The Resistance Is Dead. Long Live the Resistance?

You’ve probably heard the news: The resistance is dead.

Its demise was predicted even before Donald Trump’s victory on November 5. In January, Ian Bassin, the founder of Protect Democracy, told Politico that if Trump were to win a second term, “the civil-society, pro-democracy, grassroots movement will feel incredibly defeated and deflated.” Sure enough, days after Trump’s win, at a rally in Washington held by the Women’s March, a woman told the New York Times, “I didn’t even want to come down — I was on the metro and I’m like, you know what? This might actually make us feel worse. Why bother, especially now?” Puck’s Dylan Byers wrote that the liberal-left media was bailing on its anti-Trump coverage in an article titled “The #Resistance Is Futile.” And on Saturday Night Live, comedian Bill Burr crowed, “Alright ladies, you’re 0 and 2 against this guy,” suggesting that future female presidential candidates should ditch the pantsuits and learn to “whore it up a little.”

Burr’s joke channeled some ambient postelection frustration with the women who had come together angrily after 2016 to march and lead the hashtag resistance, women often caricatured as pussy-hatted, hard-brunching dilettantes. His ire was particularly potent given signs that they were about to rise again. There were reports of white women on TikTok donning blue bracelets as signs of racial solidarity. There were rumblings of a “People’s March,” with permits sponsored partly by the Women’s March, an organization long since distanced from its founders. On X, reporter Dave Weigel predicted that any such event would pale in comparison to the 2017 turnout and provide a “check-up on how much less protest/direct action energy there is compared to eight years ago,” saying he had observed a “not doing that again, didn’t work” vibe.

In the face of a devastating rout, with every political commentator in possession of a suit jacket asserting their surety of what had gone wrong, the last thing anyone wanted to hear about was stupid blue bracelets or a chunky-pink-knit reunion tour. As Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in the weeks before the election, “I don’t want to do four more years of resistance nonsense under Donald Trump. Good god! Do we remember what it was like waking up every day and there was some shit going on?”

I do remember. I didn’t want to do it again either.

Yet on the morning after the election, Ocasio-Cortez herself woke up and got on Instagram Live, looking exhausted but determined as she took stock of what had just happened, talking about misogyny, the Democrats’ inattention to class issues, and the voters in her own working-class multiracial district swinging toward Trump. She noted that there have been “mass movements of people that mobilize to protect one another in times of fascism and authoritarianism and this is the era we are poised to enter.” It wasn’t just the big-name public faces of the earlier resistance who woke up on Wednesday ready to go back to work. Less than 24 hours after the race had been called, a friend in Maine, who had worked nonstop during the election and whom I expected to be holed up nursing her wounds somewhere, instead forwarded me an invitation to a virtual event about “White People’s Work After a MAGA Win.” Six thousand people were on the call. “They’re telling us, ‘Focus, this is real, and we have to organize now. Pull it together,’” she told me.

That Thursday, a call co-hosted by Indivisible and Working Families Party drew more than 137,000 people. “That went for hours,” said Fatima Goss-Graves, the director of the National Women’s Law Center. “I don’t think I spoke until 10 p.m., and people stayed on and attendance grew. People are seeking not only community but ways to engage.”

As election results came in, I’d been texting despondently with Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, a resistance-era organization that supports young progressive first-time candidates for state and local office. She hoped, she’d said, that her organization could carry on doing consequential work “even without a resistance 2.0, which I do not expect to see.” Seven days later, 7,000 people had signed up with Run for Something, seven times the number it had drawn the week it launched on Trump’s first Inauguration Day. “I was shocked, to be honest,” said Litman. “I’m so glad to be wrong.”

While the guys on television were expressing their Big Feelings about everything everyone had done wrong and the bleak future we face because of it, the women I was seeing on Zoom screens looked flinty and clear-eyed, like they had simply vomited and slept and were now ready to discuss legal, medical, electoral, and fundraising strategies. As Indivisible co-founder Leah Greenberg observed to me with wonder after the 137,000-person call, “It’s been 72 hours. At this time in 2016, people were mostly just crying in bed and buying Hillbilly Elegy.”

The resistance is dead. Long live the resistance?

Any theory on the future of The Resistance™ depends on how you understood it to begin with. For some, it refers to the constellation of groups that put fanatical faith in liberal-democratic institutions — media, government, the judiciary — to hold Trump to account or even oust him from office. These were people who wore “Mueller-Time” T-shirts, carried “Democracy Dies in Darkness” tote bags, and posted on Facebook a lot. Adjacent to this was the more explicitly feminized social-media activism, women with bedazzled “Nevertheless, She Persisted” sweats, and “In This House, We Believe” signs on their lawns. Like a terrible haircut from not that long ago, these earnest, faddish signifiers have come to haunt resisters, understood now as the hollow messaging of people very new to political engagement.

But derision of the merchandized detritus of first-stage resistance organizing often worked to obscure the seriousness of what was happening among many Americans who had never before been politically active and who had been both appalled and galvanized by the defeat of Hillary Clinton. The first big public gathering, the Women’s March, wasn’t just an Instagrammable party. It was spiky and contentious, bringing together Hillary heads and Berners, leftists and moderates, hard-core activists and wide-eyed newbies, as well as the grifters and profiteers who adhere to any mass movement. It was at the time the largest single-day protest in the country’s history, built to encourage intra-movement communication and a messy move toward solidarity. Plus “Pussy Grabs Back” signs.

From there, women broke in a dizzying array of organizing directions. Some helped drive the wildcat teachers’ strikes that spread in 2018 across Oklahoma, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Arizona. Others disrupted Republican-lawmaker town halls, helping to save the Affordable Care Act from repeal in Trump’s first year in office, and harried administration officials responsible for the family-separation policy. The shared fury of women led to the Me Too movement, which resulted in powerful and abusive figures losing positions of institutional authority, and to sexual-harassment walkouts at companies including McDonald’s and Google. A historic number of women ran for office, flooding candidate-training groups like Emerge and Higher Heights. Others got to work organizing on their behalf in municipal and local races, creating Democratic infrastructure in places that the party had left unattended for generations.

This organizing produced material results all over the country. This iteration of the resistance was the force that flipped the House to Democratic control in 2018, staved off a red wave in 2022, and won majorities in Michigan and Minnesota, where laws were subsequently passed to protect abortion access and LGBTQ rights and ensure free school lunches. It helped secure State Supreme Court seats in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and a streak of ballot referenda on abortion rights post-Dobbs, including in blood-red Kentucky, Ohio, and Kansas — ensuring that, for a while at least, tens of millions more Americans have had access to health care they would otherwise not have had. Litman told me that Run for Something has helped to elect 1,500 millennial and Gen-Z leaders across the country, its alumni beating hard-right Moms for Liberty candidates for school boards and city councils, ending single-family zoning in Berkeley, winning meals for students in Virginia, and fighting anti-trans legislation in West Virginia. Even in last week’s terrible election for Democrats, young Democratic candidates flipped red seats in Kentucky, Iowa, Washington, and North Carolina.

Indeed, last week, while “the country swung away from Democrats pretty significantly,” said Lara Putnam, a University of Pittsburgh historian who has been studying the flow of people, especially women, into local organizing in Western Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County since 2017, “in many places, down-ballot Democrats — not just congressional, but state legislative races — did pretty well,” citing races in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. Putnam sees the results as evidence of “on-the-ground infrastructure that is a sequential consequence of ‘resistance’ organizing. It got us to the point where Harris could lose Pennsylvania roundly yet Democrats could maintain control of the statehouse. That’s insane!”

The women she’s studied, Putnam went on, “were much more ideologically diverse and flexible” than some of the national groups like Run for Something, Sister District, or Red Wine and Blue, often getting behind candidates who fell to the right of their center-left sensibilities just to build a normie, centrist Democratic Party pipeline. “There was no such thing in so many places,” she said, “and over the course of 2017 to 2018, they went from zero to 60 in their understanding of how many electoral offices there are in Pennsylvania.” The thousands of people she has tracked, she said, may be a small portion of the electorate, but “a huge number to be very active in terms of doing hands-on super-boring unpaid political work, the housekeeping of politics.”

“To me, this is an amazing story,” said Putnam, “and it’s definitely not a story about blue friendship bracelets.” As Putnam noted, many of the women she studies are over 40 and not on TikTok or Instagram, “and none of them think politics is about performative allyship.”

The urge to demonize and dismiss these women, despite their impact, is strong from both party and press, neither of which has ever been eager to take seriously — or sometimes even notice — the nation-shaping political activation of women, unless they are of the right-wing Moms for Liberty variety. There has been little acknowledgment that the almost entirely volunteer efforts of regular-degular women in communities around the country — not just the recent exertions of previously disengaged white women but the electoral labor performed unrelentingly by Black women for generations — has done more to preserve and repair the broken Democratic Party at state and local levels than the efforts of the well-paid, expensively dressed, smooth-brained Democratic consultant class or the political press, both of which tend to obsess over the shiny highest offices, forget local- and state-power building, fly quadrennially into local communities about which they know nothing, and advise candidates against embracing issues that turn out to be more popular with voters than the candidates who listen to consultants’ advice.

Heading into the earliest days of the Trump Two era, it’s striking that it turns out not to be burnt-out women on the ground who are waving a white flag but some of the best-resourced men at the top, including those who have been most dismissive of women’s efforts.

Dmitri Mehlhorn, adviser to billionaire Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, has argued to donors that they should not encourage Democrats to run on abortion and after November 5 announced his retreat from politics. “For the last nine years,” wrote Mehlhorn wearily, “I threw everything I had into defending” America, but now “that fight is done.” Bemoaning the end of “the Second American Republic,” Mehlhorn declared, “I’m heading back to the private sector.”

Mehlhorn’s capitulation came on the heels of billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, steward of the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” brand, stopping his paper from endorsing Harris a week before Election Day. And Bezos’s premature submission itself recalls the swiftness with which senior Democratic officials were willing to throw in their towels after Biden’s bad debate in June, after which one “senior House Democrat” told Axios, “We’ve all resigned ourselves to a second Trump presidency.”

This from these powerful people, all while resistance-style affinity groups immediately dove in and raised millions for the fledgling Kamala Harris campaign. And no. It did not work. But, you know, at least they tried.

“This story for us doesn’t end with we lost that one time and gave up,” said Goss-Graves, who is also a civil-rights lawyer. “That is just not how the story ends. This is a particularly tough period in our nation’s history but it’s actually not the worst period for Black folks or for women in this country. I don’t want to sound glib when I say this, but I never thought the fight for our freedom would be easily secured or durable without further fight.”

There is no question that the loss of the White House and Senate will make every aspect of organizing harder, especially for those on the ground, who will be further underfunded. The big-money top dogs walking away with their tails between their legs are going to further hurt those already struggling after a presidential contest that soaked up a gobsmacking number of dollars. On November 13, the day after sign-ups for Run for Something crossed the 7,000 mark, the organization reduced its staff following two years of fundraising shortfalls.

“On-the-ground organizers have had gaps in the tens of millions,” Litman told me. “Fundraising was so dire that to ensure long-term sustainability, we are restructuring now. It was alarming then, and it’s even more horrifying now, how much the ecosystem had to contract in the year leading up to the most consequential election of a lifetime.”

This is the thing: The presidential race ate up all the money — one billion dollars — and there won’t be another one for four years, but the work at the municipal, local, state, and legal level is never-ending. “Filing deadlines are just around the corner,” said Litman, noting that the organization’s restructuring will permit it to continue to support the rush of young people into elected office and that she is hopeful that once donors lick their wounds, they will come back.

Greenberg said that she doesn’t mind watching the resistance being written off as dead, at least for now: “It is a very funny instance of overwhelmingly D.C./male pundits and reporters rushing to declare that things they aren’t personally paying attention to are not happening, while the actual work happens in a thousand homes across the country.” She acknowledged that there are real questions about strategy moving forward. “But our folks are not like Dmitri Mehlhorn,” she said. “They don’t give up.”

The legacy of the past eight years is not simply a gutting presidential loss. There are tools and mechanisms in place: shield laws and sanctuary states. People new to engagement now have had practice at losing and getting back up again; that is crucial. “The muscle memory has kicked back in as the grief and shock has worn off,” Litman told me. “It feels more clear-eyed about how hard this will be. But there is also a history of winning against him.”

There is a history of winning, even this fall, on abortion. Seven out of the ten state ballot initiatives protecting access to abortion passed in 2024, and in Florida a significant majority — 57 percent, more than voted for either Trump or senator Rick Scott — favored abortion protections; it just wasn’t enough to cross the 60 percent supermajority threshold needed for it to pass. David Leonhardt of the Times has pronounced the Trump-abortion split evidence that the election was not a “referendum on abortion” and that Democrats who emphasized the issue were engaging in “wishful thinking” that it could deliver a victory. But not only were these referenda tangible victories for the women who will now be able to access reproductive care (a fact Leonhardt doesn’t deign to acknowledge, instead depicting abortion-rights proponents as naïve ideologues who don’t understand politics), they were also some of the only aspects of the election the Democrats got right.

The Resistance has now experienced both the overturn of Roe and the electoral victories that followed in its wake; they have learned about abortion funds, read Project 2025, and have some idea of what might be coming next. Nothing has to be the same this time because we are not the same.

“I think the 2016 resistance is dead and that’s a good thing,” said Nelini Stamp, director of strategy for the Working Families Party. “That style of resistance was an on-ramp for a lot of people, and a lot of people took it. Now, it is more like, Let’s get to work. I’ve seen nothing but action. Not people being reactionary and saying “Resist” or “Not my president”; they’re taking time to plan, talking to their communities. There’s an advocacy infrastructure that’s grown, an electoral infrastructure, a legal infrastructure.”

Or as Litman put it, “This time we can all jump right in without building the plane while we fly it.”