Organizers demand a ‘Wednesday agenda’ after Democrats’ midterm wins
The bright blue map that emerged on election night was unthinkable two years ago, when Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election and many Democratic voters were left fatigued by the scale of the loss. The mood shifted over the following two years, and on Tuesday Democrats flipped five governors’ seats and took control of the House and Senate by wide margins. Voters were angry about the rising cost of living, the war in Iran, masked immigration agents in their neighborhoods and datacenters rising in their backyards. Organizers said anger alone did not boost turnout; years of building coalitions, developing local campaigns and expanding movement infrastructure turned frustration into organized action, and eventually votes.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an African American studies professor at Princeton University and the author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, said elections are a means rather than an end. “Elections themselves don’t achieve what it is that people want,” she said. “They set the table for the possibility of change.”
The national No Kings protests have been among the most visible actions of the second Trump administration. The coalition, made up of dozens of groups and partner organizations, emerged in the middle of 2025 as intentionally leaderless and decentralized, with marches designed as a container for grievances ranging from gas prices and federal workforce cuts to war. The marches gave an entry point to people new to activism, and the coalition is regrouping after the midterms. Ezra Levin, co-founder of Indivisible, which helps power No Kings, said, “One thing is clear: the work of protecting our democracy doesn’t begin or end with this election.”
Jamila Raqib, executive director of the Albert Einstein Institution, which studies nonviolent action, said drawing attention to injustice is not enough. “People are more engaged than ever before,” she said. “They’re taking action in response to the crises we face, but they’re less often achieving concrete objectives.” Movements need to adapt tactics to keep up with authoritarian governments, she said. Many governments have learned that brutal crackdowns on nonviolent action tend to backfire, so they rely on “smart repression” — selective arrests, legal harassment, surveillance, disinformation, funding restrictions and job losses — to wait movements out. Movements must map the “pillars of support” any government depends on, including courts, businesses, media and religious institutions, then decide which to win over, weaken or replace, she said. Preparing for that pressure also means organizing within workplaces, government agencies, businesses and congregations — where an opponent’s support actually lives — treating digital security as a basic organizing skill, planning for the arrest of key leaders and training successors before a crackdown comes, Raqib said. Mutual-aid networks, community defense groups and independent media can sustain a movement through a long fight as well. “Not everyone has to march in the streets,” Raqib said.
Several of those ideas appeared in Minnesota in January. A general strike, sit-ins at corporate headquarters and pressure on employers to speak out weakened Trump’s Operation Metro Surge in ways a single march could not, the account in The Guardian said. After federal agents killed two US citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, tens of thousands of people marched in subzero cold under the banner “No Work, No School, No Shopping”, and Trump ended the operation the following month. Doran Schrantz, a longtime Minnesota organizer who founded the Organizing Lab, said the response rested on years of labor, faith and community organizing: thousands had trained as legal observers starting in January 2025 through immigrant rights groups including Unidos and the Immigrant Defense Network, groups such as Defend the 612 built a rapid-response system to observe and document ICE agents, and the Ice Out Now coalition linked the groups on the ground.
The fight over datacenters has united Americans across party lines, showing what is possible when resistance is local and the demands are clear. “There is an authentic local response to these datacenters,” Schrantz said, adding that people felt they had agency over it: “It’s concrete: ‘I can stop that datacenter.’” The coalitions included environmental groups, farmers, retirees, school parents and “Maga moms”, Schrantz said. Residents packed council and county commission meetings, filed public records requests and gathered signatures for moratoriums and referendums. The demands were clear enough to fit on a petition: pause construction until impacts are studied, make developers pay the full cost of grid upgrades instead of passing it on to taxpayers, end tax breaks for the projects and give communities a vote before anything gets built. On election day, voters weighed in on 41 datacenter measures in 10 states and sided against the industry in all but a single measure.
Executing the demand that people have rallied around as “ICE out” has proven more complicated. Still, organizers have remained steadfast to get justice for people killed by ICE and to pass legislative measures that would get officers off the street. Three days after the Texas governor-elect, Gina Hinojosa, claimed victory on election day, Houston mayor John Whitmire signed an executive order barring police from contacting ICE during vehicle stops when the drivers aren’t arrested, even if they have immigration warrants. Whitmire’s order mirrors the ordinance activists first advocated for last year. Empowered by Republican governor Greg Abbott soon leaving office, three council members have filed a measure to write it into city law, said Jasmine Khadem González, co-chair of the Houston Democratic Socialists of America. “We’ve been going and having meetings with city council members, telling them, teaching them about the local police collaboration with ICE,” said Khadem González, who said it took months of pressure — and the fatal ICE shooting of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican immigrant who had lived in Houston for nearly 35 years, during a traffic stop — before city leaders publicly admitted the collaboration was happening. Organizers canvassed businesses, helped them make safety plans for workplace raids, posting “employees only” and “ICE is not welcome here” signs, met with faith leaders and held community teach-ins on how Houston police were delivering people to ICE, often through traffic stops. The Harris county district attorney is now taking the Salgado Araujo case to a grand jury. “We can prosecute every single ICE agent who murdered people on our streets,” Khadem González said, “and so I’m excited to see some justice come to that family.”
Khadem González’s demands reach beyond Houston: she wants the new Democratic majorities in the state to repeal SB4, the Texas law that bans sanctuary cities, and to end police collaboration with ICE statewide. “Now that Democrats are in power, we have to show what good governance looks like,” she said. The point applies nationally. Movements need to keep putting pressure on Democrats, newly elected or otherwise, to get their demands met, organizers said.
Taylor, of Princeton, warned that celebration cannot be the endpoint. “Everyone who is connected to an organizing project, to organization politics, must have a Wednesday agenda,” she said, noting the need to keep pushing after Tuesday’s election. “What are we doing now to push the political representatives who solicited our votes?” Only sustained pressure will move anything, she said, and no elected official is off-limits.
The DSA has a slate of priorities it wants its affiliated candidates to push through: an arms embargo on Israel; an end to foreign wars and to sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela and Iran; Medicare for All; abolishing ICE. The organization said its five nationally endorsed candidates, from Melat Kiros in Colorado to Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania, will represent the largest bloc of democratic socialist candidates in Congress in the nation’s history.
Katrina Gamble, a political scientist turned social impact strategist at Sojourn Strategies, said the results show what organizing can do. “This election is a reminder that the electorate is not fixed and that organizing and investment can transform what’s possible,” she said. In Mississippi, where Democrats flipped a Senate seat and elected the state’s first Black senator since Reconstruction, Black voters made up 3% more of the electorate than they did in 2024, and nearly 21% of the state’s voters in this election didn’t vote in 2024. Gamble also warned that “these wins are fragile”: the work now is to keep engaging people and ensure electeds deliver on what they promised voters.
“It can’t just be that the blue wave comes and we’ve done our jobs,” Taylor said. “The blue wave is just the beginning.”