Going into Sunday’s elections in Brazil, I wasn’t harboring the highest of hopes that the votes were there to thwart the seething ambitions of far-right nepo-baby Flávio Bolsonaro, whose party seemed to have taken the decisive edge in the first round of voting earlier this month. My Brazilian contacts are few, but they were unanimously downcast in the days leading up to the second round. It looked like a familiar story: An aging sentinel of the left was poised to be swept from office on a rising tide of global authoritarianism and anti-incumbent sentiment.
So you can imagine my pleasant surprise as the vote tallies came in and the liberal Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva broke out of a narrow race to win handily. As Lula celebrates another term in office, Flávio has lammed it to Florida, hoping that the Trump administration will lick his wounds. As The New Republic’s Perry Bacon wrote, Lula’s shock victory was both “a win for democracy” and “an important defeat for global villains” like Trump. But it also gives us much to ponder about how this win was pulled off and what lessons we can take from it.
Analysts will likely spend some time picking through the details, but one aspect of Lula’s campaign jumped out at me in the days following the election: the work of “Lula’s Army,” a WhatsApp group with 10 million members that created space for solidarity and direct action. The army worked online and in meatspace: They promoted pro-Lula hashtags, provided their candidate’s content with much-needed algorithmic boosts, and recruited new voters from their neighborhoods. As the BBC reported, lawmaker André Janones took charge of the WhatsApp group, handing the army its “missions.” Per the BBC:
Lula’s Army messages often included ready-made templates for followers to share with friends and family. Each one assigned supporters a specific task aimed at boosting Lula’s visibility on social media. Janones frequently instructed his “troops” to “blow up” the latest campaign video or help a new hashtag “take off.”
“Guys, urgent!,” “Don’t go to sleep yet,” “No food before the mission!,” and “I have one more task before you’re dismissed,” were some of the instructions.
As the report notes, it is “notoriously difficult” to assess the role that social media plays in election results. That Lula’s Army was active in ground-level organizing and voter recruitment is just as important as liking and favoriting campaign videos. Plus, it takes two to tango: Lula’s successes were somewhat dependent on Bolsonaro’s failings. But if the social media battlefront was insignificant, then we wouldn’t be staring at reports accusing Meta of putting its finger on the algorithmic scale on Bolsonaro’s behalf.
The way one member of the army described it in a series of posts, Janones’s contributions to the WhatsApp group were a mix of civic education and social media literacy. The congressman, according to this member, “helped motivate us, encouraged us to talk to friends and relatives to go vote and ... explained to us how social media worked so the people who were clueless about it understood.” Janones also apparently advised the army to stop engaging with the right-wing’s content because doing so only boosted it algorithmically. In a way, Lula’s Army found a way to gamify the resistance, all while practicing some disciplined social media hygiene.
Can this sort of political organizing work in the United States? It already is. As The New York Times reported in September, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has an army of social media influencers who dutifully promote his content and accomplishments. “The administration regularly sends the influencers memos on the mayor’s priorities and encourages them to trumpet his accomplishments, all outside of public scrutiny. The missives are delivered in group chats on Signal, an encrypted messaging app designed to shield posts from public review.”
The Times’ whiff of disapproval should come as no surprise, but not just because the paper’s own political alignment frequently runs afoul of Mamdani’s leftist leanings—the mayor’s online troops are, for the Times, its new competition in terms of influencing the direction of the city’s politics. No longer can the monolithic Gray Lady insist that the city must be run by its preferred centrist du jour. A more modern, social-media optimized force is going to have both an argument and an audience to counter the patricians who run the Times’ editorial board.
As someone who is frequently dismayed by how Democrats too often seem to not understand the modern media landscape and how to exploit it, what Mamdani is doing is precisely the sort of thing that feels ripe and timely. And if anything, the people they need to reach are already there, waiting for them to connect. Over the past few years, armies of this nature have been forming all around us. In Minneapolis, the anti-ICE movement has used the same tools to keep watch over its neighborhoods, direct support to families in fear, and mobilize for street protests. And as TNR contributor Dan Froomkin reports, the No Kings movement and its affiliated allies are planning to continue their robust organizing after the midterms in the furtherance of a bold agenda that Democrats can run and win on in 2028 by building the “permanent field campaign” once envisioned by Obama insiders, which ended up falling by the wayside.
If anything, Democrats need to learn to fight in these trenches because the MAGA right is already on the march in these online spaces. As The Washington Post reported this week, Trump and his allies are using the same tactics that Lula’s Army used to save democracy in Brazil to undo it here at home: “Nearly 600 high-profile, right-wing social media accounts, podcasts and other online media have published more than 7,000 statements questioning the election’s integrity so far this year,” it reported, adding that “overstated claims that noncitizens are on voter rolls and that mail-in ballots enable widespread fraud” have been widely broadcast online. This isn’t a fight from which Democrats can afford to shy away.
All that said, there’s a broader lesson to be taken from the exploits of Lula’s Army and its online organizing. It’s pretty clear to me that the United States’ Silicon Valley oligarchy, which backs Trump’s MAGA forces and is skeptical of democracy, has designed its various platforms and algorithmic traps to keep people isolated and despondent, doomscrolling instead of hoping, and scraping what meager dopamine hits we can from a narrowing band of content. This suits authoritarians well: Politics is a hard road in a free society; when you feel alone, it can seem even more hopeless.
But from São Paulo, to New York City, to Minneapolis, we’re seeing that the best way to achieve political change—maybe the only way—is to do it together. When we organize, we turn the arduous process of politicking into a game. We find purpose in shared burdens. We’re more apt to discover that the work actually brings joy rather than hopelessness. And if we lose, we lick our wounds together. Together, our possibilities bloom. On some rare days, you tip an election, thought to be lost, in your favor. On other days, you protect your neighbors from fascist goons. And sometimes, you gather at the Washington Monument to blow off steam, listen to a punk band, and raise a boatload of money for a good cause. As they say, birds are not meant to fly alone.
This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
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