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NEW ORLEANS — For 20 years, progressives have gathered at annual Netroots Nation conferences to share strategies and plan for the next election.
In New Orleans, this year’s 3,000 attendees were not so sure that there would be a “next election.”
At one session, after organizers described the tactics of an “authoritarian state,” they considered whether they’d even be allowed to win in 2026.
“There can’t be a free and fair election in 2026, or something resembling one, if we don’t f*ck them up now,” said Evan Sutton, a strategist who helped organize Tesla Takedown protests.
“I don’t do elections necessarily because they’re free and fair,” said Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, a progressive organizer in Tennessee. “I do it because once I get someone who is trying to change things [with] an election, and they do it, and it still doesn’t work, they are immediately a leftist.”
The mood at the three-day conference — which began as a political blogger meetup and grew into a stop on the presidential primary circuit — was nervous and grim, despite the karaoke and pickleball.
Progressive organizers who’d succeeded during previous GOP administrations described a tougher climate that had made it hard for their groups to operate, like lawsuits against Media Matters and a Justice Department probe of ActBlue. And activists committed to “intersectional” work fretted that Democrats might be abandoning them.
Elected Democrats who did show up, like Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke, talked about fighting “fascism.” They described a fight that some in their party might not be ready to win. She was fighting a GOP effort to remove her from committees for her comments about her pride in her Guatemalan heritage; he was being sued to stop funding Texas Democrats who’d fled the state to block a gerrymander.
“They are betting that our side is going to give in and give up,” O’Rourke said. “That we are the old Democratic Party that was more interested in concession and compromise.”
Know More
Founded in 2006, when Democrats first saw value in political blogs and online donation portals, Netroots Nation has evolved several times — first to be larger, then smaller. Its first conference brought bloggers together with Democratic leaders in Congress and future Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont, who defeated Sen. Joe Lieberman in a primary just weeks later.
Originally named “Yearly Kos,” an IRL companion to the political site Daily Kos, Netroots changed its name and ambitions after most of the 2008 Democratic presidential field came to its 2007 conference in Chicago.
During Barack Obama’s presidency, the conference drew White House emissaries who saw its attendees as the “professional left” that needed to be tolerated, but not taken too seriously.
By 2015, it had become a trade show for political professionals that also gave scholarships and stage time to local activists. Some of them used that stage to browbeat Democratic politicians.
Ten years later, this year’s Netroots was a little quieter, and more sparsely attended. The Democratic Party had failed to stop a Trump restoration, and the new administration has been rolling back gains that some attendees thought they’d won for good: climate funding, student debt relief, trans rights.
Progressive donors had changed, too. At a breakout on “the New McCarthyism,” movement veterans explained how Gaza activism had been used to break up progressive groups and go after universities. Some funders, they said, had gone along with it.
“After 2020, funders were like: ‘Oh, we love Black people. We’re going to give Black people so much money. We’re going to be really abundant with resources,’” said Alexis Sanchez Gill, the executive director of the Emergent Fund.
Since October 2023, progressives had seen “Zionist funders and Zionists-aligned funders pulling support” from Black-run groups that they’d supported, Sanchez Gill added, because the groups in question were now “on the front lines of solidarity with our Palestinian comrades.”
The Gaza question has divided Democrats for years. In 2023, after Netroots protesters got Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., to call Israel a “racist state,” House leaders admonished her.
But like most Democrats in Congress, most Netroots attendees wanted to halt military aid to Israel. Joe Biden’s administration had dampened their faith in politics.
When the last Democratic president was mentioned, it was as a cautionary tale of the party not using its power to prevent a second Trump term.
“All the things that stopped the Joe Biden administration — I hope Trump burns it all,” said Elie Mystal, the legal columnist at The Nation, at a panel on fighting the “captured” Supreme Court.
“So, let him kill the filibuster. Let him kill the Senate parliamentarian. Let him shoot the Librarian of Congress on Fifth Avenue, and let him pack the Supreme Court. Go. Do it,” Mystal added. “And then, finally, Democrats might get a clue.”
The few elected Democrats who came to New Orleans to hear that message said that they were doing everything within their power to resist the administration — especially state attorneys general, who have at times fought Trump to a standstill in court.
Yet some of them urged action in the streets, too. In an interview, Minnesota Attorney Gen. Keith Ellison said his office was constantly brainstorming legalistic ways to challenge the administration. But, he added, Trump was courting broader civil disobedience when it allowed ICE agents to operate with masks and when it sought to require congressional maps.
“One of the things you saw right in front of your eyes after the murder of George Floyd is that people comply with the law because they see it as legitimate,” Ellison told Semafor. “Once they see it as not legitimate, there’s not enough law enforcement people to make people obey the law.”
David’s view
There were far fewer reporters walking the halls of Netroots than there were following Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego in Iowa this weekend. I understand why.
Progressive power in the Democratic Party is usually covered like a problem to be fixed, not as a force the party needs to respond to — as seen by the demands that New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani distance himself from old tweets and problematic endorsers.
Elected Democrats voted with their feet this year, skipping a convention where they might get booed in favor of settings where people would be happy to see them.
I’ve attended most Netroots conferences since 2007, though, and I noticed that still more had shifted. The buttons that used to be offered to attendees, clarifying their preferred pronouns or whether they were open to hugs, were missing this year. Some groups that had large presences at prior conferences, flush with election-year cash, were noticeably absent.
There was really no talk about 2028 or who’d be fighting for the next Democratic nomination. Talk about the midterms was cautious; who knew what maps they’d be competing on?
In New Orleans, the shared analysis was that Democrats screwed up by not listening to them, and by expecting a return to pre-Trump norms.
Room for Disagreement
Some attendees didn’t really care about Democrats, or the party infrastructure, at all.
The poet FreeQuency helped close the weekend with a poem about how, one day, free children might grow up without knowing what a “president” is: “I don’t want a Black woman in office, not even Kamala Harris.”
The Democrats who did show said that their party needed to embrace direct action and international solidarity. In so many words, they were communicating that the party wasn’t strong enough to win on its own — and had shown no ability to win back the voters who walked away during the Obama years.
“We are a movement, a global, interconnected movement,” Ramirez said, “from Humboldt Park in Chicago to Honduras to Palestine to Ukraine to Haiti and the Congo.”
Notable
In The Bulwark, Lauren Egan covers the effort to crack down on the most exploitative Democratic PACs, which get money from progressives but do little with it. “All of this is sparking reflection within the party about how it even allowed such dishonest fundraising tactics to get this far.”
In the Washington Free Beacon, Jessica Costescu attends the Democratic Socialists of America convention, which happened at the same time as Netroots and had a more direct electoral mission. “We can win the Democratic primary in 2028. There’s polls now that show that a majority of the Democratic primary electorate supports Palestine and would want a Democratic socialist to win the presidential primary in 2028.”
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