From Protest to Power: What the “No Kings” Movement Must Do Next
Based on the Vox article "How to translate No Kings energy to actual political power" By Christian Paz | October 23, 2025 6:00 am EDT
The “No Kings” protests proved Americans still care about democracy—but caring isn’t enough. Harvard’s Theda Skocpol says the real challenge is turning mass outrage into local organization, electoral wins, and broad-tent coalitions. Power isn’t in protest—it’s in persistence.
Introduction: The Biggest Protest Since the ‘70s
Over 7 million Americans flooded the streets for the No Kings protests—an unprecedented nationwide stand across all 50 states that may mark the largest coordinated nonviolent action in U.S. history. From small-town gatherings in the Midwest to massive urban turnouts in Boston, Seattle, and Atlanta, citizens made it unmistakably clear: democracy is not a monarchy, and patriotism means defiance in the face of authoritarian power.
The movement’s humor, creativity, and peaceful discipline struck a chord in a nation exhausted by division and creeping normalization of anti-democratic behavior. Speakers like Sen. Elizabeth Warren captured the spirit of the day: that “standing up to a wannabe dictator—that is patriotism.” Across signs, songs, and speeches, the message repeated like a drumbeat—this was not politics as usual. It was civic defense, wrapped in solidarity and satire.
Yet, beneath the inspiring visuals and the sheer magnitude of turnout lies a harder truth: protest alone does not shift power. History repeatedly proves that mass mobilization, without follow-up organization, burns bright and fades fast. The Women’s March in 2017 and the Tea Party wave in 2009 both began as grassroots outpourings but diverged dramatically in outcomes. One helped shape national policy and elections; the other lost momentum when its local groups dissolved.
Harvard political scientist Theda Skocpol, who has studied civic movements across decades, warns that success isn’t measured in crowd size or hashtags but in the infrastructure built afterward. Her message to the No Kings protesters is blunt but hopeful: the energy is real, but the strategy must evolve. The next step is not another march—it’s organizing local groups, sustaining networks, and converting passion into political muscle that can outlast any single protest day.
If the No Kings movement wants to rewrite the story of modern resistance, its legacy must reach beyond signs and slogans. It must become the connective tissue between outrage and outcome—the civic machinery that turns patriotic dissent into durable democratic power.
The Energy Is There—But Power Requires Strategy
Mass protests can electrify a nation, uniting strangers under a single banner of urgency. They remind the public of its collective strength and send a moral signal that something in the country’s conscience has snapped awake. But as Theda Skocpol warns, turnout isn’t the same as transformation. Mobilization without machinery is a flash of heat with no lasting fire. The danger lies in mistaking visibility for influence—a mistake that’s doomed many movements before this one.
History offers proof. The Tea Party in 2009 didn’t just chant about taxes and government spending; it built thousands of neighborhood groups, hosted weekly meetups, and coordinated candidate training sessions. That infrastructure helped flip congressional seats in 2010 and reshaped the Republican Party’s DNA for over a decade. By contrast, the anti-Trump Resistance in 2017 generated massive participation and emotion but faltered once its decentralized networks faded. For every Indivisible group that thrived, dozens dissolved under the weight of burnout and leadership turnover.
The lesson is clear: crowds can shake the walls, but only organized power moves the levers inside. Without sustained effort—community chapters, candidate pipelines, voter mobilization—the “No Kings” wave risks becoming another emotional high without policy bite. Protesters must choose whether this movement will be remembered as a weekend of righteous noise or as the start of a durable realignment. The path to real change, as Skocpol reminds us, doesn’t end at the march—it begins there.
Key insight: The measure of success isn’t 3.5% participation—it’s political power.
Lessons from the Past: From Street to Statehouse
Skocpol’s decades of research show a consistent pattern: mass protest movements create windows of possibility, but real power emerges only from what happens after the crowds disperse. Demonstrations may capture headlines, but the work that follows—organizing, recruiting, training, and running candidates—is what actually changes policy and institutions.
In 2009, the Tea Party transformed fury into infrastructure. What began as scattered rallies over spending and taxation quickly evolved into thousands of neighborhood cells linked by shared messaging and relentless discipline. Those networks learned to apply pressure on local officials, turn out voters in primaries, and shift the Republican Party’s tone and priorities. Within a year, they helped deliver the 2010 midterm landslide that redrew the map of Congress. The movement didn’t succeed because of its signs; it succeeded because of its spreadsheets.
In 2017, the Resistance movement sparked by the Women’s March and early Trump-era backlash followed a similar blueprint. Fueled by the Indivisible network and grassroots organizations, ordinary citizens turned outrage into structure. Town-hall confrontations and organized phone campaigns helped protect the Affordable Care Act. By 2018, this decentralized but determined wave produced one of the largest midterm turnovers in modern history, flipping forty House seats and reinvigorating civic engagement across demographics that had long been disengaged.
Now, in 2025, the “No Kings” movement faces that same fork in the road. Its unprecedented scale and humor-tinged defiance have captured the country’s attention, but attention is fleeting. The question is whether that energy will solidify into enduring power... local alliances, candidate pipelines, voter-education efforts, and watchdog groups capable of confronting corruption at every level.
If activists stop at symbolism. If they march, post, and move on, the momentum will dissolve like mist. But if they translate mass participation into sustained civic muscle, the No Kings uprising could become the next great chapter in America’s story of self-correction. The streets may light the spark, but the offices, campaigns, and town halls must keep the flame alive.
Why the 3.5% Myth Misses the Point
Social media loves its talismans, meaning shortcuts that make messy realities sound simple. The latest favorite is the “3.5% rule,” a viral statistic suggesting that if just 3.5 percent of a population joins a protest, political change becomes inevitable. It’s tidy, inspiring, and completely misleading when applied to the United States. Theda Skocpol, a scholar who actually studies movements instead of meme-ifying them, notes that the figure comes from comparative studies of weaker autocracies and transitional regimes, not a century-old democracy with two institutionalized parties, a federal structure, and deeply entrenched power networks.
In those fragile states, where legitimacy is shaky and militaries hesitate to suppress popular uprisings, mass protest can topple governments because the system itself is brittle. In the U.S., by contrast, entrenched political machinery absorbs protest shocks like an old oak in a storm; flexing, creaking, but rarely breaking. The sheer scale of bureaucracy, media polarization, and electoral rules means that even millions in the streets may barely dent the gears of policy unless that energy channels into organized, strategic pressure.
Skocpol’s takeaway cuts through the myth: protest is ignition, not the engine. It sparks awareness, builds solidarity, and proves that people care, but it doesn’t, by itself, move legislation or power. Marches make noise; organizing makes movement. Without infrastructure—local groups, consistent funding, candidate recruitment, and follow-through, the energy dissipates back into digital echo chambers.
If the No Kings protests want to change more than trending hashtags, they must treat mass turnout as the starting line, not the victory lap. The future of democratic resistance won’t hinge on viral thresholds or symbolic headcounts. It will depend on whether that 3.5 percent, and the millions beyond it, decide to keep showing up when the cameras go home and the hashtags fade.
The Danger of Top-Down Activism
Movements crumble when they confuse hierarchy with strength or purity with purpose. Theda Skocpol points to Indivisible as a cautionary tale. A movement that began as a spark of authentic, local energy but drifted into the gravitational pull of Washington politics. What started in 2016 as thousands of volunteers self-organizing around living-room meetings and Google Docs soon hardened into a professional advocacy structure. Headquarters grew. Payrolls expanded. The emphasis shifted from empowering citizens to managing messaging.
That drift wasn’t malicious; it’s a predictable trap. When movements centralize, they often trade agility for control, and passion for branding. The further decisions move from local chapters and ordinary members, the weaker the connective tissue becomes. Volunteers who once felt ownership over strategy suddenly become spectators waiting for talking points. Energy drains out through bureaucracy’s slow leak. Skocpol argues that this was Indivisible’s undoing because it stopped nurturing the grassroots that gave it legitimacy.
The other fatal instinct is ideological purism, as in the belief that every participant must agree on every issue or risk expulsion. Purity feels noble but functions like a cage. It fractures coalitions, alienates allies, and replaces persuasion with policing. History is full of examples: the New Left of the 1960s splintered under purity tests; Occupy Wall Street evaporated under horizontal infighting; even the early suffrage movement nearly tore itself apart over internal litmus tests.
Skocpol’s warning lands hard in 2025: movements that aim to save democracy cannot afford to eat their own. Centralized leadership can mute creativity; purity politics can gut participation. Sustainable power lives in the messy middle ground; a decentralized network of people united by purpose, not perfection. When citizens organize from the ground up and keep control close to home, they build something Washington can’t co-opt or crush.
“You do not need to prioritize getting rid of Chuck Schumer,” she says dryly. “Broad-tent movements win.”
Translation: Unity matters more than ideological perfection.
Militant Inclusion: The Future of Effective Resistance
Theda Skocpol doesn’t ask for moderation—she asks for “militant inclusion.” It’s a phrase that sounds paradoxical until you realize how radical it actually is. In an age when political tribes see compromise as betrayal, she’s arguing for a kind of fierce, practical unity that refuses to let difference become division. The idea isn’t to erase identities or dilute convictions, it’s to build a coalition tough enough to hold together under pressure, because democracy itself is what’s on the line.
Militant inclusion means embracing ideological diversity with discipline. You can be a centrist Democrat wary of slogans, an independent disgusted by corruption, or even an anti-MAGA Republican clinging to the old guardrails of law and decency, and still belong in the same democratic defense line. The test isn’t whether someone agrees with your policy wish list; it’s whether they’ll stand beside you when the rule of law or the legitimacy of elections is attacked.
Skocpol’s framing rejects the purity politics that keeps activists splintered and powerless. Every successful democratic movement in history, from the labor coalitions of the 1930s to the civil rights alliances of the 1960s, has been messy, imperfect, and deeply plural. They succeeded not because everyone thought alike, but because they agreed on what was non-negotiable: equal representation, shared power, and accountability.
In this era of disinformation and creeping authoritarianism, militant inclusion may be the most subversive act of all. It demands that citizens look past labels and work shoulder to shoulder with people they’d never invite to dinner. It insists that defending democracy is not a partisan project but a civic one. And it reminds us that unity doesn’t mean uniformity.
It means standing together, loudly and imperfectly, for the republic itself.
When movements demand ideological purity, they shrink. When they embrace difference, they win.
The Real Work: From Protest Signs to Ballots
Demonstrations can inspire, but ballots decide. Skocpol emphasizes that protest movements must evolve into infrastructure:
Build local groups that meet regularly.
Support candidates who can realistically win—even imperfect ones.
Pressure institutions to uphold democratic norms.
Stay focused on power, not purity.
This is what turns civic energy into political consequence.
Key Points
The “No Kings” protests drew over 7 million Americans nationwide.
Protest energy must evolve into organized, local political networks.
Success isn’t measured by protest size but by electoral and institutional change.
Avoid ideological purism by practicing “militant inclusion.”
Focus on sustainable, bottom-up organizing rather than D.C. power games.
Action Items for Activists
Join or start a local group aligned with your protest values.
Volunteer for campaigns focusing on competitive local and state races.
Contact representatives regularly and document accountability.
Educate others about the importance of civic follow-through after protests.
Support coalition building across ideological lines to resist authoritarianism.
