Roots Action

RootsAction.org is a U.S.-based online activist organization generating petitions and emails to the U.S. Congress and others. It claims over 1.3 million active members and over 100 successful advocacy campaigns. RootsAction.org was founded in 2011 by Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen. Its Campaign Coordinator since 2011 has been David Swanson.

Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen co-founded the online activist group Roots Action in early 2011; ten years later, it counted more than 1.3 million active members. With Solomon as RootsAction's coordinator, the group has addressed a wide range of concerns. In 2012, it generated more than 14,000 individual emails to the government of Ecuador as part of a successful campaign urging asylum in Ecuador's London embassy for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. In August 2013, Solomon delivered a RootsAction petition with more than 100,000 signers to the Nobel Committee in Oslo, urging that then-Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. RootsAction was the first large U.S.-based online group to petition in support of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. In early 2014, RootsAction presented petitions (totaling 100,000 signers) to the State Department and Justice Department urging that the U.S. government restore Snowden's passport and end its efforts to capture him. By the end of the decade, RootsAction had organized many hundreds of online actions, including a #VoteTrumpOut initiative.

On June 4, 2014, Solomon was among the speakers at a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., announcing the launch of ExposeFacts.org as an ongoing project of the Institute for Public Accuracy. In tandem with IPA, RootsAction hosted a news conference in Washington on August 14, 2014, announcing a petition with more than 100,000 signatures in support of New York Times reporter James Risen. At issue was the U.S. government's attempt to force Risen to testify against an alleged source, former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling. C-SPAN aired the full 70-minute news conference, which was co-sponsored by the Institute for Public Accuracy and RootsAction.org.

The October 27, 2014 edition of The Nation published a cover story by Solomon and investigative journalist Marcy Wheeler on the intertwined cases of Risen and Sterling as well as overall Obama administration policies toward the news media and whistleblowers ("The Government War Against Reporter James Risen").

In 2017, Solomon co-authored RootsAction's "Autopsy" report on the Democratic Party's 2016 Presidential defeat by Republican Donald Trump. The report attributed Trump's election to Republican voter suppression efforts and the Democratic Party’s failure to mobilize its base.

After Biden gained the Democratic Party Presidential nomination, RootsAction launched the online "Vote Trump Out" campaign in swing states, with special attention to Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin. Politico covered the "Vote Trump Out" campaign under the headline, "We have to get rid of Trump: Pro-Bernie group launches an effort to boost Biden."

Weeks after Biden defeated Trump, RootsAction launched its "No Honeymoon" campaign to challenge Biden to enact a progressive agenda and "to push back against the destructive forces of corporate power, racial injustice, extreme income inequality, environmental assault and the military-industrial complex."