Resistance movement hopes to keep momentum

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. — One hundred days after President Donald Trump took office, the resistance efforts that grabbed headlines in the form of massive women-led marches across the country the day after the inauguration have settled into something less visible but perhaps much broader.

The resistance has been mounted on a number of fronts, by venerable organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood, as well as upstarts such as the Indivisible Project and the Women’s March. Many U.S. cities have pledged to remain “sanctuaries” for people living in the country illegally despite President Trump’s threat to withhold federal grants from those cities, and states such as Hawaii and Maryland have filed lawsuits over his executive order seeking to ban travelers from some Muslim-majority countries.

The foot soldiers are the men and women who have joined thousands of groups such as Indivisible 757 that have formed nationwide, from Virginia Beach to Orange County, California.

It is unclear whether this nascent Democratic movement can maintain enough momentum to create change as effectively as tea party conservatives did after Barack Obama’s election. That movement, which grew out of conservative outrage, pushed the GOP to the right and laid the groundwork for Trump’s victory.

Liberals seeking to build a similar power base face different challenges. They remain fractured after the election, some still identifying as supporters of Hillary Clinton or her foe in the Democratic primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.

Progressives have other structural challenges that make their task more difficult, particularly their concentration in big cities and university towns and their tendency to mobilize more for presidential elections than state and local ones.