Women Are Marching Again, But It's Not About Donald Trump
The sea of pink pussy hats that swarmed Washington, D.C., for the first inaugural Women’s March last January will look a little different this year.
The locus of resistance is moving out of the president’s backyard and into Las Vegas, Nevada, where women and allies will stage an event elevating women and progressive candidates, called “Power to the Polls.” Unlike last year, when many women took cross-country buses to unite in one central location, this year the Women’s March organizers are placing an emphasis on organizing locally. And instead of a one-day event, the Las Vegas rally will be the first of several events held in swing states across the country, in a race to register 1 million voters.
“It would have been very easy to do an anniversary march in D.C., but we wanted people not just to think about marching for women once a year on January 21st,” said Bob Bland, co-president of the Women’s March. “We wanted women and allies and everyone who marched last year to know that activism is a thing they can do every day.”
The simultaneous decentralization of the movement and the recalibration of power among its ranks is not a coincidence. The Women’s March is not about Trump anymore, nor is it really about pussies. Women’s March activists say they’re more focused on engaging women, communities of color, and new voters in the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections. And just as each woman has her own reason for standing up—“The spark is usually a woman’s outrage,” says Bland—each locality has its own issues to champion.
Large liberal cities like Boston, New York City, and Los Angeles are of course the ones that expect especially large turn-out again this year. But Women’s March National is not looking to build hubs, says Bland: “We want to look at races that are local—where we’ve found the most exciting examples of women and women of color who are unapologetically aligned with our unity principles.” They’ve observed the strongest organizing in red and purple states like Michigan, Iowa, Tennessee, Florida, Arizona, New Mexico, Wisconsin, and Utah, she says.