A Tale of Two Strategies

By Ezra Levin, Indivisible Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director

It’s the final day of the Biden presidency and the last day of relative peace before all hell breaks loose. As we brace for impact, I think the most helpful thing I can do is try to demystify how national politics is working in this new reality, and identify concrete steps we can take to influence things.

With that in mind, and in the spirit of experimentation, I’m going to try a new format for this newsletter: I’ll start with a big lesson from the news this week, and then I’ll follow with a few skimmable nuggets on heroes, capitulators, news sources, action items, and discussion. Tell me how you like it.

News of the Week: A Tale of Two Strategies.

In the last week, we’ve seen two different strategies from Dems responding to MAGA’s divide and conquer strategies: one focused on immigrants and one focused on trans kids. In one, Dems fractured and capitulated, and in the other, they unified and fought back. This pair of case studies is instructive enough that it’s worth telling the full story to extract some lessons. Let’s dig in.

A case study in capitulation: The anti-immigrant bill is called the Laken Riley Act, named for the horrific murder of a nursing student. But the bill was never supposed to become law. A MAGA member introduced the legislation in 2024 as what’s known as a “messaging bill.” A messaging bill isn’t about making law; it’s about sending a message. And the message he and his fellow MAGAs wanted to send with this bill was, “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris suck and don’t care about immigration”. Read it yourself if you’d like.

The substance of the bill is cruel, unworkable, and likely unconstitutional. It would force the government to imprison immigrants indefinitely if they are simply accused (not convicted) of a crime. It threatens Dreamers and other legal immigrants. And it gives MAGA state officials effective veto power over federal immigration decisions. This isn’t some non-controversial, commonsense “tough on crime” legislation. It’s an awful, dysfunctional, unconstitutional mess.

Now, unworkable policy isn’t really an issue for a messaging bill like this normally, because normally messaging bills don’t get anywhere close to becoming actual policy. Members of Congress introduce hundreds of messaging bills like this every year. They introduce the bill, issue a little press release, get a little attention, raise a little money, and then move on — the bill doesn’t go anywhere because it was never intended to. Such was the destiny of this bill.

But then Dems lost the White House. Fearful that they are vulnerable on immigration, 48 House Dems voted for the newly introduced bill in the House earlier this month. A couple of key Dem Senators — John Fetterman and Ruben Gallego — announced their support. Senate Republicans smelled blood in the water. They fast-tracked the legislation. This week, only 10 Senate Dems broke with Republicans on whether to allow the legislation to move forward, clearing the way for a vote on amendments.

Democrats who voted to open debate on the bill claimed they were just interested in having good faith negotiations on the bill and improving it. What actually happened is Republicans rejected all Democratic amendments, and in fact, included Republican amendments that made the bill even worse. 10 Democrats voted for it anyway. Now the bill will get a final vote in the Senate and then head back to the House, where Republicans simply need a majority to send Trump a legislative “win” in his first week.

A case study in contagious courage: This is a shorter, happier story. House Dems confronted another divide-and-conquer bill with the Orwellian name, “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act.” Don’t judge a bill by its title. Instead of doing anything to make schools actually safer — like preventing gun violence — this bill targets trans kids for singling out and bullying. It would harm all women and girls in schools by potentially requiring kids to submit to humiliating genital inspections just to play sports with their friends.

Bad stuff, right? And given that Republicans ran so many anti-trans ads in the campaign, you’d think Democrats might be skittish and capitulate here too, right?

They didn’t. The Dems unified around their own messaging, rebranding the bill “the Child Predator Empowerment Act.” They lambasted Republicans for targeting children. And in almost lock-step, Dems voted against the legislation. While the bill passed the House with Republican votes, it did not build momentum. No Senate Democrats came out trumpeting support. Republican Senate leadership shows no signs of fast-tracking this bill. And as a result, the bill does not have a clear path to becoming law.

I was talking with some Democratic House Members this week, and they reported how energized the caucus felt after unifying against the bill — eager to find more opportunities to fight back like that. Because — once again! — courage is contagious.

Lessons learned: A delay is a win, and we can build on that kind of win. As we look to the fights to come, we should internalize the lessons from these early skirmishes. GOP leadership is going to want to move fast. They want to steamroll Democrats to get as much done as they can, as fast as possible. It’s a smart strategy when you’re pushing a deeply unpopular agenda. If they take their time and slow-walk unpopular legislation, public opposition will build, and it will be harder to pass anything. In short, the MAGAs want to move fast; we want to go slow.

Our only chance of going slow is by unifying Dems. The good news is that when they do that, they feel good about it and want to do more of it. Courage is contagious and self-replicating. Our job is to help Democrats find that courage, and then show up to have their backs when they do find it.

If you think this is persuasive, consider calling your House Dem and thanking them — and telling them you hope to see more of this in the future.

With that in mind, let’s hand out some awards:

Courage Caucus Award of the Week: Representative Maxwell Frost.

Frost, the youngest member of the House, brilliantly messaged against the anti-trans kids bill and helped unify the Dem caucus against it in the House. If you’re a constituent, here’s his office number to say thanks: (202) 225–2176. If you’re not a constituent, you can give him some love on Bluesky here.

Capitulation Caucus Award of the Week: Senator Chris Coons.

Chris Coons has been an elected official for a quarter century, but he’s not a flashy guy. If you’ve heard of Coons in the past decade or two, it’s probably because you read a quote from him praising a Republican or explaining why Democrats can’t pass legislation. True to form, Coons was in the news this week praising Senator Katie Britt, the GOP manager of the anti-immigrant Laken Riley bill. The reason for the praise? She allowed a vote on an amendment he offered to the bill. The kicker? She and every Republican voted against amendment, killing it.

Coons isn’t the worst Democrat in the Senate. Still, I chose him this week because he exemplifies a pernicious and damning characteristic of some congressional Dems: prioritizing process over policy. He’s also up for reelection next year.

If you’re a constituent, here’s his office number if you want to tell him to get with the program: (202) 224–5042.

News Source of the Week:

Staunch never-Trumper Jen Rubin of the formerly great Washington Post left the paper this week to form a new media operation, the Contrarian. I’ve already read some good articles over there — it’s well worth a subscription. On a related note, last week, I surveyed Indivisible members for their favorite pro-democracy news sources and got a ton of recommendations. I’ve gathered all of those in this Google Doc if you’re looking for recommendations from the movement.

Indivisible Group of the Week:

Howard County Indivisible (Maryland). I brought our 4yo and 2yo to Howard County Indivisible for their new member meeting. I watched the kids while Leah spoke to the group of more than 120, about a third of whom were new members. Howard County Indivisible is organizing to push their Members of Congress, but they’re also organizing locally to fight back against Stephen Miller’s threats against pro-immigrant counties. I found the group’s charter to be downright inspiring and worthy of replication if your own Indivisible group is looking for ideas.

Also: Shout out to Indivisible Fairfax for having me at their event in person last week, and Indivisible Evanston for having me at their virtual strategy session with around 200 folks! If your Indivisible local or statewide group would like me or Leah to drop by your member event, let your organizer know — we love doing it!

National Action Item of the Week:

If you’ve got a Dem House member (who isn’t Rep. Cuellar or Rep. Gonzalez), call them and thank them for voting against the anti-trans kid bill (H.R. 28)! If they voted against the anti-immigrant bill as well, thank them for that too!

Better yet, think about putting together a quick District Office visit next week to thank House Dems for their courage and urge them to keep it up when MAGA’s Laken Riley bill heads to a House vote next week. Our team put together a few quick and dirty ideas to get you started.

Discussion of the Week:

If you missed this past Thursday’s Q&A session with me and Leah, you can find a recording here. And you can join me and Leah for another “Bracing for Impact” Q&A discussion this Thursday! We’ll debrief the first few days of the second Trump term and spend most of the time answering your questions about strategy, tactics, messaging, and organizing. Register here.

Request for Money for the Week:

Grassroots dollars fuel grassroots action. In just the last week, Indivisible has driven tens of thousands of calls and emails to Congress on the Laken Riley bill and launched the NixTheNoms.org campaign against Trump’s worst nominees. If you want Indivisible to support more of this, please consider investing in the movement. We need you and we need your support to make it happen.

That’s it for this cold and dreary Sunday. In other news, I hear it will be positively freezing on the National Mall tomorrow. Shame.