How to Convert Protesters into Real Political Power

We can do so much more than march and vote.

May 02, 2026

Join me in visualizing what it would look like to channel individuals who attend rallies and mass demonstrations into groups that allow them to explore and build their personal political capacity and how this would create the kind of power we can’t get from just voting and demonstrating AND generate the sense of community belonging that many of us seek.

Photo by Antonia Scatton, Seattle, May 1, 2026

Imagine

Since the #NoKings rally on March 28, I have been grappling with the question of how to convert all this human potential into real political power. Some of you may know that, in addition to studying framing and working in political communications, I have spent the bulk of my life working on campaigns in the field. My mission has been to figure out how to defeat the power of money in politics by harnessing the incredible potential of real people in communities. I have learned a ton from the many local groups and volunteers with whom I have had the honor of working. In a later newsletter, I will talk more about how to actually do it and why it will work. Hint: it doesn’t depend on any particular technology or the support of any particular organization. It’s something we can just do. For now, I would just like you to imagine…

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The People

Meet Bob. For the first time in his life, Bob decided to do something political. He went to a #NoKings rally in his suburb and got really inspired. Someone made an announcement that if people wanted to learn about more opportunities to make a difference, they should scan the QR code that appears on many of the signs at the rally. Bob scans the code which takes him to something that looks like the homepage of a private “Reddit” style chat community. Bob finds and joins the chat group for people in his own real-world neighborhood. In this group, Bob sees a notice for a get together the next Friday at a local pub. He decides to go and bring his wife, Carol.

Bob also sees a list of activities and interests, and is surprised to find that “cooking” is one of the options. Bob never dreamed that he could help get people elected just by cooking. Bob has secretly dreamed of quitting his programming job and opening a catering business. He joins the local “kitchen club working group” that helps provide food, from catering fundraisers, to feeding volunteers, to making food for big community events. He jumps in with both feet, knowing that he can pick and choose which candidate or cause he wants to cook for. Bob also dives into the platform’s cooking activity wiki, where cooking groups all over the country collect and share favorite recipes and compile best practices about how to start and run a cooking group.

Bob’s wife Carol is an accountant. She goes with Bob to the local get-together, meets some new folks and sees someone she knows casually through her kid’s school. They bond over their horror of the local “Moms for Liberty” group. Carol joins the “neighborhood” and finds that there is a working group for accountants, which she joins. She decides to learn the fundamentals of campaign finance and FEC filing, and is able to draw on more experienced members of the national accounting working group for guidance.

Bob and Carol explore the neighborhood platform and find that each group is networked with other groups who, collectively, can manage pretty big campaign projects. Bob finds that the cooking group often coordinates with groups that do different aspects of event planning: from location scouting to audio-visual set up, entertainment, decorating, crowd-building, and so on.

The Campaigns

The MAGA candidate, let’s call him “Smith,” spends all his time asking wealthy people for money. His campaign is like a plane that takes off from DC, carpet bombs his district with digital ads, text messages and attack mail, and flies back to DC without ever once touching the ground.

Our candidate, let’s call her “Jones” has been active in the community for years. She sees growing voter backlash against the super-rich and how they have killed off the American Dream. She knows she can no longer appease the donors and please the voters. She has to choose which side she is on. She has come to realize that all the money in the world can’t buy her the kind of high-value person-to-person outreach that these volunteers can. She decides to walk away from big-donor support, putting her faith in the local neighbor network instead.

Carol’s campaign finance group and others sign up, helping to reduce Jones’ campaign costs by providing professional services she would otherwise have to pay for. Bob and the events network organize community barbecues across the district so Thompson can meet voters face-to-face. Other volunteers introduce and vouch for Jones to their fellow members of social clubs, parents’ associations, sororities, and soccer teams. She benefits from those long-term relationships and volunteers’ knowledge of the unique ways information travels through their communities. There is also a visibility group that purchases lawn signs at cost and already has a list of willing households along high visibility streets. People wear their campaign tees and tote bags (silk screened by the local high-school campaign club) as they pick their kids up from school, spreading that word of mouth even further.

Jones knows she can depend on these neighbors, some of whom have decades of volunteer or even professional experience. The canvassing, calling, postcard writing and letter-to-the-editor groups operate year-round on behalf of various local issues. Now they turn their efforts toward Jones’ campaign. They don’t need to pay for the VAN: their data is way better. Since they have been contacting people regularly, the data in their database (managed in FileMaker by the volunteer data club) is squeaky clean. They pretty much know where everybody stands politically including who can be persuaded, and the people doing the voter contact are people those voters already know and trust.

Candidate Jones does need to raise money to support these local volunteer-driven efforts and pay for other campaign expenses, but she finds that she can do this relatively easily through low-dollar donors because people are now excited by and personally vested in her campaign. Plus she’s not wasting her money on useless polls or tactics (like attack ads) that the data says don’t work. Freed from the requirement to spend eight hours a day on “call time,” Jones spends most of her time talking to voters face to face (which happens to be the single most effective tool for voter persuasion.) She often films these encounters for her prolific video campaign, run by volunteers with video production, social media and marketing skills, and distributed by the neighborhood social media amplification network. Many of those videos are real conversations with voters about what kind of government we would have if the people in it really represented the values and priorities of the people in the district.

Without all the pressure from powerful donors, Jones is free to be herself, speak her mind, and provide the positive vision people are hungry for. Her opponent is filling the internet with negative slop, but in the real world, he barely exists. Meanwhile, between her personal appearances, videos with local people in recognizable places, and saturation-level visibility, her campaign feels incredibly real, present and alive. By election day, every voter has either been told about her by someone they know, seen her speak live, met her personally, or all of the above.

She wins her election despite being outspent by millions, and sees the volunteer network, not as a tool she owns, but as a community that she both belongs to and owes her election to. Now she is in office, and with their ongoing help, they can generate the political will to pass policies that deliver what the community needs.

Meanwhile, Bob and Carol have become, well, happy. They have fun. They have made friends. Their kids even occasionally join them in family-friendly volunteer activities. They have become part of a real-world community of people who share their values. They have each found a role in that community in which their personal skills are valued and contribute toward something meaningful. Best of all, they no longer go to bed every night feeling isolated and powerless over everything they see happening in the world. They used to just vote, but now they know the satisfaction that comes from learning how to exercise the power that each of us has within us.