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Fabio Rojas, Opinion contributor Published 6:00 a.m. ET Nov. 6, 2020 | Updated 4:04 p.m. ET Nov. 7, 2020

Do protests ever enact real change? Yes. But not all movements are created equal. Here's the ingredients of a successful movement. USA TODAY

Activists should stay focused on what the government does, not who gets elected.

The era ofPresident Donald Trump appears to benearly over and people will soon move on.

Within the Republican Party, there will be a long discussion about whether the party will represent big-government nationalism or try to reclaim its roots as a party of business and limited government.

Similarly, Democrats will need to think about whether they will pursue the progressive vision of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez orthe more centrist tradition embodied by Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris.

Activists, on the left and right, should take the transition to a new president, and a new balance of government, as a time to reflect on the role that activism has in American society.

We live in an era of polarized activism. When you see a protest, you are likely looking at an assembly of mostly Democrats or Republicans. You rarely see a crowd of people who represent the breadth of American society.

Protesters raise signs outside the federal courthouse in Portland, Oregon, in the early morning of July 26, 2020.(Photo: Trevor Hughes, Trevor Hughes-USA TODAY NETWORK)

The extremely partisan makeup of protests is well documented. Tea Party protesters in the 2010s were mainly Republicans, and people who participated in the March for Science in the late 2010s were mainly Democrats.

As a researcher who specializes in activism, I studied the anti-Iraq War movement and found that almost all protesters were self-identified Democrats or members of very left third parties. It is challenging to find any form of civic participation or activism today that is not so heavily partisan.

This is a bad thing. Of course, some forms of politics will almost certainly be heavily partisan by their nature. But there are many issues that deserve to be pulled out of the rigid left-right axis that constrains so much of our politics. Sometimes, we need to realize that positive social change will need a broader coalition where people need to leave their voter registration card by the door.

How should activists improve? First, activists should adopt a new mantra: policies, not presidents. Stay focused on what the government does, not who gets elected or even what elected leaders say. For example, we saw an increase of activists attention paid to immigration during the Trump era because President Trump made it clear that he intends to reduce immigration.

However, increasesin deportation and detention occurred during the Obama and Bush administrations as well. We needed vigorous and strident pro-immigration activism during those presidencies as much as during Trumps. Its about the issue, not which team gets elected.

Second, activists should make bridge building a priority. It may not work for every issue, but activist leaders should take the initiative to identify issues where it makes sense to reach out to the other side.

Anti-war politics during the Bush and Obama years provides another example. Whatever the merits of starting the Iraq War, it was clear by the late 2000s that there needed to be a bipartisan conversation about bringing that conflict to a close.

Activists could have played a role in that conversation by maintaining constant pressure on the Obama administration to completely withdraw troops. Instead, the antiwar movement backed off, Obama allowed troops to stay in Iraq, escalated troop levels in Afghanistan, and intervened in Syria.

Today, we see the pernicious effects of partisanship appearing once again in the discussion of police misconduct. The Black Lives Matter movement has focused on an issue that should be of great concern to all Americans. Every year, approximately 1,000 U.S. residents die at the hands of the police, many are from Black and brown communities, and misconduct often goes unpunished.

One might expect a broad bipartisan conversation about how to improve policing. Sadly, most discussion has become highly partisan. Recent research on Black Lives Matter protests suggests that the movement is strongly aligned with the Democratic Party as most participants self-identify with that party.

Similarly, conservative activists have chosen to focus on the most sensational aspects of Black Lives Matter rather than engage in a dialogue about why it has been so hard to reform police. We need to be better.

If we can reorient the culture of activism to focus on policy over partisanship and bridge building, well get the activism that America needs. When a protest gathers outside the White House, the president will no longer be able to write it off as a motley crew of angry partisans.

Instead, the protest will send a clear message: America needs to talk about this. Not just some of us, but all of us.

Fabio Rojas is the Virginia L. Robertsprofessor of sociology at Indiana University-Bloomington and a senior fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies. He is the author of "From Black Power to Black Studies: How a Radical Social Movement Became an Academic Discipline."

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Why activists for police, immigration reform need to focus on policies, not presidents - USA TODAY