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WASHINGTON – The negative reactions to Donald Trump’s second term have come in great waves. Democrats sweep in last week’s elections. The 7 million people who attended last month’s demonstration throughout the country “No Kings” protests.

But there has also been another, less obvious kind of pullback all year: a massive surge in young progressives signing up to run for office.

In the year since Trump won re-election, nearly 75,000 people have signed up to run for local or state offices through Run for Something, a grassroots political group that recruits young progressives in down-ballot races in all 50 states.

For context, about 67,000 people signed up for the group during Trump’s first term, for all of those four years.

There’s a different energy driving young people to consider running for office this year, says Amanda Litman, co-founder and executive director of the organization.

“You hear people say quite explicitly, ‘I’m not going to wait my turn,'” he told News themezone in a recent interview. “‘I didn’t want to run for office. But I feel like I have to.'”

Run For Something, which launched in 2017 in response to Trump’s first presidential victory, recruits people under 40, who are generally left-of-center Democrats and who align with the group’s stated values. Those values ​​include things like supporting abortion rights, LGBTQ+ equality, climate protection, and ending gun violence. Beyond that, it’s up to each candidate to decide how to reflect those values ​​in their campaigns.

The group had a very good night in last week’s elections. It endorsed 222 candidates in the general elections, and of the 193 such races called, 129 of its candidates won in state and local races in 23 states. They include 36 candidates who flipped seats held by Republicans to Democrats. That’s a 66% win rate so far, the highest ever recorded by the group.

“We now know, as we saw earlier this week, that we can win,” Litman said on a call with reporters last week. “Local candidates can be some of the party’s best messengers right now.”

The election itself prompted more people to sign up for Run for Something. In the week after Democrats swept the polls, another 5,000 people signed up to run. And there was a surge within that surge: Nearly 1,200 of them signed up within 24 hours of moderate Senate Democrats. caving sunday in his party’s fight to protect health care subsidies for millions of people in exchange for reopening the government.

“This shit is why people don’t trust the Democratic Party,” Litman joked Sunday night. on social networksin response to the Democrats’ concession.

Moments later, she connected the dots for anyone who missed it: “Primaries are good, healthy and useful. It’s not too late to start for 2026.”

run for something

The waves of Run for Something registrations come at a time when young people have reason to feel disillusioned about the path ahead.

Add to the mixture a tremendously unstable The political climate and AI are increasingly stealing jobs of humans, and it’s not hard to see why young people may feel compelled to try to address the bigger issues holding them back in life. What better way to do that than by changing the policies that put them in this grim situation in the first place?

“They’re over it,” Litman said. And seeing so many people turn desperation into action “is a really exciting feeling.”

Judge Horn, 27, is one of those people. He was managing Department of Energy projects for a Missouri nonprofit when his federal grant was suddenly canceled earlier this year as part of Trump’s extensive cuts. Packing up his office in a cloud of anger and disappointment, Horn began thinking about running for local office as another way to look at the types of workforce development projects he had been working on at his job.

“I thought, OK, if I’m going to have all this free time, I’m unemployed, I’m going to fully commit to this,” Horn said. Citing the motto of the late civil rights icon John Lewis, he added: “Because when we have a lot of free time, you can get into some trouble. Some good trouble.”

He had heard about Run for Something through friends in progressive politics and filled out the group’s questionnaire, which asks potential candidates why they want to run for office, how they plan to interact with voters in their community and what kind of “heart and enthusiasm” they can bring to a campaign. Not everyone who runs gets the group’s endorsement, but if they do, they inherit a wealth of resources, including a campaign advisor, an alumni advisor, and access to training and guides for a successful career.

Horn checked all the boxes for the group. In late May, he announced his candidacy for an at-large seat in the Jackson County Legislature, representing Kansas City. If he wins this election, which will take place in August 2026, he would be the first Generation Z resident elected to a position in Jackson County government.

Horn has spent months knocking on doors in his community, meeting many people who are unemployed and who, like him, lost their jobs at nonprofits or in city government because federal funding was cut. He talks to them about his priority issues, such as launching a guaranteed jobs program and addressing the affordable housing crisis.

Young people uniquely understand the “urgency” of these things, Horn said, because they are directly affected. Like many of his peers, he gets by on credit cards and loans.

“We’re all unemployed. We know what it’s like to navigate these bureaucracies,” he said, referring to federal food assistance and unemployment benefits. “That anger… I just like that people use it to do better and change things, you know?”

Horn added: “Because a lot of people are depressed, you know?”

JP Yim via Getty Images

Before last week’s election, Litman said there were four separate times in the last year when waves of people signed up for Run for Something: right after Trump won re-election in November 2024; when Trump carried out his first major wave of federal layoffs in February through his so-called Department of Government Efficiency; when Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) angered progressives in March by voting for a GOP bill to prevent a government shutdown; and when New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary in July. (Mamdani also won the general election last week).

The post-Mamdani increase was the largest. Litman speculated that her primary victory resonated with young people in part because of her focus on affordable housing, a theme that continues to emerge in Run for Something’s outlook. But Mamdani, 34, also showed that a young progressive can take on the political establishment and, against all odds, win.

“They’ve seen evidence that it’s possible,” he said. “A lot of people will try and won’t do it. But it’s possible, and the fact that it’s possible is inspiring.”

To be sure, Litman’s group is not the only left-wing organization supporting young people in their runs for local and state office. This is also critical to the efforts of the Democratic Party, through its state chapters and the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. The difference is that Run for Something is recruiting people to the left of the establishment and is focused exclusively on building a pipeline of young, diverse progressives who can launch careers in public office.

Some of his students have gone on to Congress, such as Representatives Jasmine Crockett (Texas) and Sarah McBride (Del.). Some are running for the Senate in 2026, like Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow and Iowa State Senator Zach Walls. More than 20 Democrats under the age of 40 are currently running for Congress, and nearly half are Run for Something alumni.

All of them are among the more than 230,000 people in the Run for Something project. To date, the group has endorsed more than 3,500 candidates and elected more than 1,600 people in 48 states to state legislatures, city councils, school boards and mayors.

In its appeals to potential new candidates, Run for Something dismisses the current generation of Democratic leaders in office as old and out of touch.

“Politics is stuck in a repeat. The same old generation makes the decisions, and the people who make the rules don’t look like the people who live under them,” the group’s report reads. website. “Ready to change that? Run for Something manages the largest field of candidates in Democratic politics, filled with young, diverse progressives who truly represent the people.”

There are times when Run for Something candidates have directly challenged Democratic Party-backed incumbents. That friction within the party is fine with Litman.

“It’s like if the incumbent was doing a good job, he was going to win,” he said. “If not, then there will be a better Democrat.”

Andrew Harbaugh

In some cases, people signed up for Run for Something and then went on hiatus. That still works for the group, as it maintains a lifetime list of potential future candidates.

Theora Tiffney lost her job in April as a federal contractor at the National Institutes of Health after Trump’s cuts to federal funding. Tiffney, who is gender nonbinary and in her 30s, had always planned a career in public health policy and sees a natural connection between the work she had been doing and elected office.

“There is a really powerful spirit of service for anyone entering federal employment,” they said. “You typically make 30% less than in private industry. There are extremely intrusive background checks. Ethical stipulations. You really get into this if you want to make the world a better place.”

Tiffney signed up for Run for Something last spring, but there is no obvious position to apply for in her community in Montgomery County, Maryland. Meanwhile, they were selected for a two-month residency at the Brocher Foundation, a group that studies the impact of medical development on society. It is unpaid, but it is a prestigious position and will take them to Geneva, Switzerland, next summer to continue their health research.

They’ve put their political ambitions on hold for now, but let’s keep elected officials in mind in the future. The satisfaction Tiffney gets from working in public service is something they say naturally appeals to young people, and something the current president will never understand.

“One of the reasons the Trump administration is attacking public administration as it is is that it is completely foreign to it,” they observed. “They want it to go back to being a tool to reinforce power structures, rather than a tool to help people.”

“My ‘progressive’ is different from yours, because the ‘progressive’ in my area is different from yours.”

Andrew Harbaugh, 31, would agree. He lives in a close-knit community in red Clarion County, Pennsylvania, and used to be a Republican. But last week he won a seat on the Clarion City Council as a proud Democrat.

He fully embraces Run for Something’s philosophy that “progressive” means something different to each candidate and the community they come from.

“My ‘progressive’ is different than yours, because my area’s ‘progressive’ is different than yours,” Harbaugh said. “If Google Maps tries to take you somewhere, it gives you four different paths. But you still end up going from point A to point B.”

He said conservatives in his community have been willing to look beyond his party affiliation because they see that he is genuinely invested in them and delivering results. That was the message that inspired him to run for office in the first place, when he first heard it from former Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz at last year’s party convention.

“It was one of those moments where something clicks inside you,” Harbaugh said. “I totally understand being a Democrat in a red zone. You have to work really hard for it. And the whole Walz thing was like, we’re not all going to love the same, we’re not all going to think the same, we’re not all going to pray the same. But at the end of the day, we’re all neighbors.”

His approach seems to be resonating. As the father of a fourth-grade son with autism, Harbaugh said he is connected to people in his community about how Republican cuts to Medicaid and federal education funding have hurt him personally. You’ve heard their concerns about rising health care costs and how to address local budget challenges.

He’s even convinced some of his Republican friends to consider signing up for Run for Something. This may seem counterintuitive, Harbaugh said, but they also care about their community and have real potential to help lead it. And despite being Republicans, they recognize that when Trump does things like send ICE into communities to terrorize families or increase costs for Americans with his tariffs, “none of this is right.”

“It reminds you that good ideas are still possible and can still be heard instead of all this incendiary shit,” Harbaugh said.

“I think we showed [in last week’s elections] “Ideas don’t have to have letters next to their name, but rather have results in mind,” he added. “That was enough here. I think that was enough everywhere.”