From “No Kings” to “A Fair Shot”
The fight to defend democracy will succeed only if it is rooted in the everyday economic realities that drive people’s disillusionment with politics in the first place.
The recent No Kings protests lacked meaningful ideological and demographic diversity to such an extent that they may also cut against Democrats’ efforts to rebuild their party brand among independent and low-frequency voters. (Amy Lemus / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Mutual recriminations abound between those who think now is the time for Democrats to focus on rebuilding trust with working-class voters to put the party in the most advantageous electoral position for 2026, and those who think it’s naive to believe we’re still living in a time of normal politics and that the only way to stop authoritarianism is building a movement outside of formal politics to apply maximal pressure against the Trump administration.
There is clearly truth in both arguments. On the one hand, if Democrats retake at least the House of Representatives in 2026, they would have substantial power to block new legislation proposed by Trump and his congressional allies, restrict or condition appropriations for key elements of his agenda, and use their oversight authority to scrutinize the administration’s most controversial actions. They could also leverage control over spending bills to force compromises on major policy priorities or risk another government shutdown.
Yet there are clear limits to what an electoral strategy alone can accomplish. Even if Democrats regain control of the House, structural barriers like Republican gerrymandering will continue to skew representation and make winning and sustaining a Democratic majority difficult. There is also the very real threat that many Republican officials will refuse to accept the results of a free and fair election in 2026, regardless of Democrats’ objective performance. Finally, the increasingly concentrated power of the executive branch — particularly under a president willing to test constitutional boundaries — means that control of one chamber of Congress may only partially constrain Trump’s actions, leaving significant areas of policy and enforcement beyond legislative reach.
On the other hand, a huge body of evidence from countries around the world points to the value of protest in strengthening opposition to authoritarian leaders. In some cases, protests generate mass opposition that forces authoritarian leaders out of office. In other cases, protest plays a critical role in raising public awareness of the government’s authoritarian excesses. Protest can also slow the pace of institutional capture and raise the cost of silence among elites and can be effective in inducing elite splits and defections that weaken the strength and unity of the governing coalition.
Protest and sustained mobilization have real potential to impact the degree and speed of authoritarian backsliding we experience over the coming years in the United States. Demonstrations, town halls, and other visible opposition — especially in electorally competitive areas and targeted at the 5–10 percent who now regret voting for the president in 2024 — can heighten politicians’ perception of the political risk associated with acquiescence or silence around Trump’s more egregious violations of democratic norms and civil rights. Large, nonviolent actions can also elevate the political salience of Trump’s authoritarian maneuvering and hopefully push concern over authoritarian backsliding up the list of issues that Americans prioritize as the most pressing issues we face as a country.
But while protests have a key role to play in constraining authoritarian governance, the current wave of anti-Trump protests — embodied in the recent four-to-six-million-strong “No Kings” protests — they also have the potential to undermine the other key pillar of opposition to Trump: winning elections.
To be sure, the protests exhibited a range of characteristics that scholars of protest have found to be associated with increased support among the general public. For one, they were quite large and geographically diffuse, indicating to the nonparticipating public that the protests represent a substantial segment of the United States. Next, despite the sometimes diffuse specific causes represented by the protesters, the protest message was generally clear and unified around Trump’s authoritarian excesses and the threat his administration poses to American democracy. And finally, with some clear exceptions, the protesters’ messaging was framed in terms that most Americans could find relatable: patriotism, defending our basic rights and liberties, and so on, and were, as far as I have seen, completely nonviolent.
Hooked on Opposing
Yet at the same time, the protests lacked meaningful ideological and demographic diversity to such an extent that they may also cut against Democrats’ efforts to rebuild their party brand among independent and low-frequency voters. According to a team of researchers from American University who have been surveying protesters, 88 percent of participants at the Washington, DC, No Kings rally had a BA or more, and 86 percent were white (in a city where around 65 percent of residents have a college degree and less than 40 percent are white). And while I couldn’t find any exact numbers for the partisanship of the protesters, the overwhelming majority were clearly Democrats motivated by partisan opposition to Trump. So when President Trump claimed the protests weren’t representative of the country, he wasn’t wrong.
To some degree, it’s unfair of course to fault a protest movement against Trump for being full of Democrats who hate Trump, especially since previous scholarship has found that even highly partisan protests have the potential to boost electoral participation among movement supporters.
That said, to the extent that the movement plays into the same out-of-touch elitist liberal narratives that have helped to push so many working-class voters away from the Democrats, it may actually do further damage to the party’s already heavily tarnished brand among the disillusioned Trump voters, swing voters, and infrequent voters they can’t afford to do without in 2026. Beyond the movement’s clear class and liberal bias, even the broad focus around “No Kings” and Trump’s unfitness for office perpetuate the broad “Resistance” narrative that puts attacking Trump at the center of all Democrats do and say and sends a message to ordinary, nonpoliticized Americans that the party isn’t focused on the bread-and-butter issues they care about most. While it’s possible that a laser-focus on Trump’s authoritarian excesses could help sway voters in places like Virginia, where the effects of Trump’s mass layoffs of government employees are particularly visible, even some veteran progressive strategists concede that simply attacking Trump isn’t enough.
“I worry that Donald Trump is like crack cocaine for our party,” pollster Celinda Lake told the New York Times. Focusing too much on Trump, she contends, means that Democrats fail to do the critical work of rebuilding their own much-damaged reputation among the electorate: “The biggest thing the Democrats need to do is not the negative but the positive. We have to offer an alternative,” she said.
This all puts progressives in a bind: they must find a way to continue building a robust movement against authoritarian backsliding while also rehabilitating the Democrats’ image. How can this be done in a way that ensures these twin goals complement rather than undermine each other?
Beyond Resistance
In short, by building a broad, cross-partisan coalition that injects the economic concerns that persuadable voters have about Trump’s failures to deliver into the heart of opposition framing. It’s very hard to get most working-class voters who are tuned out of politics and utterly disillusioned with the Democratic Party to pay much attention to Trump’s attacks on democratic institutions and basic norms when they have so little faith in government in the first place — not to mention when they’re working two or three jobs and trying to raise a family.
This is why, if opposition to Trump is going to get any traction beyond the already converted, it must, to borrow a phrase from an ongoing campaign spearheaded by the Rural-Urban Bridge Initiative (RUBI), go “beyond resistance.” This means centering both the very real economic harms the Trump administration is inflicting on working Americans, as well as a bold economic populist agenda that will put working people first and offer a path to the middle class for every family.
RUBI’s Beyond Resistance campaign, which kicked off on September 10 with a meeting of over four hundred participants from grassroots organizations across the country and was headlined by Rep. Ro Khanna, has held over a dozen events in the past month with more planned for November and December.
The campaign offers a compelling framework for how this can be achieved, focusing on a “Rural New Deal” made up of practical, commonsense solutions for rebuilding working-class communities that have been hollowed out thanks to decades of bad policies and neglect by both parties. This last part is critical: calling out Trump’s snake-oil sales pitches to the working class is vital, but to show it’s a cross-partisan, populist movement focused more on working people than partisan bickering, the movement must also call out Democrats for losing their bearings as the party of the working class.
Perhaps an even better frame for the broad campaign to defend working families against Trump’s relentless onslaught would decenter resistance altogether and focus on a vision for a better future for all that neither Trump nor the Democrats have delivered. Instead of “No Kings,” how about “A Fair Shot” for all Americans?
A Fair Shot
The essential factor that explains why we’re on the brink of authoritarianism is because many Americans lost faith that their lives would be better than those of their parents, that they had a fair shot at the American dream and a middle-class life — not to mention a fair shot at living their lives free from arbitrary and unlawful violations of their basic civil rights. After decades of hollow promises, people got fed up and opted for a Hail Mary pass in the form of a system disruptor who claimed to feel their pain and bring back manufacturing jobs.
But that’s not what happened. Workers aren’t getting a fair shot when Trump’s tariff chaos and factory pullbacks stall hiring and push up prices. He even said he “couldn’t care less” if car prices rose. Immigrant families aren’t getting a fair shot when ICE worksite raids tear through small businesses, detaining hundreds and spreading fear in communities that keep local economies running. Farmers aren’t getting a fair shot when promised support vanishes and markets dry up, forcing many to sell off crops or scrap renewable energy upgrades they already paid for. And small business owners aren’t getting a fair shot when Trump’s trade wars drive up costs, cut sales, and leave hometown shops and producers struggling to stay open.
Everyone deserves a fair shot in America, but neither Democrats nor Republicans have delivered. That message resonates across the political spectrum and is much more likely to help diversify the ideological and class ranks of No Kings than putting Trump’s attacks on democracy front and center. Not only that, but it can help to turn opposition protest into a complementary tool rather than a necessary but politically risky gambit that may inadvertently help to strengthen Republicans’ chances in 2026.
Finally, while it is essential to infuse economic grievances against Trump into every chapter of the opposition playbook, the electoral front also needs a healthy injection of nonelectoral, grassroots organizing if progressives hope to make inroads in the small-town and rural communities where both Democratic voters and Democratic-linked civil society organizations have all but disappeared. Injecting grassroots base-building into electoral strategy means investing billions of dollars and countless hours into rebuilding durable, year-round progressive civic infrastructure in every corner of the country.
Projects like RUBI’s Community Works — which trains local organizers, connects rural leaders across regions, and helps communities tackle concrete problems from broadband access to worker rights — offer a model for how this can be done effectively. By rooting progressive politics in the daily struggles and capacities of small towns, efforts like these begin to rebuild the trust and relationships that can eventually translate into electoral strength.
Ultimately, for those who wish to halt Trump’s march, building a mass movement against authoritarianism and Democrats winning the 2026 midterms do not need to be understood as opposing goals, or even as being in tension with each other. Infusing one with the other only strengthens both. The fight to defend democracy will succeed only if it is rooted in the everyday economic realities that drive people’s disillusionment with politics in the first place. Democrats need a clear, credible vision that speaks to those realities — a vision centered on guaranteeing every American a fair shot.