Those of us involved in resistance work are often curious about the aims and tangible results of mass efforts, in the causes we care about. I was gratified to learn about how much effort and love went into the May Day action and what we can expect in the future to safeguard our democracy.
—Sarah Walz
Adapted from Daniel Hunter’s article, by the same name
The mass mobilization on May Day was a show of power — and a dress rehearsal of the tactics it takes to win against an authoritarian regime.
On May 1, organizers reported over 5,000 May Day Strong actions across the country. With No Kings, millions were activated into the streets. May Day had another goal in mind—to stretch our mass mobilization skills to include more, to quote Martin Luther King Jr., “creative tension.” The need for escalation became all the more urgent in light of the MAGA Supreme Court’s ruling eviscerating the Voting Rights Act.
So in New York, protesters with the Sunrise Movement shut down entrances to the New York Stock Exchange—a daring tactical escalation. In Raleigh, North Carolina, 20 school districts closed for the largest statewide teacher rally since 2019. At Kent State University in Ohio, students honored previous generations who braved bullets, standing in the rain and wind to protest the closing of DEI offices and scholarships. The May Day Strong coalition was also consciously moving in a unique formation with National Nurses United, AAUP, NDWA and dozens of local unions, including SEIU, AFSCME and UNITE HERE locals, joining with the likes of Indivisible and 50501.
Finding the right yardstick
One of the hazards of living under an authoritarian attempting to consolidate power is that most of our victories will not come from government interventions. Therefore “Did we stop him today?” cannot be our yardstick for growth—though obviously, it is an ultimate aim. A different yardstick could be numbers. But of course No Kings blows that out of the water with an impressive eight million people taking action this March. But No Work, No School, No Shopping is not sign-waving—it’s economic pressure.
A strong coalition of protestors, labor, school kids, people staying out of work and not shopping, and civic disruptors came together to show what we’ve got. May Day Strong put together an impressive array of labor groups, all under a broad set of sensible demands:
- Tax the Rich: Our families, not their fortunes, come first.
- No ICE. No war. No private army serving authoritarian power.
- Expand democracy, not corporate power. Hands off our vote.
Minneapolis gave us the blueprint
After Operation Metro Surge placed 3,000 armed, masked federal agents throughout Minnesota in January, terror was unleashed on communities and created terror, but out of that was born a response. Unions, faith leaders and community organizations made a call: Jan. 23 would be a day of “No Work, No School, No Shopping.
Over 1,000 businesses closed. The faith pillar moved, activating new national networks, with over 700 faith leaders participating and roughly 100 arrested in an action at Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport, blockading the departure lanes used for deportation flights. Across the country, police—long a backbone of state enforcement—began to break ranks, with chiefs publicly condemning ICE tactics and others moving beyond words to support legal distance from rogue, unaccountable and untrained agents.
This was not a spontaneous eruption. It drew on networks built after the murder of George Floyd, labor councils shaped by years of relationship, and immigrant rights organizations that had been organizing long before most people noticed. What Minneapolis gave us was not just inspiration. It was a blueprint—and a question. Could it spread?
A structure test
Much of the country does not have the resources, history of organizing and relatively healthy movement ecosystem that Minnesota has. We need more practice moving in more unity with each other. In labor organizing, a structure test is any ask you make of people that is deliberately lower-stakes than the final big ask. It’s designed to reveal the real shape of your organization: who will put their name on a petition, who will wear a sticker to work, or who will attend a public meeting, before you ever ask anyone to walk a picket line.
It is testing the capability of institutions and their resolve. It is the practice of honesty about where you are. It is the act of asking, in public and under conditions of real pressure: Who is actually with us? That question, asked in thousands of cities on May 1, is the most important thing that happened that day.
Power, unity, leadership: an honest accounting
The scale of coordination — thousands of events, major national unions, official city holidays in Chicago, teacher actions statewide in North Carolina, airport actions in the Bay Area, nurses on strike in New Orleans — represented unity and planning, in a real and measurable expansion of what this movement can do.
“The way we build power is by flexing power,” said Martha Grant, one of the May Day Strong organizers.
There are real tensions in any broad front. There are more groups that need to be brought in. And because institutions like unions have been so gutted, there are many more individuals that need to be connected, too — hence one reason organizers created “Strike Ready” to capture individuals wanting to participate who weren’t connected to some of the big organizations.
In Minneapolis this January, what was most striking was not the headline number but the distributed leadership underneath it: union shop stewards who had built trust over years, faith leaders who had organized their congregations, neighborhood organizers who knew every door on their block.
The work of the next months is not another rally. It is building into those communities — finding the people who will knock on the next door.
We are training for something larger
Perhaps the biggest test of this year may be preparing for enforcement of election results — something that the tactic of the strike is well suited for. A general strike is not a valve we can just turn on and off. It requires groups ready to move in formation with each other — and May Day Strong is positioning itself to be the entity that tells us it’s time to strike if the election is stolen. This is critical.
Cliff Smith, a Roofers Local 36 official and May Day Strong organizer in Los Angeles, said plainly what many are saying privately:
“We should not depend on the November midterm elections to provide us with any solutions to this problem. We should have contingency plans in the event that there are not free and fair elections.”
May Day 2026 wasn’t perfect—but it was a real exercise of power. We learned where we stand, not in theory but in motion. The muscles are there—maybe stiff, maybe uneven—but real, alive and ready to grow for more escalation, more economic disruption, more clarification of the billionaire opponents who are threatening the existence of all of us. That matters. Now we just have to keep building on it.
Read more. . .
Photo credit: Spencer Platt, Getty Images
Daniel Hunter coaches and trains movements across the globe and is a founder of Choose Democracy. He has written multiple books, including What Will You Do If Trump Wins, Climate Resistance Handbook and Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow.