For those in the “acceptance” phase of the eight stages of grief over the 2024 election, reality has set in: Donald Trump will get most of what he wants through a GOP Congress. Worse, there doesn’t seem to be much of a plan—or even, really, an appetite—among Democrats to offer up much of a fight, the way Republicans unerringly do when Democratic presidents come to power.
Outside of a few members who seem to want to actually participate in the membership of an opposition party, most Democratic electeds seem depressingly willing to roll over. Senators like John Fetterman seem poised to roll out the red carpet to Trump’s more controversial nominees, like the Dr. Oz he once deemed to be unfit for office to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. House members like Representative Jared Moskowitz have bounded like frisky little puppies toward the Marjorie Taylor Greene–chaired caucus that will make deep cuts to crucial federal spending, guided by huckster billionaire Elon Musk and his GOP hanger-on helpmate Vivek Ramaswamy.
Outside of Washington, while some governors are showing more spine, others, like Governor Jared Polis of Colorado, have frustrated Democratic voters by expressing outright enthusiasm for the nomination of anti-vaccine conspiracy crank Robert Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.
The lame-duck period has been a doom loop of negative energy. Left-of-center Americans seem to be out of energy for mass protest and have looked to high-level Democrats to take on the fight. Those Democrats elected, especially in swing areas, see little protest from the base and figure the safest political path forward is working with the new administration. This depresses the base even further, and so on we go, cycling toward the drain.
It’s a deflating reality for those who believe Democrats should act as a unified bulwark against Trump’s actions—or at least raise a competent debate over worthier alternatives. Yet, the need to cripple his administration’s grotesque ambitions remains whether Capitol Hill’s Democrats are up for the task or not—especially considering that the new, revenge-minded regime seems so flamboyantly fascistic. But regardless of whether the party’s elites get their act in gear or stew helplessly in their own flop sweat, it’s time for anyone who wants to be part of the loyal opposition to start looking much closer to home.
When I worked for Congressman Jerry Nadler, he had a penchant for telling us old stories from his political upbringing in the 1960s that stuck with all the staff because they were humorously parochial. Why should I want to learn as much about the 1969 Democratic district leader races on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as I had been taught about the Civil War? There’s no answer to that except that Jerry was one of the great kibitzers, and his go-to was old Manhattan political war stories.
Looking at the unwillingness of many Democrats to oppose all things Trump, I was reminded of another one of the Congressman’s great stories—that of the West Side Kids. In the mid- to late ’60s, Jerry, along with Dick Morris (yes, that Dick Morris) and Dick Gottfried (who went on to become a longtime New York State Assembly member), led a group of hundreds of high school and college students opposed to the war in Vietnam and Lyndon Johnson getting another term as president.
While the Kids cared about bigger issues and who would determine the country’s path forward from D.C., they spent much of their time and energy focused on the local level, as a means to grow their strength and build upward political pressure. As Representative Nadler recently reminded me, the Kids were initially organized in 1965, before he entered his freshman year at Columbia. The focus was not on Vietnam but on pushing local reform candidates against the “regulars.”
They used their relatively small numbers to exert influence at local Democratic clubs—neighborhood-based organizations of Democratic activists that can make or break a candidate’s chances of winning a primary. They methodically worked to control small election districts. A year later, the Kids had amassed enough power to help give establishment Congressman Leonard Farbstein the scare of his political life when he almost lost his seat in a primary to reformist candidate Ted Weiss (Weiss would later go on to win that seat in 1976, following Bella Abzug, who knocked out Farbstein in 1970).
That focus on the hyperlocal was absolutely critical to the influence they amassed. By the time the war became an issue, the Kids demanded that every elected official at every level vocally oppose it for their support. Nadler told me nobody running for the state legislature or other statewide office could get their support without opposing the war.
“Anyone running for dogcatcher, if they wanted our support, they’d oppose the war in Vietnam; we didn’t really care what their position on dogs was,” he likes to joke.
Even as their influence grew, the Kids didn’t stop looking locally to build their power and influence. “We formed tenant associations, we started block associations, we painted park benches. All of this was building up cache,” says Nadler. “We had a recycling drive—this was a new concept—to show people how you could recycle.”
Gottfried, who retired from the New York State Assembly in 2022, concurs: Focusing on local organizing can have an outsize influence on lower-level elected officials.
“City and state elected officials are, in most cases, more sensitive to what they hear locally, and what they see locally,” Gottfried says. “Twenty people in a city council district are a much bigger factor than 20 people in a congressional district or a whole state.”
Gottfried added that this is something Republicans have recognized for decades, but which Democrats and progressives too often ignore.
“Right-wing Republicans, as far back as around the 1960s, were focusing on local public offices and local party positions very quietly, taking over school boards and taking over local Republican Party committees,” he noted to me. “To this day, you see right-wing groups taking over school boards and library boards and getting people elected dogcatchers and gradually working their way up the chain to controlling state government, state courts, state political parties, and capturing control of the national political party. Progressives have not done much of that.”
Naturally, New York is a different political beast than the rest of the country. You’re unlikely to see the same impassioned fights over adding a traffic circle in Mankato, Minnesota, as you might if you attend a meeting of the Village Independent Democrats in Manhattan. However, every area of the country has town councils, school boards, state representatives, and state senators—and, as Gottfried notes, they are all sensitive to the pressure that comes when committed locals start turning the screws and agitating for change.
In the same way that Nadler, Gottfried, and the Kids demanded every candidate, for every local party position and office, stand in united opposition to the Vietnam War, today’s activists must make opposing Trump and Trumpism a litmus test for support at every level of party politics and government. At first blush, it may seem illogical. What’s a local school board member supposed to do about big national policies beyond their remit?
It’s all about digging deep wells of political pressure, and getting that energy to start flowing upward and outward. After all, the school board member who wins the support of activists and voters for being outspoken in opposition to Trump today will get the attention of the city councilperson of the same party who’s worried about winning a primary. They will feel the political pressure to do the same. That city councilman, now gaining the support of the base, might be a challenger for Congress tomorrow. That will force that incumbent Congress member to get with the program to fend off their own primary challenge. And who knows? They may be a challenger for the Senate tomorrow. Now, all of a sudden, the incumbent senator has to take notice. In this way, a few well-played notes way down-ticket lead to a louder orchestration playing over the landscape.
Needless to say, it takes a hell of a lot less energy and money to get a school board member on your side than it does to try to jump right into a Senate race to try to influence its outcome. Activists can more thoroughly control the conversation in the public square by systematically bringing elected officials to their side, starting at the local level. It also takes much less money and energy to defeat lower-level candidates who don’t play ball and send a message to those higher up.
It is the best path to steeling the spines of Democrats at the national level to stand up to Donald Trump, instead of bending towards him. However, it also allows progressives to push for states to undertake policies that offer a positive alternative vision to voters for where the country could go under Democrats and vesting that vision in politicians who will also have the chance to deliver the goods locally—in this way investing forward-looking ambitions in local politicos who will have the opportunity to establish a solid reputation of trustworthy governance built on the daily task of coming through for ordinary people. This combination will be crucial in convincing voters to look to Democrats again in 2026 and 2028.
“Given the brick wall that we’re going to be hitting at the national level, states are really going to have to step up,” Gottfried says. He noted that many of the big national programs we take for granted today were first conjured at the state level—New York, for example, established the first public education system in the 1700s. The Children’s Health Insurance Program was pioneered as a Minnesota state program in the 1980s. Gottfried believes now is the time for activists in New York to push for single-payer health care at the state level, to show America what they could have instead of Trump dismantling Obamacare, Medicare, and Medicaid.
In 1968, the Kids took all they learned from organizing in Manhattan and the cache they had built and began flooding New Hampshire with New Yorkers working for antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy. Nadler and Gottfried remember leading massive leafleting and door-knocking efforts to find and pull out voters from across the entire state.
Lyndon Johnson won the popular vote in that primary, but McCarthy caused a political earthquake, taking 42 percent of the vote against the incumbent president. Four days later, and just three years after the West Side Kids first started organizing, New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy entered the race, having seen what McCarthy had managed to do. Johnson went on national television days after that to say he would not run for another term. With Johnson out and Kennedy in, those local politicians that the Kids had worked so hard to affect swiftly moved to back Kennedy, also an antiwar candidate.
From taking over election districts in Manhattan to eventually participating in the effort that overthrew a president, the Kids can be a model for today’s activists. The path to energizing opposition to Trump, pushing for more vociferous and unified defiance from Democrats, and offering a bold alternative starts small, it starts at home, and—who knows?—it could start with you. Candidates for dogcatcher, beware.
