Merriam-Webster defines a coup d’état as “the violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group.” The small group and the existing government are the definition; violence is the usual method. A “mini coup” uses an election or an open meeting instead: a small group winning a majority of the seats on a school board, a city council, a county commission, or a neighborhood council and all in one fell swoop.
Fun fact: over the course of 2025, Ballotpedia tracked 38,609 elections, and 26,318 of them, 68 percent, were uncontested. Everybody who submitted the paperwork to run was awarded a victory.
Religious extremist freedom hating Republicans have been running for these seats reliably over the last few decades. I suspect that the inclination towards self awareness and humility gives the more kind and generous of humanity more legitimate and respectful pause before running for some random office. And it makes sense, more republicans than democrats have nothing better to do while simultaneously believing they’re the smartest person in the room anywhere they go. That’s a perfect mix for some too big for their britches county commissioner who runs unopposed every year on the GOP ticket and can’t tell you a damn thing about local zoning laws or critical infrastructure but he sure does feel it’s his duty to fight any sort of progress or common sense infrastructure projects.
What follows is the record, county by county, of how the GOP successfully engaged in the “mini coup” strategy over the last few decades. We can replicate, sophisticate, and reiterate what they did, but applied ethically in tactics and morally in aspirations. It makes complete sense, too. We take the smallest and most winnable offices, then wield them like a cudgel or a shield in the best interest of freedom, justice, democracy, and maybe even some occasional progress in improving the station of our fellow humans. How quaint.
The smallest board you can take over is usually a neighborhood council, where in many cities attending two meetings makes you a voting member. Get yourself one. The goal is a deluge of mini coups. Invite some friends and take over, be a menace for good. Why should the bad guys be the only ones who have mini coups?
Moms for Liberty has been getting defeated in local elections but they had a run at it, maybe if pro-democracy and pro-science folks can get equally as enthused, things will start getting better.
Ralph Reed, the Christian Coalition’s executive director in the 1990s, described the strategy in public more than once. In 1996 he said, “I would rather have a thousand school board members than one president and no school board members.” Before that, he had told the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot how the Coalition campaigned: “I want to be invisible. I do guerrilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag. You don’t know until election night.” In San Diego County in 1990, conservative Christian candidates for school boards and other local offices campaigned through mailings to church directories and fliers in church parking lots, and they skipped the public forums and candidate questionnaires. People for the American Way monitored 500 such races across the country in 1992 and estimated that about 40 percent of the religious right’s candidates won.
The same idea inside the GOP is called the precinct strategy. Steve Bannon promoted it on his podcast in 2021, and by that August, Republican leaders in 41 counties reported an unusual increase in sign-ups, more than 8,500 new precinct officers in all. Isaac Arnsdorf, the ProPublica reporter who counted them, explained the logic to Slate: “The idea behind this strategy is to take over the party from the bottom up by taking all these precinct positions, which are often not contested and just there for the taking.” Precinct officers elect the county party’s officers, and in some states they choose the poll workers and the members of the election boards that certify results. ProPublica checked the equivalent Democratic posts and found no similar surge. Those Democratic seats exist in your county too.
Mini-coup your local democrats. If you want to turn your county Democratic party into a hub for a new free range solar punk secessionists, go for it. I bet you’d find a surprising number of folks receptive to your ideas and would rapidly earn a higher approval rating than the DNC currently has. You’d probably only have to convince a half dozen friends and show up to monthly meetings for 18 months, and you could do it.
Moms for Liberty took the school board version to a larger scale after the pandemic. They endorsed more than 500 school board candidates in 2022, 202 in 2023, more than 100 in 2024, and 57 in 2025. The Brookings Institution checked the results and found that 47 percent of the group’s 2022 endorsees won and 33 percent of their 2023 endorsees won. In Florida the group’s candidates won majorities on seven school boards in November 2022, and within a year four of those boards had changed superintendents.
Sarasota County went through the whole cycle. Governor Ron DeSantis endorsed Bridget Ziegler, a Moms for Liberty co-founder, and Tim Enos in 2022, and his political committee paid for mail supporting them and Robyn Marinelli. All three won, and the board had a 4-1 conservative majority. Soon after the new members took office, the board voted to separate from Superintendent Brennan Asplen. On August 18, 2026, two candidates endorsed by Equality Florida, Megan Tennimon and Beth Mayberry, beat the Republican-endorsed candidates outright. Ziegler did not seek another term, and her seat went to a November runoff between Jimmy Glover, who led with 44 percent, and Heidi Brandt. WFLA counted one conservative left on the five-member board. The majority DeSantis built in 2022 lasted four years.
Ottawa County, Michigan, is the county commission version. A group called Ottawa Impact formed in 2021 in opposition to the county’s and the state’s pandemic rules. The founders, Joe Moss and Sylvia Rhodea, recruited candidates for the 2022 county board races, and the Ottawa Impact political action committee funded the ones who signed a contract committing to specific policies. Ottawa County is Republican enough that the August 2022 primary decided the seats, and the Ottawa Impact slate won it. Eight of the 11 commissioners sworn in on January 3, 2023 were Ottawa Impact candidates. At that first meeting the new majority changed the board rules so a simple majority could add agenda items. Then they added and passed items to fire county administrator John Shay and replace him with John Gibbs, a former Trump housing official, to close the county’s diversity office, to replace the county’s lawyer with a Lansing law firm, to demote the health officer the state had already approved, and to change the county motto from “Where You Belong” to “Where Freedom Rings.” Rhodea explained the motto vote: “The vision statement of where you belong has been used to promote the divisive, Marxist ideology of the race equity movement.”
The county was sued six times in the next 20 months. The health officer, Adeline Hambley, kept her job after a year of litigation, and during that year the board passed a budget that cut the health department’s education program funding nearly in half. Journalist Sarah Leach tallied the cost of the changes at about $3 million. The board fired Gibbs in February 2024. In the August 2024 Republican primary, three Ottawa Impact incumbents lost and the group fell to four of the 11 seats.
In Sequim, a city of about 8,000 in Washington state, one mayor and his appointees held the city council for two years, and then residents organized and won every council seat on the ballot. William Armacost was appointed to the council in 2018 and elected unopposed to a four-year term in 2019. The other council members chose him as mayor in January 2020. Three of the six council seats came open during his mayorship through deaths and resignations, and the council filled them by appointment. Ron Richards, a former Clallam County commissioner, told The Nation: “All these conservative people snuck onto the city council when nobody opposed them. And then they appointed their friends to government.”
Residents formed the Sequim Good Governance League in January 2021, and they reported 500 active members by the end of that month. The League backed five council candidates, including one conservative incumbent, Brandon Janisse, and trained dozens of volunteers to canvass. Candidate Lowell Rathbun described the campaign: “We organized. I broke the town down into 54 neighborhoods, and we worked every one of those neighborhoods.” In November 2021 all five League candidates won with between 65 and 70 percent of the vote, and League candidates also won both county hospital commission seats and the school district seats on the ballot that year. On January 11, 2022, the new council voted Armacost out as mayor, and the only vote to keep him was his own.
Every mini-coup in that record was legal. Reed’s guerrilla warfare was a church directory and a mailing list. The Ottawa County mini coup was a primary win and a motion to change the board’s own agenda rules, and the Sequim coup was one unopposed election and three appointments. The right read those rules as a list of what they were allowed to do, rather than imposing unnecessary handicaps on themselves.
Those examples involve the same few offices. A school board hires and fires the superintendent. A county board chooses the health officer, the county’s lawyer, the county administrator, and the voting equipment. In many counties the county board also decides whether the jail works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. On June 16, 2026, Gallatin County, Montana, commissioners Jennifer Boyer and Zach Brown voted to end the county’s 287(g) agreement, the contract that had let the county jail hold people for the agency, after months of public testimony and a lawsuit arguing that the sheriff had signed it in 2020 without the board’s approval. Sheriff Dan Springer told them that a 2021 Montana law still requires his deputies to hold anyone with a federal detainer for up to 48 hours. That is what a local seat is: the person in it decides some things outright, and on the rest decides how much the county cooperates.
Ballotpedia estimates the country has more than 80,000 school board seats. Of the 546 school board seats Ballotpedia tracked in 2025, 36 percent were unopposed. Portland State University’s Who Votes for Mayor project found that in 15 of the country’s 30 largest cities, fewer than 20 percent of eligible citizens voted in the most recent mayoral election, and the median voter in those elections was 57 years old. A seat with one candidate goes to that candidate. A seat with two candidates goes to the candidate whose supporters vote.
The smallest layer of government you can join is a neighborhood council. Spokane, WA recognizes 29 of them, and the city charter sets the membership rule: “persons who are sixteen years of age or older and reside, own property, or operate a business within the neighborhood council boundaries.” The Northwest Neighborhood Council gives voting rights to anyone who attends two meetings in 12 months. Each council sends a representative to a citywide Community Assembly, which can “review and recommend an action, policy, or plan” to the city council’s neighborhood committee and any city agency on any matter affecting the city. Los Angeles has 99 neighborhood councils covering about 40,000 people each; their board members are elected city officials, and each council spends an annual budget funded by taxpayers. Both systems are advisory: the neighborhood council recommends, and the city council decides. What the neighborhood council gives you is a sign-in sheet of the people on your block who show up, and a formal channel into city hall.
The model of Educate, Activate, Recruit, Repeat works at the scale of a neighborhood. The education is the fun fact at the top of this piece plus the date of the next neighborhood council meeting. Activation means the neighbor shows up to it. Each neighbor who shows up recruits one more for the following month, and you repeat that until your group is a majority of the members who vote. The Sequim league did the same thing across a whole town, 54 neighborhoods, one at a time. If a dozen neighbors come to two meetings, they are the neighborhood council, and the sign-in sheet from those meetings is the list you work from for everything after. That is the whole coup, a quorum and a vote.
What a radical neighborhood council passes is a formal position on the thing the city council has been avoiding. In February 2026 the Harbor City Neighborhood Council in Los Angeles, with two of its board seats vacant, filed a Community Impact Statement supporting a motion to direct city departments to report within 30 days on financial assistance for small businesses hurt by Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. The pattern is a specific item on the city council’s agenda, or one the council has refused to put there, and a recorded vote on it, whether the item is refusing cooperation with federal immigration raids, a public bank feasibility study, municipal broadband, or whatever the neighborhood decides. Like what you read about in the ER each week? Get yourself a mini coup with your neighborhood council, indivisible chapter, county dems, school board, anywhere that might have receptive pro-democracy folks. Nothing stops you from going to those meetings and presenting info to others.
Coup where you can, folks.
The good news is that the mini coups built on culture war sand castles, they eventually fail. Moms for Liberty’s win rate fell from about half to about a third in one year, in part because other organizations started endorsing opposing candidates, and in 2026 Equality Florida spent $250,000 on mailers for school board candidates facing Moms for Liberty challengers. Taking the seats was the easy part in every case. Keeping them is about the roads and the sewers and the actual work of governance, which the GOP is obviously terrible at.
Right wing extremists have spent the last 50 years proving that a small number of organized people can take control of a small government almost anywhere in America. Every part of that method is legal, every part of it is available to you at the scale of one neighborhood, and every part of it helps in the fight against fascism.
Because ultimately, when you make the world better for your neighbors, you’re fighting the nihilistic underpinning of modern conservatism.
We win when we deliver results rather than excuses.
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CALL TO ACTION
Find out if your neighborhood has a neighborhood council. Search your city or county’s name and “neighborhood council,” “neighborhood association,” “community council,” or “advisory neighborhood commission,” and read their membership rules. Most grant voting rights after you attend a set number of meetings.
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I joined a local group called Fired Up for Democracy. We have gone from essentially no local Dems to a fair number. For the first time in many years, I'll be able to vote for a Dem for my county board.
Do I love going to meetings? Not really. But I don't want to tell my grandchildren, "Sorry for the whole authoritarian hellhole thing, but I was really busy and couldn't spare time to organize."
I’m clicking in commenting because of your picture of Obama. You’re right they do get a lot of clicks and it just resets my nervous system. And gives me hope. I haven’t even read your article yet. But just seeing Obama‘s face made me feel good.