We've spent months preparing for this election. Organizing, mobilizing, defending our communities, protecting the institutions we depend on, and working toward a future that feels increasingly difficult to secure. I am so happy for us. We demonstrated that money is not the only lever of power that matters in a democracy. We watched 100k “election monitors” fan out across the country - and even that couldn’t stop people power.
For those of you who worked on these elections in any way, savor the wins. Process what we sacrificed for those wins. And when all is said and done – rest. Thank you, thank you, thank you for all of your work. Thank you to each and every one of you.
We have been in a grade A, five-alarm fire of an emergency for some time now. We have grown used to hearing that our work is the duct tape keeping our communities together. It’s been incredible to watch. We are very good at responding to emergencies. However, the work that has shaped my life for the last 7 years has constantly reminded me – we are much less practiced at building institutions that can sustain what comes after. When the heat is on, we are dialed in, but when the moment of brief respite and time for strategy comes - we tend to spend that time in-fighting.
We all know the work of building a multiracial democracy cannot begin and end at the ballot box and this fact demands more of us. However, what it looks like for our institutions to be living, breathing, joy-inspiring monuments to the very principles we are fighting for our government to honor; that has always been work we put off or put down.
We are living through a period of enormous political uncertainty, institutional instability, and conflict within our own movements. We are about to be faced with our serious disagreements about strategy, leadership, accountability, and what it will take to win. Some of those disagreements are necessary and come with the territory of building something new when there is no playbook. Other disagreements can become so consuming that we lose sight of what we might accomplish together. At precisely the moment when our movements need more people sharing all kinds of power, we tend to lock into battles over whose power is legitimate the moment we hint at disagreement. We see difference and we hoard power instead of sharing it.
Power Is Not Binary
As we move into this next phase of movement building work, I want to pause and discuss the conflict between older and younger generations of leaders. We have much more power now, and that’s usually when this divide becomes more pronounced and tug-of-war like. It takes a lot of possibility and makes it binary.
I don’t believe power is binary where you either have it or you don't. Instead, I believe power is dynamic, contextual, and a series of levers to be used based on the situation in front of us. This approach helps us examine not whether we win or lose but rather how we work with each other.
This is what gets lost in so many of our internal power struggles. We treat power as something another person must surrender before we can exercise our own.
Older leaders often hold the levers of money and decision-making authority. They control budgets, direct institutions, make hiring decisions, and determine which ideas receive resources. Younger leaders may have less access to those forms of power, but they have developed extraordinary influence through audiences, networks, and the ability to shape public narratives.
We tend to recognize one of these forms of power as leadership and dismiss the other as disruption. Younger people are accused of practicing cancel culture, using public pressure to punish people or force institutions to change. But older leaders have their own ways of canceling people. They can withhold funding, deny opportunities, remove someone from a position, or simply decide that a person no longer gets access to the rooms where decisions are made. One form of exclusion happens in public. The other can happen behind closed doors, through the routine exercise of institutional authority.
Neither generation has a monopoly on virtue or abuse. Both are exercising power, often without recognizing the power the other holds. And when we reduce these struggles to questions of who is right, who is entitled, or who has behaved badly, we miss the opportunity to ask more useful questions: What would become possible if we combined these forms of power instead of using them against one another? Or if we expanded our concept of power to see complexity while building systems that can hold us all?
As many of you know, I believe there are seven levers of power: money, information, decision makers, rights, platform, self-awareness, and community. Power is not one thing, nor does it reside exclusively with whoever holds the highest title or controls the largest budget. Different people and institutions have access to different levers, and our ability to create meaningful change depends on how we use them together.
A leader may control money but lack the trust of a community. A young organizer may have a powerful platform but no authority to make institutional decisions. A coalition may have deep relationships and tremendous public support but lack the information or resources needed to turn that support into durable change. None of these actors is powerless. But they aren’t likely to achieve their ambitions alone either.
This is what gets lost in so many of our internal power struggles. We treat power as something another person must surrender before we can exercise our own. We confuse control with capacity. And we sometimes spend so much energy trying to prevent someone else from exercising power that we fail to build the collective power necessary to confront the forces working against us. We cannot afford this in the next leg.
Democracy and the Work Ahead
The stakes extend far beyond our organizations. Our opponents are not waiting for us to resolve every disagreement, perfect every process, or arrive at a shared understanding of what accountability should look like. They are using all of the power available to them: political authority, institutional influence, financial resources, media platforms, and organized communities. We cannot afford to respond as though the only power that matters is the power we do not possess or the power to remove the people we think don’t deserve to be among us.
We belong to each other, the time to make that real is now.
This does not mean setting aside real grievances in the name of unity. Sharing power is not the same as avoiding conflict, and collective action cannot be built on silence or the expectation that people with less authority simply accept the decisions of those with more. Nor that those with more formal power simply submit to what their told at the threat of emotional turbulence, It means becoming more sophisticated about power itself: understanding what each of us holds, what we are willing to share, what risks we are asking others to carry, and what becomes possible when our resources are brought into relationship.
Over the coming weeks, there will be plenty of analysis about why a politician won, which coalition failed, and which leaders deserve credit or blame. Some of it will be useful, but I hope those of us committed to building a different future will ask ourselves another set of questions. What power did we fail to recognize? What relationships did we neglect in this time? What opportunities for collective action did we sacrifice in our struggles with one another?
We. Have. More. Power. Then. We. Think. The challenge is learning to recognize it in one another, combine it, share it, prioritize with it across difference, and use it to build institutions capable of sustaining the democracy we say we want. We belong to each other, the time to make that real is now.
