As a congressional staffer, Sarah Dohl saw Tea Partiers disrupt and dominate politics. Now she wants progressives to learn from the conservative movement

Politicians seeking re-election don’t like it when voters turn up to town hall meetings wearing devil horns and carrying tombstones scrawled with the officeholder’s name.

They don’t like it when their offices are inundated with angry calls from residents. They don’t like it when protesters turn up at events they were expecting to provide positive press and complain about every vote they have made.

They don’t like it, but they can’t ignore it. It’s how the Tea Party movement propelled its startling rise to power, from its beginnings in 2009 to the stunning election of 2016.

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As the fight against Donald Trump takes shape, some former congressional staffers think progressives should copy the conservative protest playbook.

About 30 staffers from Congress and not-for-profit groups have created the Indivisible guide, which offers very specific advice for “resisting the Trump agenda”.

“Unless you worked in congress the summer of 2009, you cannot fathom the volume of phone calls [that came in],” said Sarah Dohl, co-author, spokeswoman for the Indivisible guide and, between 2009 and 2013, a communications staffer for Lloyd Doggett, a Democratic Texas congressman.

Office phones would ring with Tea Party-aligned voters complaining from the moment staff arrived at the congressman’s office to well after they left, said Dohl. The office’s voicemail was always full.

“You’re trying to do things in your daily job – policy briefs, speeches – and you’re forced to take these phone calls and respond to emails and write letters,” she said.

“That’s why the Tea Party was so successful: it slowed federal policymaking to a halt.”

Dohl remembers clearly the day when her boss turned up for an event in a supermarket in Austin, in August 2009, to find protesters wearing devil horns, carrying tombstones with “RIP Doggett” written across them, and chanting “just say no”.



“That was the first time we saw it and that really set the tone for the next several years,” said Dohl, who now works with not-for-profit organizations. “It made it very hard to get anything done.”

Highly defensive “just say no” tactics could prove effective against the new Congress, said Dohl.

“If they were able to be successful against a president and Congress with a national mandate for change,” said Dohl, “we believe we can be just as [successful] if not more so with a president not coming into the office with the majority of Americans behind him or the Congress that does not enjoy the same majority that the Democrats did.”

Hillary Clinton won nearly 3m more votes than Trump, who won the presidency in the electoral college. Republicans hold 52 Senate seats to the Democrats’ 48 and control the House 241 to 194.

The Indivisible guide explains how congressional offices work and the best methods for getting Congress to pay attention.

“Many people probably don’t realize their members of Congress are re-elected every two years,” Dohl said. “What that system breeds is a person [who] is very accountable to the people who elect them.”

Conversely, she warns against people wasting time protesting against politicians who do not represent them.

“If people are calling Paul Ryan that don’t live in the first district of Wisconsin, it’s horrible to say he doesn’t care, but he’s not beholden to people who don’t elect him,” Dohl said.

Voters are better off calling their own members of congress, she said. If they like and agree with their member’s decisions, they should call the lawmaker’s office and say so.

“Rally the troops behind the members,” Dohl said. “Say: ‘Thank you for opposing Trump’s agenda but also speak out at every turn.’ Quiet opposition does not do as a much good as bold opposition.”

Progressives often struggle with an inclination to be defensive, the guide notes, because they want to set a new agenda with liberal ideas, not just stop things.

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“We don’t believe in abandoning those values,” Dohl said, “but in order to protect them and looking at the reality we face with Congress and Trump as president, simply we have to resist and defend those policies at every turn, and that means standing up against the policies of Congress and Trump.”

The guide also shows voters how to set up political organizing groups – or join existing ones – and then how to protest effectively.

For example, to protest a town hall meeting, the guide recommends preparing questions, scattering the group through the crowd, videoing and tweeting what happens and contacting local reporters.

So far, 1,000 groups have registered with the Indivisible guide. Volunteers are building a map so people can search for the nearest group to join.

Dohl said she hoped the guide would demystify the political process and remind voters that politicians are just normal people who want to keep their jobs.

“These are average people who can sometimes make bad decisions,” she said. “The responsibility we have as a country, as Americans, is to watch those decisions and have those voices heard when they’re making decisions that aren’t best for the country.”