[W]hen Shaw attended her first meeting of a local Democratic club in 2018, she saw it as her next big project. The gathering was fairly dull, a handful of older people seated around tables in an echoey ballroom on Cleveland’s west side. There was pizza, sure, and a lineup of local speakers. But there was no attendance-taking, no callouts for volunteers, no planning for weekend projects—even though the midterm-primary season was under way. Things have got to change if we’re going to beat Donald Trump, Shaw thought to herself as the meeting wrapped. And things did.
Under the stewardship of Shaw and a handful of allies, the sleepy Ward 17 Democratic Club has been revitalized. In less than two years, the group has doubled its membership, from 25 to 50; built a brand-new website; and developed a witty social-media presence. Every weekend, the club holds voter-registration drives and literature drops, drawing from a pool of 90 volunteers—most of them women.
Americans know the bigger story well by now: how an all-consuming hatred of Trump has spurred women, especially suburban women like Susan, to campaign and vote for Democrats all across the country. But the piece often missing from that narrative is that these women aren’t just expressing their outrage by voting in high-stakes national elections; they’re funneling their energy toward a collection of smaller targets, including statehouse races, local party organizations, and school boards. And all of this activism has the potential to shape American politics in a much more significant way than their biennial votes. “It’s a renaissance of a very long-standing form of American civic engagement,”
The question now is whether these women will sustain their zealous engagement no matter which party is in power. Is America entering a new age of activism—or is all of this just a Trump-era blip?
Before Trump’s election, Shaw read the news. . . . . But she never volunteered to knock on doors or lick envelopes for Hillary Clinton, let alone for any local candidates. She’d never once attended a local Democratic Party function—hell, she wasn’t entirely sure what a “ward club” did. She was, in other words, exactly like a lot of other Democrats. And like a lot of other Democrats, Trump’s victory took her completely by surprise. The day after his win, she gathered with a few friends to mourn. We “just started bawling and drinking wine,” Shaw told me. One woman announced to the group: “I feel like I’ve been asleep.” Actually, they all felt that way.
Things came together quickly after “The Indivisible Guide”—a handbook for grassroots activism—was released in December 2016. The women began meeting on the second Monday of every month, first at members’ homes, and later at a local coffee shop owned by a member. They called themselves the GrassRoots Resistance, or “GRR,” an onomatopoeic representation of their feelings toward the president.
By January 2017, GRR had settled on a few targets for their activism. Their anger was national, but their action would be local, the thinking went. The women, who were mostly white and ranged in age from 35 to 65, studied up on the inner workings of the Cleveland city council and the Ohio legislature and on the quotidian operations of state-level campaigns. They subscribed to state-politics newsletters, figured out who their state representatives were, and began researching those lawmakers’ past votes. Over the past three years, the group has grown to 150 members. They’ve channeled their energies toward fundraising and door-knocking for candidates, and they’ve given themselves hand cramps writing hundreds upon hundreds of get-out-the-vote postcards.
GRR was one of roughly 2,500 women-led groups that whirred into action following the 2016 election, according to Skocpol’s research. Many of these women live in the suburbs of major cities, places that have traditionally been Republican but are rapidly turning blue as college-educated white women grow more and more repulsed by Trump and as neighborhoods become more and more diverse. Some are former Republicans, while others were simply inactive Democrats, as Shaw was. These so-called Resistance groups are always somewhere between 75 and 100 percent women, and they generally operate independently of national bodies. Many of the women in these groups are middle- and upper-middle-class, well educated, and used to running or working on teams and planning big events. The level of organization this work requires, Skocpol says, is already something they’re good at.
Some on the political left have dismissed these women, many of them white, as “wine moms” or “MSNBC moms”—silly, unprincipled newcomers to the political scene who are more interested in watching Rachel Maddow with a glass of pinot in hand than agitating for systemic change.
What the critics may be missing, though, is the scope of these women’s influence—and their role in strengthening the Democratic Party’s infrastructure. Despite the fact that most Democrats are concentrated in urban areas, Resistance groups have sprung up all over the country, from the Arizona desert to rural Pennsylvania.
Americans’ civic involvement declined massively from the 1960s to the 2000s; there was a kind of “falling-away of regularly meeting groups,” as Skocpol put it. That loss has been felt by both political parties, but especially by Democrats, as their membership in two key groups has declined. Liberals no longer attend church or join local labor unions at the rates they once did, depriving them of crucial forums for community and political engagement. This means that today’s widespread, women-led activism represents a fundamental shift in American politics, says Lara Putnam, a history professor at the University of Pittsburgh who has studied the anti-Trump movement.
They’re registering voters, raising money, and establishing formal databases of volunteers. They’re boosting federal candidates and learning how to run—and win—state political campaigns. “They went to be troops fighting this battle for democracy and found no one there,” Putnam told me. “So they basically rebuilt those structures.”
If Trump leaves office, it stands to reason that at least some of their motivation may disappear right along with him. A Biden presidency could mean a chance to relax, to take some time off, to bond as friends rather than as political warriors. “They may maintain an interest in politics that is much higher than it was previously,” Jessica Trounstine, a professor at UC Merced who focuses on local politics, told me. “But they’re gonna have a limited amount of energy they’re gonna put toward [it].”
Organizations working to channel suburban women’s political power are already worried about a potential slump. Katie Paris, the founder of Red Wine and Blue and the former CEO of the left-wing media company Shareblue, believes the path to turning both Ohio and the rest of the country Democratic runs through these women’s neighborhoods.
The GOP has, on average, a three-point turnout advantage over Democrats in midterm elections, according to FiveThirtyEight, and Democrats were dominated by Republicans in the 2010 and 2014 midterms. In 2018, that changed: The work of these Resistance groups contributed to the highest turnout for a nonpresidential election in U.S. history, and helped deliver the House majority to Democrats. But the party can’t assume that 2018 is the new normal. It’s possible—even likely—that in 2022, Democrats, under a President Biden, would return to their pre-Trump voting levels.
Many of the GRR members I spoke with, including Shaw, are adamant that there’s no turning back. After all, they’ve already done the hard part. “People have developed the networks, the skills, the tools to do this work,” said Nora Kelley, a 44-year-old lawyer and a leader in the group. “The faucet’s on, and it’s not getting turned off.”
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