Recently the Democratic members of the Texas House of Representatives tried to stop Republicans from gerrymandering the state’s congressional map. They left the state, denying Republicans a legislative quorum, but returned a couple of weeks later. The gerrymandered map passed, clearing the way for Gov. Greg Abbott to sign it into law.
During the two weeks that the Democrats held up the proceedings, the Texas gerrymander, which had at that point garnered little attention, became big news. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California mobilized the State Legislature to counter the Texas move with a plan to redraw his state’s own districts.
The Texas Democrats lost. But they drew attention to Republicans’ efforts — undertaken at the behest of President Trump — to put their thumb on the electoral scale going into the 2026 midterms, and demonstrated a valuable tactic for galvanizing their beleaguered party.
They lost, but they lost loudly. Losing loudly has been a crucial feature of successful political movements.
Hundreds of thousands of people marched for L.G.B.T.Q. rights in Washington in 1993, one of the largest single-day protests in American history. In the short term, there were setbacks: the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 and a raft of state bans on same-sex marriage. But the fight for same-sex marriage was later won with the Supreme Court’s 2015 decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.
John Lewis and other civil rights heroes led peaceful marchers to the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965, on what became known as Bloody Sunday. The marchers knew the likely outcome. They would be savagely beaten and tear-gassed. And indeed, many of them were. No law was changed the next day. But a few months later the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed. Mr. Lewis, who died in 2020, served in Congress and was awarded the presidential medal of freedom.
Movement organizers often predict that the more they can dramatize their cause by being stopped, arrested or beaten up, the more sympathy they can win. The political scientist Omar Wasow has shown that during the civil rights movement, this prediction was right: Counties closer to nonviolent protests — particularly those where protesters were met with state or vigilante violence — wound up having higher Democratic presidential vote share as a result.
When people fight principled battles that they know they may lose, others pay attention.
Of course, the Texas Democrats didn’t put their lives on the line as the Bloody Sunday marchers did, but they did risk expulsion from the Legislature, and Mr. Abbott threatened them with felony charges.
Their gamble may pay off. Shortly after they left their state, Mr. Newsom started his effort and Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York endorsed the strategy of fighting gerrymanders with more gerrymanders, writing in an opinion essay for The Houston Chronicle that “The only viable recourse is to fight fire with fire.” Eventually, former President Barack Obama weighed in to support Mr. Newsom’s efforts.
Texas Democrats’ stand gave their cause time to move the needle of public perception. Their battle invigorated a nationwide conversation about how elected leaders can resist America’s anti-democratic turn.
Losing loudly doesn’t always work. In Texas in 2013, the state senator Wendy Davis famously filibustered an anti-abortion rights bill, initially defeating the measure and giving a shot in the arm to supporters of abortion rights. But not only did a similar bill ultimately pass, less than a decade later the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade.
A reasonable skeptic might also predict that losing in public would tend to discourage a movement’s supporters. In sports, the idea of “no moral victories” is a cliché. But researchers who study social movements find the opposite. Once people persist in the face of a likely defeat, they often keep fighting.
Why? People willing to lose loudly aren’t deceiving themselves about their power or their prospects. As we discuss in our forthcoming book, co-written with Daniel Kelly, they don’t tend to think: I personally will change history, if only I keep at it.
A comprehensive analysis of protesters in places including Russia, Turkey and Hong Kong found that they were not motivated primarily by belief in their immediate effectiveness, but instead by factors including a shared sense of identity and faith in protest as a way to build a movement. They don’t necessarily think their movements will make all the difference — at least not in the short term. But they believe they can make a difference to their movement.
Not unlike activists who speak out in repressive countries, the Texas Democrats fought a battle they almost certainly expected to lose in order to help the rest of us grasp the stakes of current events. Their choice reflected a core tenet of collective action. They demonstrated, for those of us who believe in free and fair elections — and in democracy itself — that there are moments when we can’t wait around for somebody else to do something.
Michael Brownstein is the chair of the philosophy department at John Jay College and a philosophy professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. Alex Madva is a philosophy professor at Cal Poly Pomona and the director of the California Center for Ethics and Policy. They are two of the writers of “Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change.”
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