What Now? Creating a Civic Infrastructure of 100,000 Local Elected Officials

I am still reeling from the results of the 2024 election. It was far worse than I could have imagined. There is so much I don’t pretend to understand about why Donald Trump was elected. While numbers can be viewed in countless ways, here are a few ways to look at who voted for Trump. Some sample numbers: Trump won 47 percent of voters ages 18 to 29, 53 percent of White women of all ages, 43 percent of all voters with a college degree, and 35 percent of all urban voters.

I’ve been on several calls with activist leaders, and honestly, no one has a clue. I am sure there will be many books written, papers published, conferences convened, and theories put forth.

But you know what the labor activist and songwriter Joe Hill said, just before his execution in Utah in 1915, “Don’t waste any time mourning. Organize!”

A Basic Theory of Political Action

When it comes to effective organizing, I have a unified theory of civics that looks something like this: Message leads to Members leads to Money leads to Means.

That is, people become politically engaged by first hearing a message that resonates powerfully with them. They see something, hear something, experience something that speaks to them. It may be a call to action or some inspirational or inflammatory communication that addresses a need or a desire of theirs.

Only after hearing and aligning with a powerful and meaningful message will a person decide to affiliate and join some effort or campaign.

And only after identifying as a supporter or member will a person donate money or volunteer.

If this cycle is powerful and attracts the right mix of supporters, it can establish the means of sustainability—some permanent architecture or civic infrastructure to perpetuate itself. Nonprofits, labor unions, and cause-fired campaigns exemplify how this cycle plays out.

Political campaigns mobilize for an intense period of time, but after the election, that architecture dissolves, and there is little left to engage—until the next campaign.

How the Right Built Their Civic Infrastructure

I wrote about how the far right and their big business allies built a civic ecosystem in a HuffPost Chicago column in 2017 and more recently in my CivicNotes newsletter here and here. Robert Reich offers a similar explanation in “The Memo that Broke American Politics.”

In my take on this narrative, I also emphasize the role of the religious right and the Christian Coalition, which I first had to confront directly when the group was attempting to dismantle the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) back in 1991.

Long story short: Too much of the US civic ecosystem for the last 50 years has been driven by forces that favor a limited social welfare role for the federal government (sometimes misleadingly labeled “small government”), a paternalistic White male-dominated view of reality, and a desire to have America ruled by a particularly cruel version of the Christian Bible.

This architecture is fueled by powerful messaging, and of course by money from members of the base, rich individuals, and well-endowed foundations (themselves legacies of rich White businesspeople).

Civic infrastructure starts with a message, builds membership, raises money, and develops a means to sustain itself to thrive.

A key component of this architecture is an ongoing and methodic process of vetting and training candidates to run for local office. The religious right has been using the tools and infrastructure of their evangelical religious movement and member institutions for decades. The Christian Coalition adroitly uses its installed base of members and connections to evangelical religious organizations to recruit members, raise money, and develop leaders and candidates.

This sort of political work happens across the country, and is out in the open and well documented. See Evangelicals at the Ballot Box (1996), The Christian Coalition: Dreams of Restoration, Demands for Recognition (1997), Religion and Politics in the United States (2003), The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America (2005), and The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (2019), to name a few books.

So, we have a sketch of how we got here. But what do we do now? And what would a liberal civic infrastructure look like?

Toward a Civic Infrastructure of “Servant Leaders”

As noted above, civic infrastructure starts with a message, builds membership, raises money, and develops a means to sustain itself to thrive.

The next step is to organize.…I offer the aspirational goal of electing 100,000 progressive leaders.

So, let’s begin with the message. The message I propose is a call for “More public!” The right has worked relentlessly to degrade the concept of “public” and encourage Americans to hate and fear the government. To say the obvious, we are not going to charity our way out of structural inequality or the climate crisis. Perhaps it would be better expressed as “Put Us to Work (Great Jobs), Deliver Happiness, Save the Planet.”

This view resonates with at least some in philanthropy. Not long ago, Dr. Carmen Rojas, president of Marguerite Casey Foundation, argued that “this moment provides an opening for movements to shift public dollars to support the public goods our nation so desperately needs and to ensure that our dollars, in the public sector, are used to realize our dreams.”

Regardless of the exact message, the next step is to organize and elect servant leaders to local office in 2026. I offer the aspirational goal of electing 100,000 progressive leaders, which, given that there are over 500,000 local officials in the United States, works out to one leader in five.

These candidates would pledge themselves to fight for service, science, justice, equity, beauty, and peace. We must chart a path to power in order to govern. Everything else must be put on hold.

Mobilizing Money and Partnerships to Support Local Leaders

Let’s say the effort to develop and elect 100,000 local leaders succeeds. Congratulations! But winning a local office is merely one step.

To understand what is required, every nonprofit leader and movement activist should know about the Leadership Institute. As its website indicates, “Founded in 1979 by its president, Morton Blackwell, the Leadership Institute increases the number and effectiveness of conservative leaders in the public policy process. More than 300,000 conservatives have become leaders through Leadership Institute training.”

The Leadership Institute has a spiffy headquarters in Arlington, VA, that includes offices, classrooms, and a broadcast studio. It offers hundreds of political trainings annually and raised $39.2 million in 2022. It is super effective at what it does. Some of its fabled alumni include Karl Rove, Ralph Reed, and Grover Norquist. The institute combines thinking and action across the sectors of big business, religious fundamentalism, and raw power politics.

What exists on the left? Nothing to that scale.

Don’t get me wrong, there are great organizations like re:power (the evolved Wellstone Action organization), Vote Run Lead, She Should Run, and Run for Something. But in 2022, these groups took in a combined total of $16.9 million, less than half of what the Leadership Institute took in. And, of course, the Leadership Institute also has more than 40 years of history behind it.

How can this gap be closed? One possible path involves the Movement Voter Project, which raises millions of dollars annually to fund on-the-ground, frontline grassroots political organizing work in battleground states. They are in intimate contact with dozens of effective groups which are, in turn, deeply connected to thousands—if not tens of thousands—of grassroots organizers and leaders.

But we should think of the mobilizing effort more broadly. Consider the American Library Association (ALA), a professional organization serving America’s librarians. It has some 48,000 members from across America’s 123,000 public libraries. Our public libraries have seen some of the most ferocious and sustained political attacks—with book bans and state laws designed to punish and even jail librarians who circulate the “wrong” sorts of books (especially LGBTQ+ books). According to the School Library Journal, 24 percent of school librarians were harassed in 2023 over their jobs.

Our local librarians are well-known and trusted people who have devoted their lives to education, access, freedom of expression, and advancing knowledge. And they have been politically effective, successfully organizing for a ban on book bans in Illinois last year.

What if the Movement Voter Project teamed up with the ALA and one or more candidate training operations mentioned above and aggressively recruited members to get prepped to run for local office—say, library board, school board, or city council? You can see how a civic infrastructure begins to emerge.

Although this is just a sketch, it’s worth noting that librarians aren’t the only potential allies. What if there were similar partnerships with the American Federation of Teachers, Americans for the Arts, the American Institute of Architects, the National School Boards Association, the National Association of Social Workers, and the National Academy of Sciences?

If the goal were 100,000 servant leaders, these bodies—and others like them—could inspire and propel 10,000 members from their ranks to get trained and run. They could also potentially help raise funds—even if they must set up parallel structures like 501c4 organizations to do it—thereby providing a possible basis to sustain candidate development over time.

I can see a grand center or space, either physical or virtual, where all such prospective candidates can access mentorship, connect with progressive vendors (printing, polling, and so on), get access to research and legal advice, and meet one another to share and collaborate.

Next Steps

Social justice advocates can organize on this scale. But it requires a shift in the nation’s political culture, and we must think big and go big. Only in this way will social justice values of civic love, civic opportunity, civic equity, and civic justice find their way into the public sphere.

If you agree, I invite you to follow @More_Public on Blue Sky. Share ideas, methods, and means. Share stories of your most #LovedPublic—perhaps testimony about your experiences with public places and spaces as well as ideas for making More Public happen.