Building group power to push back against Trump 2.0

Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin on what he's learned from the 2024 election, and the challenge of organizing to fight a second Trump administration

Ezra Levin is an activist, organizer, and the co-founder and co-executive director of Indivisible, the network that grew out of a viral Google Doc (since greatly expanded) that taught readers the organizational skills necessary to push back against the policies of the first Trump administration and inspired them to launch the thousands of local groups that have since coalesced into the larger Indivisible movement.

We’ve been reaching out to some of the smartest, most thoughtful people we know to talk about how the 2024 election has upended their assumptions about American political life. We asked Levin to talk about how his expectations have been challenged, the lessons he’s learned since 2016 that might apply in the fight against the second Trump administration, and why, even under the most daunting circumstances, people shouldn’t abandon hope and do the fascists’ work for them — and why, working together in solidarity, they still have the power to make political change. And they can be joyful doing it.

Want to get involved? Sign up to join Indivisible’s nationwide strategy call tonight, Wednesday, November 13, at 8:30 p.m. Eastern. And make sure to visit Indivisible to find a group in your neighborhood.

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A lot of people have done postmortems already. You've already posted something to that effect. But we’re asking people to look at what happened, throw out their priors, rethink their presuppositions, and start planning out how to move on. My question to you is, has this election challenged your vision of politics, or of America? And if so, what have you come away with? 

I was wrong. I thought we were going to win. I thought we were going to reject Trump and MAGA across the board based on the energy that I was seeing on the ground and even based on some of the data that we're seeing from the GOTV operation and even some of the polls, it looked like we were building the momentum to overcome the global trend of post-Covid, post-inflation backlash.

So first of all, I start with a fair amount of humility and curiosity because I got it wrong. And I don't want to drink Kool-Aid on this. I want to understand exactly what we could have done better and what exactly we were missing because clearly, we did miss. That said, I do think there can be a rush to respond to a loss like this with a conclusion of, "Oh, nothing we did mattered. We lost because elections are binary and you either win or you lose. And if you lost, therefore, your efforts didn't matter.

So the data that we currently have looks like there was somewhere between a six to eight-point shift nationwide in Trump's direction, which is just an enormous shift. But when you look at the battleground states, there was something like a one-to-four-point shift, depending on the state. What that tells me is the clown show of a campaign and GOTV operation that Trump and team ran compared to the kind of stellar textbook GOTV operation that we ran did indeed matter because the shift wasn't as bad in battleground states.

Though that wasn't enough to overcome Trump’s appeal, or the global phenomenon of incumbents facing major backlash. I don't mean to suggest that as an out. That was just the challenge.