Organizing Suggestions for Populist Citizens

A practical, non-partisan guide to finding each other and taking local action.

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You’re angry about the system. You’re not alone. Millions of Americans—left, right, and center—share a populist instinct: power has been captured by a small elite, and ordinary people need to take it back. The good news is that real change almost always starts the same way: a handful of regular citizens decide to meet each other in real life.

This site exists for one simple purpose: to help populist citizens find each other in their own towns, neighborhoods, and counties. Think of it as Meetup.com, but built exclusively for people who believe government should serve the many, not the few.

We are deliberately not a political action committee, a campaign, or an advocacy organization. We don’t tell you what to do once you meet. We just make the first step—discovery—dramatically easier. Because once ten or twenty like-minded people are sitting in the same room (or on the same Zoom call), the question “OK, we’re populists, to some degree or other—what is to be done?” suddenly stops feeling abstract.

Why Face-to-Face (or Screen-to-Screen) Matters

History shows that every successful populist wave began with small, local gatherings:

  • Tea Party (2009) → living-room meetings → takeover of GOP precincts
  • Bernie 2016 → canvasser meetups → massive volunteer armies
  • Trump 2016 → rally crowds → county chair takeovers via the Precinct Strategy
  • Progressive reform clubs in Brooklyn and Queens → county committee takeovers → public meeting calendars

The pattern is always the same: strangers become neighbors → neighbors become co-conspirators → co-conspirators take over the boring but decisive machinery of politics.

What “Populist” Means Here (Broadly)

We welcome anyone who believes ordinary citizens should have far more control over their government than they currently do. That includes people who want to:

  • Petition or lobby elected officials on populist issues (anti-corruption, fair taxes, ending corporate welfare, etc.)
  • Support genuinely populist candidates in primaries
  • Donate time or money to organizations like RepresentUs (anti-corruption) or Patriotic Millionaires (tax fairness)
  • Run public education campaigns to spread populist ideas
  • Get involved in the governance of the Democratic, Republican, or third parties—especially at the hyper-local level where the real gatekeeping happens

Two Proven Playbooks That Started With Citizens Meeting Each Other

Case Study 1: Benjamin Yee and the Transparency Revolution in NYC Democrats

For decades, the Democratic county committees in NYC (the real “party” that controls ballots, endorsements, and judgeships) held their meetings in secret. Agendas were private. Minutes didn’t exist. Rank-and-file Democrats had no idea when or where decisions were being made.

Enter Ben Yee (also Benjamin Ye), a young organizer who decided this was unacceptable. Starting with almost nothing—just a laptop, a Twitter account, and relentless persistence—Yee and a small group of allies:

  • Built the first public website for the Manhattan Democrats
  • Forced the posting of meeting notices, agendas, and minutes
  • Live-tweeted executive sessions
  • Created explainer videos and a weekly newsletter
  • Recruited dozens of new county committee members through the “Open Seat Project”

Result: Manhattan became the most transparent county party in New York City. Attendance jumped over 50%. Other boroughs soon faced similar pressure. All because a few citizens started meeting, talking, and refusing to take “that’s just how it’s done” for an answer.

Case Study 2: Dan Schultz’s Precinct Strategy (Republican Side)

In 2021, a retired aerospace engineer named Dan Schultz revived an old idea: the most powerful position in American politics that literally nobody is watching is the precinct committeeman (or equivalent) in the Republican Party. There are roughly 400,000 of these slots nationwide; roughly half are vacant.

Schultz’s simple message: fill them. His pitch in three points:

  1. Influence the policies and direction of the Republican Party
  2. Decide who gets to run as the Republican nominee
  3. Elect party leaders who actually represent the grassroots

Thousands of MAGA and America-First activists took him up on it. They filled empty seats, and in many places became the new majority. Love it or hate it, it worked— and it started with people finding each other locally.

Ralph Nader Speaks on Citizens Lobbying Their Congressmen

From a DemocracyNow interview on Dec 3, 2025

“So, we have these examples, which I put in my new book, Civic Self-respect, just to try to get people to stop giving up on themselves, stop being cynical, which leads to withdrawal, and develop a process of summoning the senators and representatives to their own town meetings, choreographed by the citizenry in town halls or school auditoriums, where there’s no intermediate flacks, and the senators and representatives have to hear the agenda of the people. .... Every day, for example, we see the — we see the press reporting corporate crime, frauds, abuses, and the Congress doesn’t pay any attention, even under the Democrats. They didn’t have the requisite public hearings that inform and mobilize people so they can basically tell their Congress who they work for in the first place. So, I wrote this article in Capitol Hill Citizen .... in order to show people their own history and to wake them up and to recover Congress. But you do it by personal lobbying of your senator and representative, just like the two powerful lobbies, AIPAC and NRA. They don’t deal with marches and demonstrations. They deal with personal lobbying on the staff, on the members.”

Further reading: Civic Self-respect

Your Next Step

  1. Use the map on this site to see if there’s already a populist meetup near you.
  2. If there isn’t, create one. It can be as simple as “Populist Coffee – [Your Town] – 2nd Saturday of every month.”
  3. Show up. Bring a friend. Ask the only question that matters: “What is to be done—here—by us?”

The elites have think tanks, lobbyists, and super PACs. We have living rooms, coffee shops, and county party rules that almost nobody reads. When regular citizens start meeting regularly, the balance of power changes faster than anyone predicts.

See you out there.