Congress Inside the protest movement that has Republicans reeling A group of former House Democratic staffers wanted to channel their post-election grief. They never imagined what would happen next.

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich — Hill Republicans are openly accusing liberal mega-donors of bankrolling the tide of local protesters storming their offices. They’re beefing up their physical protection from demonstrators. And they’re imploring out-of-state critics to stop clogging their phone lines.

“It’s just yelling and criticizing. There is no substance,” said Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.). “It’s a protest against the election.”


To which Angel Padilla, a co-founder of the group organizing the demonstrations that have spread across the country in a matter of weeks, had this to say: You'd better get used to it.

"We want to pressure these members of Congress for as long as we have this president,” Padilla said.

Dubbed “Indivisible,” the group launched as a way for Padilla and a handful of fellow ex-Democratic aides to channel their post-election heartbreak into a manual for quashing President Donald Trump’s agenda. They drafted a 26-page protest guide for activists, full of pointers on how to bird dog their members of Congress in the language of Capitol insiders.

The booklet concludes with a stirring promise to fellow Trump enemies: “Good luck — we will win.”

The group isn’t planning to limit itself to the town-hall resistance to repealing Obamacare that it’s becoming known for. Indivisible has marshaled demonstrations against Trump’s Cabinet nominees and his immigration order, and it’s partnering with the organizers of the Jan. 21 Women’s March for a new action next week.

Its handful of senior leaders count about 100 contributors to their national organizing work but insist that all are working on a volunteer basis. They know conservatives are spreading unfounded rumors that their success is being driven by wealthy donors like George Soros, which they flatly deny.

“It doesn’t matter who we take money from — we’re always going to get blamed as a Soros group, even if we don’t take money from Soros,” said Padilla, now an analyst with the National Immigration Law Center. “That’s one of the attacks and that’s fine.”

The group began when Ezra Levin, a former aide to Texas Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett, commiserated over the election in late November with his wife Leah Greenberg, a longtime aide to ex-Virginia Democratic Rep. Tom Perriello. The couple was “going through the stages of grief, like a lot of progressives,” Levin recalled in an interview, “and wanted to do what we could to help.”

They got to work on what became the "Indivisible Guide," billed as a set of “best practices for making Congress listen.” The manual borrows openly from the early tactics of the Tea Party, which sprouted on the strength of local conservative resistance to former President Barack Obama’s hefty government stimulus bill and health care reform plan.

“Trump is not popular,” the guide states. “He does not have a mandate. He does not have large congressional majorities. If a small minority in the Tea Party could stop President Obama, then we the majority can stop a petty tyrant named Trump.”

The Indivisible manual is often blunt about what it says members of Congress really tick — and how protesters might use it to their advantage. One chart compares what "your MoC cares a lot about" (an example: "an interest group's endorsement") vs. what a lawmaker "doesn't care much about" (for one, "your thoughtful analysis of the proposed bill").

Levin, Greenberg, Padilla, and another former Doggett aide, Jeremy Haile, continued tweaking the guide even as their burgeoning effort mushroomed a full-fledged movement. About two dozen veteran Hill staffers and activists contributed or edited the guide in some way since that November first draft, according to Levin.

While the millions-strong turnout for anti-Trump Women’s Marches captured the nation last month, the Indivisible founders were conscious of the need for protest tactics that could truly force members of Congress to pay attention — or risk losing their seats.

“Marches are great to bring people together, but our experience as congressional staffers had taught us that energy needed to be channeled in a smart way to make a difference on Capitol Hill,” Haile said.

Indivisible's founders never planned or expected the groundswell of interest that resulted from their guide, which prompted them to organize as a 501(c)4 group this month. "The last thing the progressive ecosystem really needed was yet another nonprofit," Levin said.

But Indivisible's guide has spread at the grassroots level at an unpredictable speed this year, with the help of other liberal groups amplifying its message. Less than two months after the group launched its website, 225,000 interested participants have registered to learn more, according to Levin.

It helped that Doggett was one of the first Democrats targeted by the tea party in the summer of 2009. During one of his routine Saturday morning office hours that August, hundreds of local conservative activists showed up wearing Revolutionary War costumes, Haile recalled. They chanted and jeered while carrying tombstones and coffins, and the chaotic scene caught the attention of the national media. Doggett required an escort to leave his own event that day.

Fast forward to last weekend. Police escorted Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) out of his own town hall meeting after a local Indivisible chapter joined other progressive groups to protest it.

When the tea party began rattling lawmakers with local disruptions, Haile explained, “what mattered was this sense around the members that their constituents were unhappy. And what that is did is create discontent around Congress but also energized angry people who said, 'I’m angry; we’re angry; and if we join together we can make a difference and get members of Congress to change their positions.'”

That alignment of protesters galvanized by many different issues is a linchpin of Indivisible’s early success. The group doesn’t have a core policy mission: some chapters protest in defense of Obamacare; others embrace criminal justice reform or rally against Trump’s controversial travel ban.

Chapters don’t even have to call themselves Indivisible. Levin estimated that no more than 40 percent of the 6,200 local affiliates registered on the group’s website use the name.

The organizers of Indivisible Grand Rapids, for example, hadn’t spoken to any original drafters in Washington before they helped marshal a crowd of several hundred to a Thursday night town hall meeting held by Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.). Chapter leaders explained to POLITICO that they’d heard about the movement through friends, visited the website to register themselves, then found others registered in their area who wanted to start a group.

The Michiganders downloaded the Indivisible guide and started a Facebook group in mid-January. The group now includes more than 300 people, a third of whom are registered for a Sunday training session on how to approach lawmakers.

“It’s important for us that we rise above; we don’t want to be depicted in any way as only being an angry mob, and we’re not,” said Claire Bode, 49, the co-founder of Indivisible Grand Rapids. “It’s a long-haul effort.”

Indivisible is also embracing collaboration with other major anti-Trump protest outlets. Leaders of the group were in communication with Women’s March organizers before their main event on Jan. 21, and that partnership will become official when the March unveils the third in its series of 10 direct actions that attendees have been asked to pursue in their communities.

In addition, MoveOn.org and the Working Families Party joined with Indivisible for its first nationwide call on Jan. 22. Nearly 60,000 people phoned in that day, according to Levin and MoveOn organizing director Victoria Kaplan. Indivisible estimates that its second national call, on the impact of Trump’s immigration order with assistance from the ACLU and Padilla’s group, drew 35,000 people.

Kaplan said MoveOn plans to team up again with Indivisible ahead of the Presidents' Day recess week. They want to help to major local chapters organize demonstrations while lawmakers are back home in their districts.

The White House has aggressively pushed back at any comparisons between the new Indivisible-boosted efforts and the tea party. Trump spokesman Sean Spicer told Fox News on Monday that the anti-Obama conservative opposition was “a very organic movement” but the rippling wave of liberal protest is “a very paid, Astroturf-type movement.”

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) sounded a similar note in an interview. “I think it’s going to be a demonstration a week until they run out of funding,” he said, predicting that “they will incrementally die off.”

It doesn't look like that will happen soon. Two House Republican chairmen faced fierce pushback at town halls in their districts on Thursday night, with budget committee chairwoman Rep. Diane Black fielding tough questions on the party’s lack of a united plan to replace Obamacare and oversight committee chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz shouted down by furious boos.

Organizers at the Amash town hall said they're in it for the long haul. At the event in Grand Rapids, Mich., they passed out pamphlets encouraging attendees to "boo when he falls back on regressive values."

And they recruited the best interrogators in the crowd to join their cause.

"Do you mind if I grab your contact information?" group organizer Colin McWatters asked one Amash constituent who grilled the lawmaker about GOP plans to repeal Obamacare.

The constituent signed up.