Trump is gone, so Pennsylvania progressives are thinking local: ‘That’s where all the real stuff happens’

In Southwestern Pennsylvania, progressive activists are planning workshops on how to engage with voters who believe such conspiracy theories as Donald Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen.

In the Lehigh Valley, organizers are securing commitments from local candidates to reallocate police funding and pursue policies aimed at dismantling systemic racism.

And in Philadelphia, activists who have helped topple establishment Democrats are putting City Council on notice that this year’s budget must prioritize low-income renters over big developers.

Trump’s 2016 election unleashed a new generation of political activism and grassroots organizing on the left, which over four years helped Democrats win back the White House and Congress. As Indivisible chapters and “resistance” groups formed across the country to elect Democrats and beat Trump, some other liberals started to fundamentally rethink the social contract. They participated in such big events as the Women’s March and Black Lives Matter protests, but also put countless hours into holding community meetings, getting candidates on the ballot, and even running for office themselves.

It remains to be seen what will happen to all that political energy now that the man who spurred so much of it is out of office. But interviews with a dozen activists across Pennsylvania suggest that as much as Trump-era progressives were mobilized by the former president, they have long been and remain focused on effecting change in their own communities.

For people such as Neil Ren, 25, that means writing pledges that lay out a vision for school board and city council candidates in the Lehigh Valley.

“That’s where all the real stuff happens here,” said Ren, who volunteers for Lehigh Valley Stands Up, part of a network of progressive groups across the state.

“There wasn’t just some sudden awakening because of Trump,” Ren said. “We are people who are driven by broader goals — transformative change through social and economic justice — and we’re just going to continue to organize and empower folks to ... know their voice matters and make their voice heard.”

» READ MORE: Democrats had a brutal 2020 in Pennsylvania besides Biden. Now they’re charting a path forward.

Some who got involved in organizing are now crafting an agenda as newly elected officials.

Rick Krajewski was working as a software engineer when Trump won. Krajewski, who is Black, described feeling concerned for his safety and wondering whether he could “even trust the other white people around me, because this person was elected.”

He joined Reclaim Philadelphia, a grassroots group formed in 2016 by Bernie Sanders staffers. And last year, Krajewski, 29, was elected state representative in West Philadelphia after beating a 35-year incumbent in the Democratic primary.

Now he’s working in Harrisburg on a “People’s Budget” that “centers the needs of working people” — though whatever budget he and his colleagues propose is surely dead-on-arrival in the Republican-controlled legislature.

Krajewski’s allies at Reclaim, which now counts about 850 dues-paying members, are working to send more progressives to Harrisburg while also defending the gains they have made so far. One test will come this spring as District Attorney Larry Krasner faces a primary challenge. The longtime civil rights lawyer’s 2017 victory was a seminal moment for Philadelphia progressives and foreshadowed more victories to come.

Reclaim activists are also working to advance renters’ rights with such groups as the Philly Rent Control Coalition and ACT-UP Philly, a nonprofit that has long advocated for people living with HIV/AIDS. Housing advocates say the Black Lives Matter protests last year reinvigorated the city’s affordable-housing movement.

“We’re going to continue to push for and be part of a movement to ensure we have a moral budget, to ensure we are funding communities, and funding access to safe, accessible, and affordable housing over giving that money to police,” said Tammer Ibrahim, a Reclaim housing activist.

Of course, a whole progressive ecosystem predated Trump-era activism. Many longtime community organizers in Philadelphia continue to focus on such basics as food insecurity, jobs, gun violence, and poverty. And the new activists’ goals, as well as their definition of what it means to be progressive, don’t always align with those who came before them.

For some, it’s a given that public and private institutions are plagued by structural racism and must be fundamentally transformed. Reclaim is holding a nine-week “Mass Liberation School” that invites community members “to reflect on the roles each of us should play in creating police- and prison-free communities.”

Others say that approach is counterproductive to progressive goals: Prisons aren’t going to be abolished anytime soon, but Republicans will highlight such rhetoric to campaign against Democrats, as they did last year with calls to “defund the police.”

» READ MORE: Pennsylvania Republicans have left the party in big numbers since the Capitol attack

In more conservative parts of the state, activists are trying to tackle another problem: the disinformation that helped lead to the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. Progress PA, a Southwestern Pennsylvania group that formed in 2017, is planning a “communications boot camp” with a nonprofit that works to fight right-wing propaganda.

“We’ll get people doing some role-playing — how to talk to people who are sort of swept up with the Big Lie and other conspiracy theories, and how to get them to step back and think about it and kind of deprogram them if we can,” said Linda Bishop, 69, referring to the myth of a stolen election that has gained wide purchase with Trump supporters.

“We can’t just say, ‘Oh, we took back the White House,’” said Bishop, who lives in deeply conservative Butler County, north of Pittsburgh. “If you talk to half the people around here where I live, they don’t even believe that. They believe Trump is gonna rise from the dead here. We just can’t relax.”

That sustained engagement was evident during a February lunchtime Zoom meeting held by Turn PA Blue, which worked unsuccessfully to flip the state legislature last year.

“We had 300 people at noon on Wednesday to hear [two party activists] talk about political mapping,” Turn PA Blue executive director Jamie Perrapato, a 49-year-old former commercial litigator from Bala Cynwyd who helped found the group after Trump’s election, said last month. “Everybody was, like, riveted.”

Some organizers said there’s been a natural decline in activity following a high-stakes presidential election, as they consider bigger questions about their purpose. An Indivisible chapter in Montgomery County updated its charter in January because it was oriented around fighting Trump. “What is our focus moving forward and what is our mission?” Spencer Lewis, the chapter’s founder, recalled asking members.

Lewis, a 52-year-old digital marketing strategist, said “the lack of a clear villain” makes it harder to keep people engaged. But the GOP is still carrying on Trump’s cause, he said, pointing to Republican lawmakers’ false claims of voter fraud and proposals in Harrisburg to make it harder to vote.

“We’ve cut off the head of the snake, but the snake seems to still be living,” Lewis recalled one activist telling him.

» READ MORE: What unites Pennsylvania Republicans after Trump? Democrats and tightening voting laws.

Lewis said his Indivisible group is focused on electing more Democrats to the state legislature and more people of color to leadership positions in the local Democratic Party. “Because this county has been blue and trending blue for a long time, people just kind of assumed it’s like Philly-lite out here,” he said. “It’s not. We’re still dealing with a lot of the same issues … in terms of lack of representation that you see elsewhere in the state.”

Lewis isn’t alone. Christopher Jaramillo, a 29-year-old FEMA worker, cofounded the Movement for Black and Brown Lives in Montgomery County last year. In January, he was appointed to fill a vacancy on the Norristown Area School District Board and is now running for a full term.

“We need to value the cultural capital that exists in the Latinx community,” he said, adding that many don’t believe that they have a voice either because of their immigration status or language barriers.

Jaramillo and cofounders Veronica Moeller and Carmina Taylor are also convening community meetings with police chiefs to address juvenile justice issues and holding forums for school board candidates. They plan to raise alarms about Republican County Commissioner Joe Gale, who announced last month that he’s running for governor. Gale drew a firestorm of controversy last June when he described the Black Lives Matter movement as a “hate group.”

Black Lives Matter also helped motivate Ren, the Lehigh Valley activist, to get involved.

Ren said that growing up outside Allentown as a first-generation American, he “never really thought of the Lehigh Valley as a place where progressive politics happens.”

“So when I saw there were thousands of people marching in Allentown, in Bethlehem, demanding that our cities basically review policing … I think that was just a wow moment,” Ren said.

In addition to vetting candidates for office, Lehigh Valley Stands Up is planning to address policing in schools and neighborhoods. That starts with community conversations about “what safety looks like, about what help should look like, about where our money goes.”

“Organizing isn’t something that just happens,” he said. “It takes a lot of planning, a lot of research, a lot of work.”