An accurate understanding of the geography of our nation shows that our reach and power is more promising than we may feel at the moment.
I recently saw a meme on social media with a picture of Trump that said: “President of the white people of the red states of America.” The meme not only perfectly captures the current situation in this country but also illuminates the power and potential of those who are not represented by the latest occupant of the oval office.
Historically, revolutions take place city by city, county by county, state by state. As the progressive forces liberate a region, they deepen the support and enthusiasm among the residents of that region by manifesting a clear alternative in terms of priorities, policies, vision and quality of life (the slaves are freed, the billionaire’s land is redistributed, etc). In such a fashion, the reach of the revolutionary forces steadily grows until they are in a position to take power nationally and seize the seat of government. That framework is especially relevant to this moment. A deep dive into the geography, economics, and population of the nation focused on justice and equality reveals that we are bigger and more powerful than we may feel.
Looking just at states can blur the picture of what our nation actually looks like. It’s not primarily land mass that defines a nation but shared worldview, values, and vision. Champions of multiracial democracy don’t just live in the 19 states won by Kamala Harris.
In order to get a clearer picture of our nation, it helps to look through a county-focused lens. There are more than 3,000 counties in the country, and more than half of the votes cast nationwide came from the 150 largest counties. In those places, Harris won, cumulatively, by 17 points. Most important, in most of the battleground states, the greatest areas of opportunity lie in the counties. People of color tend to be concentrated in a relatively small number of counties within states that are frequently thought of as more conservative. Arizona, for example, has 15 counties, but 82 percent of all the people of color in the state live in just three counties (Maricopa, Pinal, and Pima). Similar situations exist across the country, even in the states that lost to Trump in the latest election.
North Carolina presents one of the best opportunities for Democrats to flip a US Senate seat in 2026, so it is a timely and useful case study. There are 100 counties in the state, and the majority of people of color live in just nine of the counties. Harris lost North Carolina by 183,408 votes, and in those nine diverse counties, 760,283 people did not vote.
An accurate understanding of the geography of our nation, then, will look at both the states where Democrats won as well as the counties where people of color and their white allies live. Viewed in that fashion, the reach and power of our nation is more promising than we may feel at the moment.
The sprawl of the progressive nation is not just more geographically far-reaching than it may appear at first blush. It is also much more fundamental to the operation of the entire country than we may realize. Looking just at the economic data in the states where there are Democratic governors (and that leaves out states such as Virginia and New Hampshire that were won by Harris but have Republican governors) reveals that it is actually our nation that powers the progress in this country. According to the latest statistics from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Gross Domestic Product in the states with Democratic governors is $17 trillion as compared to just $12 trillion in the red states.
As an extension of that economic power, the Democratic states shoulder a larger share of the tax responsibility for the operation of the federal government. States with Democratic governors provide 60 percent of the country’s entire tax revenue.
Maximizing our power over the next four years will require steadily and methodically proceeding on two parallel and synergistic paths in the various cities, counties, and states in our nation: (1) Developing and championing a clear, unapologetic progressive public policy agenda that defines the differences between the respective nations; and (2) embracing a “1 million precinct captains” strategy of ensuring that every potential progressive voter is identified, informed, and encouraged to vote in each upcoming election. While we need to raise the flag and throw sand in the gears of the oppressive plans of those in Washington, the greatest opportunities exist in the states, counties, and cities where most of our people live.
In many ways, our states and counties can provide a more powerful and meaningful counterweight to the administration than our minority in Congress. The executive order attacking the 14th Amendment, for example, was swiftly opposed in the courts by a coalition of 22 states—led in part by Arizona’s Democratic attorney general—and that coalition received an immediate injunction blocking something akin to “Make America White Again.” The task over the next two years is to make elections in 2025 and ’26 a referendum on what kind of society we want to live in and what kind of people we are. That entails unapologetically pursuing an alternative public policy agenda and loudly articulating how our agenda is the opposite of and based on opposite values and vision than that being advanced by the president of the white people in the red states of America.
I saw this approach play out firsthand 21 years ago in San Francisco with marriage equality. At a time when the leaders in Washington—Republican and Democrat alike—were championing bigotry, homophobia and hate, local leaders in San Francisco, led by then-Mayor Gavin Newsom and then–District Attorney Kamala Harris, defied that direction and started handing out marriage licenses. And they did so with a visible and forceful defense of the values underpinning their actions, with Newsom defiantly declaring that the United States Constitution “leaves no room for any form of discrimination.… Today a barrier to justice has been removed.”
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Two years later, in the face of rabid resistance in Washington to extending health care coverage to people without a lot of money, San Francisco again modeled what is possible at the local level. In 2006, city leaders developed and implemented their own health insurance program, Healthy San Francisco, to provide access to health care for the city’s lower-income residents. Funded with a 25 percent surcharge on restaurant tabs, the program generated the resources to provide health insurance for 90 percent of the city’s uninsured residents.
This course of action can provide a road map to state and local leaders today. As Trump tries to whitewash the curriculum, for example, local school boards, mayors and state legislatures and governors should forcefully say“Hell No” and offer a clear alternative—a different direction and course of action. As reactionary red-state governors and leaders follow in the footsteps of the heirs of the Confederacy who worked relentlessly to ban books and suppress any accurate depictions of the violent, white-supremacist, mass-murdering regime that was the Confederacy, progressives should go the opposite direction, challenge those actions, and hand out the books being banned in other parts of the country.
Likewise with the bogeyman of DEI. Local and state leaders should announce initiatives that turn the argument on its head. They should embrace the objective of avoiding racial preferences and announce detailed studies and vigilant oversight of why white people get so many of the jobs and contracts and preferential positions in our society. And high-profile conferences should be convened and extensive hearings conducted to explore just how it is that the positions of wealth, privilege and power in every section of our society are overwhelmingly allocated to whites. The key is to let the people see the dividing line, challenge people to choose, and begin the buildup now to make 2026 an opportunity to create the kind of society we want to have.
While standing up and fighting back, we have to simultaneously lean into the unsexy yet essential work of voter registration and mobilization. Ultimately, voting is the key to peacefully retaking power. When facing an earlier but similar level of naked aggression, racism and unleashed white racial resentment, Malcolm X warned of the choice between The Ballot or the Bullet. When he uttered those words, the country’s population was 88 percent white. Today, after removal of the whites-only immigration laws and practices that had kept the country unnaturally white for centuries, the US is a truly multiracial country, with people of color accounting for 41 percent of all residents, and they are not alone. A meaningful minority of whites have always supported and fought to make this a multiracial country. And despite the darkness of this hour, the electoral trend remains encouraging as the majority of young people rejected Trump, and every year nearly 4 million 17-year-olds turn 18 and become eligible to vote (Trump won the popular vote by 2.2 million votes).
We have the votes to take back power, but we have to register, inform, inspire, organize and galvanize our supporters. The way to do that is by going extraordinarily deep: There should be 1 million precinct captains in the country (there are roughly 200,000 total precincts), with every precinct, especially the ones in our counties, having a designated person making sure that every progressive-minded person is registered to vote and actually casts a ballot. In Texas, for example, the 2020 election was decided by 600,000 votes, and 4 million people of color did not vote. In Georgia, decided by 11,000 votes in 2020, 1.2 million people of color didn’t vote. The seeds of our resurgence are right there in the counties we won in the states we lost.
The ultimate objective of social change is to improve the lives of the people. The people of this country live in the cities and counties across the country. The majority of those places are areas of hope and opportunity, and that is where we need to focus our time and attention over the next four years.
Steve PhillipsTwitterSteve Phillips is a best-selling author, columnist, podcast host, and national political expert. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Brown Is the New White and How We Win the Civil War. He is also the founder of Democracy in Color, a political media organization dedicated to race, politics, and the multicultural progressive New American Majority.