The protagonists of the trends we report on are mainly college-educated suburban white women. We tell their stories not because college-educated white women are the most Democratic slice of the electorate (they aren’t) or because they are the most progressive voices within the Democratic Party (they aren’t) or because they have a special claim to lead the left moving forward (they don’t: nor do they pretend to). Rather, what we report here is that it is among these college-educated, middle-aged women in the suburbs that political practices have most changed under Trump. If your question is how the panorama of political possibility has shifted since November 2016, your story needs to begin here.
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The fact that professional women from mid-life to early retirement years comprise the strong majority of new leaders and activists means that even those with no prior experience in political organizing have lifetimes of experience in working for change within existing systems. In contrast to some of the voices the media have embraced as national spokespersons of the “Resistance,” the actual grassroots are pervasively pragmatic. These are individuals who have honed their skills in the “slow boring of hard boards,” to use Max Weber’s definition of politics, over years of professional and community life—and are now bringing those skills to bear full-strength on local political action.
Democratic Party officials seem notably less sophisticated about how organizing works. Nancy Reynolds, the retired librarian, worked throughout the fall of 2017 with a tight network of women (their partnership forged on a chartered bus to the January 2017 Women’s March) to coordinate phone canvassing and door-knocking across Hampton Township. They elected three Democrats to a five-person township council that had been all-Republican as long as anyone could remember. As Reynolds tried to explain to a party strategist aggrieved that the party’s online calling tools went unused, “My friends won’t make calls for you. They’ll make calls for me.” In this exchange, as in many others we have witnessed, we’ve seen to what extent the ones needing education in political organizing are actually the nominal political professionals. The “amateurs” already get it.
