Hillary Clinton is officially running for president, and many leftists and liberals — even former Clinton senate-campaign staffer Bill de Blasio — are less than thrilled. As First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State, Clinton has helped remake the Democratic Party into the hawkish, Wall Street-friendly institution it is today. And yet many concede that a Republican would be even worse.

These critics are right on both counts. Clinton is a disappointing candidate for progressives, and the GOP nominee will be worse. But why are we looking to politicians to set the terms of our national debate in the first place?

Despite their rhetorical obsession with “leadership,” politicians are fundamentally reactive creatures. It was militant industrial workers who pushed Franklin Roosevelt to expand the New Deal, just as Occupy Wall Street protesters forced Barack Obama to talk inequality. Instead of spending the next 18 months recycling the same debate about Hillary, progressives should look for grassroots ways to put their grievances on the agenda — no matter who ends up in the White House.

Two vibrant movements are already putting pressure on elected officials from below. Last Wednesday, tens of thousands of low-wage workers turned out in every major city to demand $15 an hour and the right to join a union. They were joined by equal numbers of unionized workers endorsing their call. Meanwhile, as police continue to kill unarmed black people, Black Lives Matter activists are organizing to disrupt business as usual across the country.

Activists are also identifying points of overlap between the fights for racial and economic justice — witness the use of the “die-in” tactic in front of a New York McDonalds during Wednesday’s strike. “Economic justice is racial justice,” was a common refrain.

Protesters are eager to work with sympathetic politicians. But they understand that history is made on the streets before it gets ratified at the ballot box. If the mobilizations continue to grow, they just might force elected leaders to come up with some alternative ideas about how to run the country.

The history of the civil rights movement illustrates clearly how the pressure of protests can fundamentally reshape electoral politics. In the 1930s and 40s, Lyndon Baines Johnson — then a casually racist Congressman from Texas — voted consistently against civil rights legislation and anti-lynching bills. He denounced proposals to dismantle segregated bus travel as “a farce and a sham — an effort to set up a police state in the guise of liberty.”

Fourteen years later, John F. Kennedy had his attorney general order the Interstate Commerce Commission to begin enforcing anti-segregation laws on the highway. After Kennedy’s assassination, his vice president — none other than Lyndon Johnson — went on to pass the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, even mentioning the civil rights slogan “We shall overcome” in a speech to Congress.