Protest is the new brunch again. We're witnessing historic levels of pro-democracy grassroots engagement across a broad-based movement of everyday people. The leaders of Indivisible join Tim to discuss how the movement needs to stay focused on what it agrees on— no kings—and to save ideological disputes for another day. Plus, it also needs to get more young people involved. But it definitely should keep ignoring political consultants who tell Dems not to talk about immigration— because it turns out that the federal government kidnapping people off the street is not popular. Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg join Tim Miller. show notes Indivisible's "No Kings" protest day
Chapter 1: Who are Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin and what is Indivisible?
Das sollte bei der Zeit, in der ihr das hört, auf die nächste Level-Feed schauen. Auf diesem Show... We're getting earnest and activist-y, which you all know is a little bit out of my comfort zone, so I'm excited for it. They are the co-executive directors of Indivisible, the grassroots movement with thousands of local groups across the country.
Its mission to elect progressive leaders, rebuild our democracy, and defeat the Trump agenda. The Indivisible protests were the hands-off protests you saw a couple weeks ago, and... Coming up, the next big one is Saturday, June 14th, where there will be no Kings rallies and marches on the day that Trump is throwing himself a birthday military parade. It is Leah Greenberg and Ezra Levin. Levin?
Which one are we doing? Is it like Mark Levin, like the great one, or Ezra Levin, like Sandy Levin?
You nailed it. First one, Levin.
Levin, I got it right. I am so excited to do this. You guys were in a room together. It was so cute. You're married and you started this together. And we're going to do kind of like a kissing booth type podcast situation. But, you know, for sound purposes, we've had to separate you. I want to start before we get into the very important work you're doing. Give people the background.
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Chapter 2: How did the Indivisible movement start?
How did this happen? What is it like to work with one's spouse in a high stress environment like running protests? Give us the origin story.
So, our background is that we both got our start as congressional staffers in the early Obama years on the Hill. Ezra worked for a member from Texas, I worked for a member from a deep red district in Virginia. Perriella, I saw that.
Tom Perriella, that's right. I worked in that district back in the day.
Oh, yeah.
You're not going to age me. I was a Republican then, too, so we're not going to talk about it.
We could go into that at a different time, yeah. Anyways, it was an education in a lot of ways, but the big one was that we interacted a lot with the Tea Party in our jobs. We saw them organize, we disagreed enormously with their bigotry, their violence, but we also saw some very effective organizing tactics. And each of us moved on. We went on to do other things in our lives.
I worked on human trafficking, Ezra worked on poverty policy. But after Donald Trump was elected in 2016, we kind of like went back to that period in our lives and thought, Hey, there's some lessons that we can learn from this, right? We're in this moment where everything that we care about is under attack.
And we've actually just seen a model of what it looks like to organize locally in a way that puts pressure on your local elected officials and significantly impedes the agenda of the other party. And so We basically took all the lessons that we had learned watching the Tea Party operate. We turned it into a how-to guide to organizing locally to stop the Trump agenda.
And we put it out on the Internet in December 2016. We thought our friends would read it. We thought they would maybe share it with their families when they went home over Christmas. We were not prepared at all for what happened next, which was that thousands of people started reading it and sharing it and using it as the basis of forming local groups, the
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Chapter 3: What strategies did Indivisible learn from the Tea Party?
title of the guide that we had put out was called Indivisible. Suddenly there were indivisible groups all over the country who were picking it up and gathering communities and starting to organize and hold their elected officials accountable.
And we found ourselves catapulted into this incredible grassroots movement of regular people who were not waiting for Washington to resist, to actually start fighting back and who were kicking both Democrats and Republicans into gear to push back against Trump.
So this is, we're Thanksgiving 2016 and you guys both have other jobs. And you're married already or are we just dating?
We are married.
We're married, okay. And we create a Google Doc. That's it? That's how it started?
That's how it started, yeah. We did not think we were starting an organization. We mostly thought we were going to get fired.
Fired from the jobs that you're in? Yeah. What was in the Google Doc? What did it say?
I mean, the Google Doc was 23 pages of how do you organize... That is type A to start.
I mean, you just did a 23-page Google Doc just for shits? That is not in my wheelhouse. I'm more of Twitter-length writing.
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Chapter 4: What are the challenges and successes of grassroots organizing?
Und sie haben nicht alles gewonnen, aber sie konnten einige Dinge zerstören und andere Dinge zerstören. So, look, I mean, we put the Google Doc out. It took off that night. I remember Leah and I, we were like, we did a good thing. It's like people are reading this. This is cool.
And then we started getting all these responses that all said the exact same thing, which is this guide that you put out is just absolutely chock full of typos. Because it turns out, when you put a document online, that's what you get. But then, as Leah said, what people started doing, they started picking it up and forming these groups. It was an incredible thing.
And we, at the bottom of the very first page at the end of his book, the original one, we said very explicitly, we're not selling T-shirts, we're not forming an organization, take this and run with it, good luck to you. And then we formed an organization when there was this incredible operative thing von Bewegungsenergie.
Es gab all diese Gruppen, die in Tallahassee oder in Austin oder in Albany angefangen haben, und sie sagten uns, hey, wir haben gerade eine Gruppe zusammen in unserem Wohnzimmer, was tun wir jetzt? Ja, richtig. Und so haben wir angefangen, einfach Volunteure zusammenzuführen und zu sagen, wir müssen all diesen Leuten antworten.
Und dann wurde das in die Individuelle Nationenorganisation eingetreten.
Also, ich meine, ich habe Zuschauer, die die gleiche Frage jetzt fragen. Also, es ist wie, du formierst Gruppen, du kontaktierst Mitglieder, du zeigst dich an die Städte. Was war da noch?
Ja. Ja, genau. Und das ist wirklich das Kern, richtig? Und dann nimmst du einfach die Taktiken, richtig? Du zeigst dich an Townhalls, du machst ihnen Fragen über die Dinge, über die sie nicht unbedingt sprechen wollen. Du versuchst, die Probleme, über die du weißt, dass deine Mitgliedstaaten sich darum kümmern und antworten werden.
Es geht nur darum, wie du die Teile systematisch bewegen kannst, sodass deine ausgewählten Offiziere die Anforderungen haben, was sie wollen und weniger, was sie nicht wollen.
So talk about the parallels and differences between that moment and now, right? Because it seems like in that moment you're kind of like riding this tiger a little bit, where there's just all this outpouring and a lot of people that weren't even paying attention really to politics were wanting to protest and it caught everybody off guard, right?
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Chapter 5: How does Indivisible adapt to the current political climate?
Yeah, I do wonder, Ezra, what do you think, just an add-on to that, anything, but just on one specific point, you know, look, like, obviously, people that are really engaged, activists, news consumers, people that listen to political podcasts, right, like, have been engaged in showing up to these things. Like, to me, I do wonder, and it's kind of hard...
I don't know, you're at the events more than me, right? Unless I'm interviewing strangers at the events and be like, what's your story? It does feel like maybe there was a little bit of a gap between engaged people who are opposed and want to do something versus casuals, if you will. But maybe that's wrong. I don't know. What do you think?
Das wird immer wahr sein. Das war auch in 2016 wahr, Tim. Es gab viele Leute, die hyperfokussiert waren auf Politik, die sofort nach der Wahl schockiert waren, sie wünschten, dass sie mehr gemacht hätten. Und so, was sie in manchen Fällen gemacht haben, war, eine lokale Indivisible Gruppe zu formen, um ihre Gemeinschaft zusammenzubringen.
Wie Lea gesagt hat, you know, days after the election, we left our kids with my mom and then went to a cabin in West Virginia to write the new Indivisible Guide. and then put it out the following week. We had tens of thousands of people join that call to find out, what can I do in this moment?
So there was a real gap between how the broader media was covering the reaction to Trump's re-election and how a lot of folks on the ground were responding to it. Like, look, we had more indivisible groups form in November than any month since 2017 when protest was the new brunch. We beat the November number in December. We beat the December number in January.
We beat the combined number of new local indivisible groups from November, December and January in February and then beat that number in March. So what we were witnessing as organizers on the ground were a lot of folks who were flipping out, but they weren't hiding. They were trying to grapple with the situation and what they were doing was organizing on the ground.
And they were responding to two things. One was the heinous Trump agenda and the promises that this administration and the Congress was Ja, genau. Absolutely not. We've got to organize against this guy. And I think those two features, which were somewhat similar to 2016, drove this wave of engagement that was largely behind the scenes up until February.
Because in February was congressional recess. And then suddenly... In February, all the headlines were about where the hell did all these people come? They're in Republican districts and they're in Democratic districts and they're angry with Democrats for not fighting back and they're angry with Republicans for backing up Musk and Trump. This is amazing. I guess the resistance isn't dead.
But for the month, for November, December and January, I can't tell you how many journalists I talked to were like, well, obviously the resistance is dead. There's not going to be any opposition and y'all screwed this up. Yeah. So it's been an interesting journey these last six months, but we're a hell of a lot better off right now than we were six months ago.
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Chapter 6: What are the future plans for Indivisible in upcoming elections?
I want to do one more positive on that front before I get to some of my concerns. Because we saw something, so I'm in Louisiana. Leah and I were talking about why we're making Ezra move to a different room. We had these like ballot initiatives that were, I don't know if this was even on your radar, because it's like very local.
And it was the governor here, who's a MAGA guy, was pushing these ballot initiatives that were kind of arcane, really, and like what it was going to do. It was not... Das ist ein leicht zu verstehen Thema, wie ein Minimum-Wage-Erhöhung oder so etwas. Es war wie diese Änderungen mit seinem Kontrolle über das Gericht und das Tax-System.
Und was du sahst, war einfach wie dieses Gras, das sich gegen es auspufft. Und du hast zwei Dinge gleichzeitig gemacht, was eine massive Erhöhung in großen demokratischen Bereichen ist. Wie New Orleans Erhöhung war etwa 62 Prozent oder so etwas. Und es war 27 Prozent der Rest der Staaten.
Und Sie sahen, nur ein Ausdruck an meine Leute, wie die Leute, die die Republikanische Partei verlassen haben, die zu diesem Thema kamen, sind alle wie hyper engagierte Typen, wie die neue demokratische Koalition. Das betrifft Leute, die auf diese off-off-off-Jahre-Elektionen, wie random-Elektionen, die die Leute nicht wissend sind, ohne dass sie wirklich nahe auf die Aufmerksamkeit stehen.
And I do think that you're seeing like that that is something that can be, you know, catalyzed. Right. And you and you have these sorts of like random elections in a lot of places. And I just wonder what you guys are doing to kind of play off of that.
Absolut. Wir haben eine Koalition, die wir für die Generalwahlen tun müssen. Und es ist auch extrem gut optimiert, um die Gewinne im offenen Jahr, in den Spezialwahlen, in den Mittagswahlen, etc. zu maximieren, wenn man an einer motivierten Votingbasis depennt. So I think the big opportunity that's coming up is Virginia and New Jersey, right? We're going to have these elections in the fall.
They're going to be the first pretty decisive opportunities to further repudiate Trumpism, to demonstrate that this doesn't play across the board. That's especially important because, you know, New Jersey got closer than people would have liked to see in 2024, right? And so these are two states that are
You know, where the margins are going to matter for demonstrating for people exactly how much of a political penalty they're going to pay for continuing to be on board here. So we're working with our folks, we're organizing already. We tested in 2024 and are continuing to hone and roll out a technology that allows us to send folks to talk to their immediate neighbors online.
Low information or low turnout voters who we think will vote with us if turned out literally within their neighborhood. We saw that work. We've done that over a couple of cycles with some really exciting results.
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