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In the days after she and some 150 Kenyon College students went to Washington for the Womens March on Washington, Emily Carter became a whirling dervish of activism.

She had newsletters to send out. Senators to call. Action networks to create. I am literally staying up at night, like, what can I do next? said the 22-year-old Kenyon senior.

Across the state, in Bluffton, Ohio, Wendy Chappell-Dick, 48, launched a new phrase in the days after the march: political hygiene. Each morning, she said, she got up, brushed her teeth, washed her hair and called her congressman.

One week ago, both women joined the crowds in Washington, protesting Donald Trumps new presidency. Now, the buses have returned home, the bags are unpacked, and many wonder: Whats next?

American history is littered with political movements that have seen varying degrees of success. The Civil Rights Movement, led by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., resulted in federal law protecting civil rights. The Tea Party Movement led to lawmakers such as Rep Jim Jordan realizing increased power in Congress, as well as a drive right within the party. The Occupy Movements results remain largely unseen.

But the sheer breadth of Saturday more than a million protested in cities across the country and even around the world has been motivating for the same left-leaning activists who lamented the November election results.

This is where emotion and motion meet, said Mary Ann Marsh, a Democratic political consultant based in Massachusetts. You cant invent that. You cant organize that. You can have all the data that you want in the world and you cant make that many people show up on the same day for the same reason unless everyone feels the same way.

Since the march, said Chappell-Dick, we have this kind of energy and this kind of network thats ready to mobilize and fired up about how we are going to use each other to magnify our causes.

But what those causes are arent easy to summarize. During more than four hours of speeches at the march, protestors touched topics including immigration, health care, reproductive rights, Native American rights, gun violence, black lives matter, Muslim rights, LGBTQ rights and even whether tampons should be taxed when Rogaine and Viagra are not.

It was a kitchen sinks worth of liberal causes, and its unclear yet whether the wide range of rallying cries will ultimately keep those who gathered from coalescing.

Sometimes when you go to a protest and its about stopping the war and you see people holding signs for other causes, you see it as a disarray and a lack of focus, said Becky bond, author of Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything. But the array of issues at the womens march, she said, is a strength.

Its going to take all of us working together to oppose the worst abuses of the Trump administration and also have different electoral results in 2018 and 2010, she said.

But Tom Zawistowski, a Tea Party leader in northeast Ohio, said the Tea Party succeeded because their grievances were straightforward: They wanted Obamacare repealed and spending tightened. He said the grievances of those who marched last weekend are not targeted enough.

If youre going to have a movement, message is very important, he said.

The group may also need a leader. While Martin Luther King Jr. became the de facto leader of the civil rights movement, the group that organized Saturdays march numbered nearly a half dozen. Theres no clear face to the movement, and in listening to Saturdays speeches, no consensus on whether the Democratic old guard or a new generation of Democrats is better suited to keep the momentum going. The Democratic National Committee itself is in a state of flux: Theyre in the middle of electing their next chair, and as of yet no clear Democratic leader has emerged to replace 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, though Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Cory Booker of New Jersey and even Sherrod Brown of Ohio have been mentioned as possible 2020 names.

But Chappell-Dick said there doesnt need to be one leader when social media can be used to mobilize people with the touch of a button. At the march, organizers asked people attending to text their information to a number. Now, she said, hundreds of thousands of people sympathetic to the march can be reached and mobilized via smartphone.

This has definitely ginned up people who have never been excited about politics before, said Bethany Lesser, a Bexley native former spokeswoman for Democratic senators including Brown and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. Maybe the best outcome of this is that people who never cared about these before, who have been casual voters or maybe not even voters are suddenly waking up and realizing they have to be part of the process.

But Zawistowski said he doubts that the march will translate that into actual change.

He said the protestors have an electoral disadvantage that is hard to overcome. Democrats hold the minority in Congress and congressional districts are drawn to protect Republicans. The Tea Party, he said, found success by running more conservative Republicans in districts already held by the GOP.

The November elections, he said, were a seminal defeat for them. This was their Waterloo, and they lost. And its really, really impossible for them to recover.

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Will progressives learn lessons from the tea party to fight Trump? - MyDaytonDailyNews