It's hard to imagine today, but Barack Obama ran as a populist outsider, buoyed into office by a grassroots organizing campaign that used an incredibly innovative online organizing tool called MyBarackObama.com, which directly connected rank-and-file supporters so they could self-organize, creating an unstoppable force.

But as far as Obama was concerned, MyBarackObama.com was a campaigning tool, not a governing tool. The last thing Obama wanted was a clamorous electorate jostling his elbow while he made the grand bargains that defined his presidency: secret drone killings, immunity for telcos that profited from in illegal NSA spying, impunity for CIA torturers, bailing out bankers, complicity in the foreclosure epidemic, and, of course, unlimited free money for health insurance companies through the ACA.

Obama ran like a populist, but governed like Chuck Schumer. Meanwhile, the GOP of his day was dominated by its own "grassroots" groups, the Tea Party movement that was funded and organized by the Kochs but who quickly slipped the leash and became an ungovernable force that conquered the party. It turns out that the kind of people who get really involved in party activism are, well, passionate (a less charitable term might be cranks – and I say this as a certified, grade-A crank). They really believe in the principles that bring them into party activism, and the only people they hate more than the other party are their own sellout leaders (oh, hi, Senator Fetterman!).

For a leader whose theory of governance involves a lot of back-room favor-trading and Extremely Grown Up compromising, an activated, organized base represents a powerful obstacle. Obama's seeming genius was his ability to awaken a grassroots campaigning force that he could then hit pause on once he attained office, then re-activate on demand (Obama "revived" MyBarackObama.com for his second presidential campaign):

https://www.computerworld.com/article/1532634/barack-obama-s-big-data-won-the-us-election-2.html

But ultimately, I think we have to conclude that Obama's strategy was a losing one. By putting his own organization into an induced coma between elections, Obama lost an important source of discipline and feedback that would have told him when his compromises overstepped the tolerance of the electorate – and the fact that Obama didn't have an organized base meant that his Democratic Party rivals and his Republican opponents could force him into bad compromises, as with the ACA.

Contrast Obama with another "populist outsider" in the Democratic Party: Bernie Sanders. Sanders has never been afraid of his own base or their passion. Members of his staff disproportionately come from community and union organizing backgrounds. Think of the difference between Sanders' "Not me, US" and "Our revolution" slogans and Obama's dotcom URL, "MyBarackObama.com." Sanders' presidential campaigns were always organizing campaigns, and he's kept those going in non-election years.

Since Trump/Musk's shock therapy assault on American democracy, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been made headlines with a series of gigantic rallies across the country. The two Democratic Socialists have turned out vast crowds in Republican strongholds: 11,000 in Greely, CO; 15,000 in Tempe, AZ – and even bigger crowds in traditional Democratic turf: 34,000 in Denver.

Writing for The American Prospect, Micah Sifry describes the larger strategy behind these rallies. According to Faiz Shakur, the Sanders staffer who's organizing the events, the point of these events is to build a massive, grassroots organization that gets shit done:

https://prospect.org/politics/2025-03-26-bernies-fighting-oligarchy-tour-organizing/

The campaign is hiring full-time organizers in "Iowa, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and several Western states," and they're already actively fighting in state-level battles, like a Colorado bill to make it easier to form a union:

https://www.cpr.org/2025/02/03/colorado-labor-peace-action-union-history/