rights movement.
- Develop Independent Media and Communications: Establish media channels NOT connected to the state to influence the public narrative, counter misinformation, and communicate values and goals to the public. Don’t rely solely on channels controlled by those who benefit from the current regime (looking at you, Elon Musk). E.g. the underground press during World War II and later in Eastern European resistance movements.
- Strengthen Community Ties: Authoritarians seek to isolate individuals to prevent collective action. Distributed grassroots resistance builds resilience. E.g., see local groups and underground networks in France during Nazi occupation helping folks stay connected and resist.
- Document Human Rights Violations and Publicize Them: Record and report abuses committed by the regime. Documenting abuses creates accountability and can help mobilize both support and action.
