How Indivisible Is Organizing Rural America

One of the most prominent groups mobilizing their members to join in local solidarity marches, pickets and rallies is Indivisible, the nationwide grassroots progressive organization that was the principal organizer of the No Kings demonstrations.

The group’s website explains its involvement in May Day 2026 as “an opportunity to test our movement’s ability to do nonviolent, economic disruption … We can’t wait to figure this out after Trump has stolen an election–that work must happen now, before it’s too late.”

While this type of action is new for Indivisible, what is not new is its thoughtful, strategic approach to mobilizing grassroots groups across the nation to show the power of individuals taking collective action.

With 2,500 chapters nationwide in large cities and rural areas, Indivisible is one of the largest, most effective networks of grassroots resistance in the Trump era, touching every state and 99% of congressional districts. To understand Indivisible’s reach, and its role in the current moment, one has to go back to its humble origins.

On December 14, 2016—six weeks after the country woke up to the reality that Donald J. Trump was going to be the next President of the United States—the husband and wife team of Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg tweeted out the link to a Google Doc titled “Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda.” Within moments, their guide coursed through networks of despondent voters, offering a blueprint for resistance in a new political era.

In the beginning, Levin and Greenberg, both former Democratic congressional staffers, focused on a simple approach. Inspired by the conservative Tea Party movement against the Obama administration, but from the left, they advised readers: Call your elected representatives and let them know how you want them to vote on a bill; show up at a town hall and ask them direct questions (and be sure to record it and share it on social media so others can be motivated by what you have done); and importantly, talk to others and invite them to be involved so your numbers can grow.

This simple strategy had a big payoff. In the early days of 2017, a reported 6,000 groups had registered as Indivisible chapters. Throughout Trump’s first term, under a Republican-controlled House and Senate, Indivisible activists made headlines for showing up at congressmembers’ offices and town halls and inspiring grassroots resistance. In 2017, they were involved in the fight to save the Affordable Care Act.

Then, in the 2018 midterms, the group shifted from resistance to electoral work to flip the House of Representatives to Democratic control. Indivisible issued the Indivisible 435 Guide to provide tools for local chapters across all 435 congressional districts to engage meaningfully in that year’s midterm elections through door knocking, voter registration and postcard writing.

Nationally, Indivisible established a 501(c)(4) branch that allowed them to endorse House candidates in (mainly suburban) swing districts, while local chapters got involved in their own congressional races. This energy helped garner historic voter turnout and 41 Democratic victories in the House, that ended the Republican trifecta in Washington.

Even while building resistance to what was happening at the national level, Indivisible chapters began to grow their ranks by employing the same direct-action strategies at the local level.

This flexibility for local groups to design their own responses has been a highly successful strategy. It allows chapters to grow in every type of community, which has made Indivisible’s model a particularly good fit for rural and small town America. Talk to your neighbors. Develop a list. Gather together and build community. Organize a town hall, then invite your elected representatives and let them know what’s important to you. Hold a rally, to show others that they’re not alone. And engage in elections; heck, maybe even run for office yourself.

Indivisible’s signature toolkits make it easy to get started. Its website is chockfull of resources for people who don’t imagine themselves as political organizers. Resources include a guide for new groups which leads local volunteers through a 30–60–90 day plan to help them “get organized, build leadership, and take action at their own pace.” Small capacity building GROW Grants are available for smaller, less resourced chapters. Funds can’t be used to pay people—underlining the volunteer leader model—but can be used for activities to grow membership and capacity.

In mid-2017, for example, members of Indivisible Greene County, based in a largely rural county in northeast Tennessee, got involved in the campaign to address environmental concerns over air and water quality coming from the local chemical plant, U.S. Nitrogen. Being in small town Tennessee, the organizers knew they needed to expand their activities beyond simply opposing Trump, and found common cause with many residents, not just progressives or the local Democratic Party.

This was Indivisible’s model in action: don’t just respond to what is happening in Washington, D.C., but get involved locally. And not just electoral campaigns, but issues that are affecting the community in other ways.

By the time the pandemic hit in 2020, there were Indivisible chapters all over the country, including places like Clarion, Pennsylvania, a borough of about 4,100 people about 80 miles north of Pittsburgh. The chapter was established in February 2017 under the name Indivisible We Rise (Western Pennsylvania). In 2019, national Indivisible staff worked with the chapter to organize a rural summit connecting other small town chapters across the region. They are still going strong, having organized a reported 120 people for March’s No Kings 3 rally—an impressive turnout in a rural county that voted 76% for Donald Trump.

During the Biden years, a number of groups went dormant, due in part to the social distancing required during the Covid lockdowns. Others were lulled into the false sense that the MAGA resistance wasn’t necessary with Biden’s election in 2020. But the national office didn’t stop; they expanded their strategies.

What began in 2016 as a movement to resist Trump shifted in 2021 to policy advocacy—supporting Democratic proposals on issues such as voting rights, filibuster reform in the Senate and the Build Back Better bill. Indivisible urged its local groups to employ their trademark tactics on swing votes in the US Senate and House. Indivisible became an electoral mobilization engine during those years, moving from simply a protest movement toward a broader view with specific policy goals.

Indivisible’s expansion of their model to include electoral mobilization and policy advocacy sometimes created tension with their friends. Congressional leaders and the Democratic National Committee have a relationship with the group that is strong, yet at times tense. Indivisible cultivates grassroots leaders and deploys them to campaigns that help Democrats (strong), but also to lobby their elected officials on policy proposals (tense). Indivisible will endorse more progressive primary challengers to incumbent moderate Democrats, which has led to conflict with Democratic leadership, such as in 2019 when Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chair Cheri Bustos faced blowback from Indivisible and progressive groups about a rule barring Democratic consultants from working with primary challengers.

When Trump returned to office in January of 2025, voters across the Democratic base were screaming “DO SOMETHING.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) were using tame, measured approaches to Donald Trump and Elon Musk taking a “chainsaw” to our federal government. Indivisible’s Greenberg put it this way: “People want to see more from their lawmakers right now than floor speeches about Elon Musk.”

On the right, Indivisible is portrayed as a professionalized left-wing protest network pushing manufactured outrage through paid protesters, rather than a purely spontaneous grassroots movement of citizens authentically concerned about the administration’s actions. But even while some conservative commentators call their tactics harassment—and Republican leaders in Congress advise their members not to hold town halls because of the possibility of negative coverage—others recognize Indivisible’s effectiveness, albeit begrudgingly. Considering much of Indivisible’s original guide was informed by the founders’ experiences with the Tea Party, conservatives’ outrage over Indivisible’s tactics is ironic.

The November 2024 election results gave Indivisible leaders another opportunity to grow their ranks, as the need for a resistance movement returned. As Democratic voters watched the election results come in with a 2016-esque pit in their stomach, Levin and Greenberg began conceiving another plan to help progressives get through the next four years of Trump.

On the Thursday after the election, Indivisible participated in a national coalition call with 135,000 people seeking solace and guidance for moving forward. When Levin and Greenberg released their updated guide for Trump 2.0, about a week later, 31,000 people participated in the call. Like in 2017, when Trump’s first inauguration inspired a flood of Indivisible chapters, Trump’s second inauguration inspired another explosion of Indivisible chapters nationwide, with a reported 1,200 chapters either launching or restarting. This included chapters in rural areas and small towns across the country.

Right after the 2024 election, Krista Halloran went to the Indivisible website and searched for a chapter near her in Marion, Ohio, a county seat of 35,000 north of Columbus. She knew of Indivisible from 2017, when she and her now-husband attended an Indivisible meeting in Columbus, Ohio, where they were living at the time. It was overwhelming to her at the time. But by 2024 when Trump was president again, she and her husband were living in Marion, where Republicans outnumber Democrats 4 to 1.

To her surprise, her search netted a local chapter, called Citizens for Democracy. She and her husband went to its next meeting at the local Panera. Three other people were at the meeting. The existing semi-dormant Indivisible group needed rebuilding, so they dove in.

“We’d never done anything like that before,” Halloran says. Today, they have a list of 400 and an active Facebook page with 234 followers. They hold local rallies in conjunction with the national ones, with up to 350 people in attendance. At last month’s No Kings 3 event, Halloran met a 97-year-old for whom it was her first protest ever. Halloran says she just wanted to let people know that she was not happy with what was happening at the federal level. They continue to meet weekly, which Halloran concedes is also a form of “group therapy.”

Susan Daniels from Hall County, Georgia, has a similar story. Hall County sits northeast of Atlanta, where its exurbs meet rural Georgia. In 2024, 72% of Hall County voters went for Trump. Early in Trump’s second term, specifically after the White House meeting where Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance berated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Daniels recalled her kids asking her, “what are you going to do?” “I reached out to a friend and said we have to do something,” she says.

Those two friends turned into 30, then 150. Now they have 500 on Indivisible Hall’s mailing list. Their group decided to become an Indivisible chapter because of its structure, including the step-by-step guidance on building a chapter and regular trainings and informational meetings (on Zoom), the chance to learn from others, and being part of a national movement.

The founders of 82nd Indivisible in rural east central Iowa first met volunteering for Democrat Phil Wiese’s campaign for State House District 82. When their candidate lost in the November 2024 election amid the Republican wave, they looked at each other and asked, “What are we going to do to resist this?” says Suzan Erem, one of 82nd Indivisible’s core team members. They “shopped around,” according to Erem, and settled on becoming an Indivisible chapter because it allows them to be grassroots and have autonomy about what they do—including deciding on their chapter’s name—while also being connected to the bigger movement. They meet regularly, hosting local speakers, write regular columns for the local paper. They recently secured a GROW grant to build their online presence.

But it is not risk-free to oppose Donald Trump in smaller American communities, be it through an Indivisible-aligned group or one of the many hyper-local resistance groups sprouting up around the country.

Erem from Iowa, Daniels from Georgia, and Halloran from Ohio all mention knowing people who were afraid to attend a rally in their own town. Unlike in a bigger town where you can be more anonymous, holding a sign at a rally in a small town could have negative consequences. In a small town, Erem says, “everyone will know who you are. … You’ll get shunned. Your kids will get shunned.” Yet she remains active in Indivisible as a way for her and others to not feel alone. One new rally-goer told Halloran at the March No Kings rally in Marion, “I was really nervous about coming out, I didn’t want to be alone. Then I saw all of you here, saying the same things I’ve been thinking.”

Even as small town and rural Indivisible chapters provide an outlet for neighbors who are politically aligned, they can also be a welcoming place for people who become disillusioned with Trump and MAGA, such as Halloran’s neighbor who pulled down their long-flying Trump flag when the war in Iran started.

While most small town and rural Indivisible chapters have little chance of influencing their MAGA-aligned congressional representatives, or even winning at the ballot box, their actions are critical to the continued practice of democracy. They build community, stand up for what they believe in, provide mutual aid, or push back on proposals to build data centers and detention centers near their communities—all while providing a beacon to others to also get involved. “Social proof” as political strategist Anat Shanker-Osorio calls it.

Two-hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, this is what practicing true democracy looks like in America.

Cara LetofskyMore by this author →

Cara Letofsky is a community-builder to her core, and has spent the past 20 years working in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area at the intersection of community organizing and policy-making. She is the author of the Substack Field Notes from America.