We need to look not at what it will take to win the next election, but at what it will take to win the next 10 elections.
On Saturday, October 18, more than 7 million people took to the streets at thousands of events across the country, proudly declaring that we have no kings in America. Aerial photography of crowds marching through the streets of Chicago, New York, Boston and Atlanta gave me chills. But similar photos are appearing in Billings, Montana; Boise, Idaho; and Hammond, Louisiana (where Trump won in 2024), as well as Richmond, Kentucky (where he won the last three elections), gave me hope. We have plenty of energy to fight Trump and build a bigger, better, more ambitious democracy that works for everyone. Trump may have won the popular vote (barely), but he is unpopular, and if we can benefit from itwe can achieve what historians call a turnaround from autocracy.
This underlined point is the most important: can we benefit from energy? Now I'm not so sure. Let us remind you that on Sunday, October 19, the march participants returned to their usual work. They baked pancakes for their children, hung protest signs in the street along with their trash, and continued with their usual plans for the fall weekend.
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This is not a hot-button point of view at this point, but simply a statement of fact: the Democratic Party and the broader pro-democracy movement have failed to build a sustainable infrastructure that can turn meaningful mobilizations like No Kings into lasting power. We don't have the civic engagement infrastructure that connects the dots between Saturday's marches and the basic local action that needs to happen every other day to seal victory.
As co-founder and president of Run for Something, an organization that recruits and supports young, diverse leaders running for local office across the country, I have seen first-hand the impact this failure has had on our politics. And I've spent the better part of the last decade trying to be part of the solution. Running for Something supports the largest slate of candidates in politics, with nearly a quarter of a million people raising their hands to run for office in all 50 states since our launch in 2017. (Remarkably, more than 70,000 of these leaders signed on last year, more than in Trump's entire first term).
We work exclusively with candidates running for local office for the first time. And we're one of the few national groups that engages with leaders on the front lines, especially those involved in communications and organizing in red and purple areas. We're looking at not just what it will take to win the next election, but what it will take to win the next 10 elections. To that end, Run for Something has developed an ambitious five-year, $50 million plan to invest deeply in a dozen states, including places like Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi and Utah, to prepare for possible upheaval in the battleground map after the 2030 Census.
I firmly believe that recruiting and supporting local candidates—especially leaders who bring next-generation energy, optimism, and communication skills—is a necessary component of the work we must do to turn energy into strength. But this alone is not enough.
The purpose of Run for Something is to be a bridge between those marching and those running. We need others to join us in creating more connections. We need both national and local groups to do the explicit political work, as well as the softer, but even more important, relationship building. It almost sounds stupid to say it outright, but we need people to start and maintain group chats that can then be used to organize a block party one week and an ICE surveillance system the next.
Our side needs to take a decisive approach to implementing all kinds of great ideas. We need investment in local media, whether through direct funding of newsrooms or subscriptions (or both). We need to open accessible indoor playgrounds for city council candidates to sit in, provide on-site gyms with hosts for men's groups, and sponsor content creators who tell interesting and engaging stories without compromising those values. We need to send resources to people to invite their neighbors to dinner, organize food drives, and more.
Most of this work is boring. This will take years, maybe even decades, and usually does not involve a “return on investment” or similar metric that you could measure and include in a deck or grant report.
But if we maintain this connective tissue interaction over decades, we won't have to spend billions of dollars to win elections because we won't be starting from scratch.
It may be disappointing to realize that, as inspiring as the No Kings marches may be, they will not end the crisis. But just as there is no single root cause for the authoritarian hell we find ourselves in, there is no single solution—not a single action, hero, protest, or election—that will bring about lasting change. We are confronted with decades of organized strategic investment in right-wing power; this means that our response must be equally organized, strategic and long-term.
We don't need one shiny unicorn to save us. Instead, we need endless running of frisky horses.
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