Bastiaan Slabbers | NurPhoto | Getty Images
Sign in the crowd as an estimated 5.000 protest the Donald Trump Presidency during the March for Humanity, in Philadelphia, PA, on February 4th, 2017.
The last time Democrats lost a presidential election, in 2004, some of the party’s largest donors got together to seed massive new groups that became pillars of a new progressive infrastructure.
This year, a thousand apps have bloomed online amidst the post-election chaos. With no direction from dazed party officials, a diverse mix of programmers, lawyers, mothers, and political operatives have taken it upon themselves to build new tools to harness the energy created on the left to oppose President Donald Trump’s actions and policies.
Like their Silicon Valley counterparts, many of these political startups are struggling to meet a scale of demand they did not anticipate. Run almost entirely by volunteers, some may not survive, others may be subsumed into legacy players. All hope the anti-Trump outrage that fuels them will sustain itself.
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But for now, it’s a fascinating experiment in decentralized political infrastructure building.
“The institutions are hopefully going to help with scaling some of these folks that were a little faster than the institutions,” said Scott Goodstein, the CEO of Revolution Messaging, the digital firm behind Bernie Sanders’ campaign, who has helped some of the new apps get off the ground. “But I hope that everybody realizes that we’re all in this together.”
Here are some of most discussed new startups powering the so-called resistance.
