Last fall, Hannah Dasgupta spent her days focused on politics, channeling her fear and anger over former President Donald Trump into activism. Worried about the future of abortion rights, among other issues, during the Trump administration, she joined a group of suburban Ohio women who were working to elect Democrats.
A year later, Dasgupta, 37, still cares just as deeply about those issues. But she did not attend a nationwide women’s march for abortion rights Saturday. In fact, she had not even heard about it.
“I don’t watch the news every single night anymore. I’m just not nearly as concerned,” said Dasgupta, a personal trainer and school aide, who was devoting her attention to local issues like her school board. “When Biden finally got sworn in, I was like, ‘I’m out for a little while.’”
Dasgupta’s inattention underscores one of the biggest challenges facing the Democratic Party as it looks to the midterm elections. At a moment when abortion rights face their most significant challenge in nearly a half-century, a portion of the Democratic grassroots wants to take, in Dasgupta’s words, “a long breather.”
The march Saturday, sponsored by a coalition of nearly 200 civil rights, abortion rights and liberal organizations, offered an early test of Democratic enthusiasm in the post-Trump era, particularly for the legions of newly politically engaged women who helped the party win control of Congress and the White House.
In 2017, the first Women’s March drew an estimated 4 million protesters into streets across the country to voice their outrage at the inauguration of Trump. Many listed abortion rights as a motivating issue, according to surveys of participants. Since then, the annual events have drawn smaller crowds.
Organizers of the abortion rights march said that while this year’s larger events attracted tens of thousands, rather than the millions who protested during the Trump administration, the geographic scope of the gatherings — more than 650 marches in 50 states — demonstrated the breadth of their movement. They cast the marches as the earliest stages of a renewed fight.
“We’re the largest and longest-running protest movement in the country,” said Rachel O’Leary Carmona, executive director of the Women’s March, which organized the events. “For some reason, folks are willing to discount the actions of 250,000 women because it’s less than the highest ever.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times .
