When the Supreme Court announced yesterday that states could be blatantly racist again, it set off a right-wing stampede that made January 6th look like a luncheon. Lawmakers in states across the South immediately began talking about and even passing outrageous gerrymanders designed to silence minority voters and net Republicans more Congressional seats.

Tonight’s newsletter is about how we got here, what comes next, and how we might be able to mitigate the damage.

Note: The far-right’s fascist takeover of this country is being aided by the media’s total capitulation to Trump’s extortion. It’s never been more critical to have a bold independent media willing to speak up against the powerful. That’s what I’m trying to do here at Progress Report.

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Samuel Alito wrote the opinion in Callais v. Louisiana that finally gutted what remained of the Voting Rights Act, but nobody has more blood on their hands than Chief Justice John Roberts.

Foiled in his attempts to kill the landmark civil rights law in the early 1980s, when he was an attorney in the Reagan Department of Justice, Roberts spent the next 44 years methodically working to return the nation back to the Jim Crow era. Roberts’s story is the story of the modern conservative legal movement, an extremist sect that worked its way to the pinnacle of power with the help of deep-pocketed benefactors whose money has warped American culture and launched a new civil war.

Roberts’s patience helped fool the media and many Democrats into believing that he’s some sort of moderate, but investigative reporters and legal experts like David Daley had him clocked from the start. Daley is the author of the book Antidemocratic, published last year, which chronicles Roberts’s rise and ideological crusade, and I spoke with him after the Callais ruling to understand how the hell we got here, what comes next, and how we might be able to fight our way out.

Progress Report: In Justice Roberts’ decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which ended the pre-clearance requirement, he cited the fact that Section 2 still exists and can take care of racial discrimination in redistricting. Yesterday, Roberts voted to torpedo Section 2. So what happened? What changed? I’m going to ask that a lot, but this is the starting point.

David Daley: I think Roberts has played a really careful long game over decades to arrive at the point we reached yesterday, which was essentially the final evisceration of the Voting Rights Act.

This has been his life’s work. In many ways, the fact that he has so painstakingly taken apart the most successful civil rights legislation in American history, while maintaining his reputation as a mildly conservative institutionalist — an umpire — is a testament to the skill and patience he has shown.

This decision echoes, in many ways, the first voting rights fight he was part of as a young man in Washington. When he arrived at the Reagan Department of Justice and took the reins of the voting rights portfolio just ahead of the 1982 reauthorization fight, the question of intent versus effect was at the very heart of it.

Roberts’ side lost that fight in 1982 in Congress. Congress made clear they meant effect, not only intent. But yesterday, Roberts, Alito, and Thomas had the last word.

When you go back and look at Shelby County, there was a case about three years earlier called Northwest Austin. That’s the precursor to Shelby. That’s where Roberts drops, in dicta, this idea of “equal sovereignty among states.”

[Note: Equal sovereignty refers to the idea that the federal government must treat every state the same, which directly conflicted with the Voting Rights Act’s requirement that some states with a history of racial segregation and voter suppression run changes to their voting laws and redistricting maps by the Department of Justice before implementation.]

There is no such idea. Even conservative law professors looked at this and said, “I’ve never heard of this,” because it doesn’t exist. But Roberts made it up by extrapolating from the Equal Footing Doctrine, which governs the admission of states to the Union. He turned it into “equal sovereignty,” dropped it into Northwest Austin, and then cited himself a few years later in Shelby County.

So he is always planning ahead and strategizing the next move. While he promises in Shelby County that freezing the Section 4 formula would not have a major effect — and that things have changed in the South anyway — the Court gets to work undermining that almost immediately.

The road to Brnovich, where Section 2 was supposedly preserved but is [actually] weakened, is a short one. Step by step, you can see how they got there.

They quote from what I think is one of the most disastrous decisions this Court has handed down this century: Rucho v. Common Cause on partisan gerrymandering. Roberts, in that case, while incentivizing all kinds of gerrymandering — the mid-decade Armageddon we’re watching now — goes out of his way to say, “I am not at all leaving completely partisan gerrymandering to echo into a void. But there’s other ways of doing this, and citizens and commissions have it under control, and it’s not for the federal courts to get involved with.”

And of course, as soon as he says this, states say, “Well, we can partisan gerrymander now without anybody getting in our way, without any threat of punishment.”

And the consequence of that was that states began doing racial gerrymanders and saying, “This isn’t a racial gerrymander. This is a partisan gerrymander.”

And yesterday, in the Calais decision, the Court actually says, “Well, one of the issues here is that we have to protect the ability of states to do partisan gerrymanders.” Because when states say they’re doing a partisan gerrymander and someone says “no, that’s racial,” that gets in the way of their ability to partisan gerrymander.

To believe that this Court does not fully understand, and indeed strategize, what the consequences and the partisan ramifications of their decisions in these cases will be is at this point to be willfully blind to the facts.

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Go back to three years ago to Allen v. Milligan, in 2023, when the Supreme Court, in a majority that included John Roberts, upheld Section 2 in pretty much the same situation. What changed? Does this shift suggest they were strategizing, moving gradually with their decisions over the years?

David Daley: Kavanaugh’s concurrence in that case is the breadcrumb.

They all sign onto a decision saying this is the Voting Rights Act and what we have to do. But then Kavanaugh writes a brief concurrence saying, “I concur because this is the law right now. But what nobody is saying is, should this still be the law? Maybe time’s up.”

Louisiana noticed that concurrence, as Kavanaugh intended. He laid a trail toward the decision the Court wanted to reach. They didn’t feel they could do it in Milligan, but they set up what happened in Callais.

The Constitution hasn’t changed, the circumstances haven’t changed—they just decide now’s the time.

David Daley: That’s right. This Court is not a court. In the words of my friend, Professor Eric Segall: this Court is not doing law, it is exercising political power.

John Roberts is less the Chief Justice than the most effective, brilliant, and ruthless Republican political actor of the last half century. He has delivered victories the Republican Party could never win at the ballot box — on voting rights, the regulatory state, gun control, reproductive rights, executive power.

Look at where the nation and Constitution stand now compared to 2005. He has moved both dramatically rightward, all while insisting he’s just umpiring a baseball game.

Democrats famously failed to pass critical voting rights protections when they had the trifecta in 2021 and 2022. It drove me nuts. But now I’m wondering whether it would have mattered, given how the Supreme Court just ignored existing law and invented new interpretations in this decision.

I don’t think it would have mattered. I mean, look at what the Court just did in Callais, right? Congress did pass a law, and Justice Alito scribbled all over it and rewrote it to what he wanted it to be, all the while saying, if Congress wants to do something else, they should do so.

In 2006, when the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized, it came with a 16,000-page report, intentionally assembled by the bill’s sponsors to be a paper trail for any legal challenges. And the goal was to document the thousands upon thousands of cases in which the pre-clearance nationwide had been necessary, remained very much necessary in the nation in the years even leading up to its 2006 reauthorization.

It includes stories of a canceled election in Mississippi when it looked like the first Black candidate was ever likely to win — shocking stuff for 21st-century America. And this paper trail gets cited by all of the lower courts at Shelby County, at Northwest Austin, all the way up. And they were convincing to all of the lower courts — not to John Roberts.

Already, southern states are moving to delay their primaries so they can draw some racist gerrymanders, even in states where the primary elections have already begun. If it gets to the Supreme Court, do you imagine the justices will stop them based on precedent, or is the mask fully off at this point?

David Daley: I thought originally that this decision would come down in January or February so that all of these states would have time to act ahead of the midterms. And then as it slowed down, I wondered if maybe Roberts was more comfortable with this decision coming out in June, once it was too late for this midterm.

It almost felt like a classic Roberts move to detonate a time bomb that we wouldn’t feel the consequences of for another two years, that might allow him to dust his own and the Court’s fingerprints off of this a little bit.

But this race across the South to redistrict this year, even to the extent of canceling primaries that are already underway, certainly underlines the very partisan nature of what the Court has done and underlines just how fanciful its arguments remain about things having changed in the South.

It’s the same thing we saw after Shelby County, right? Texas was ready and enacted its voter ID law that very afternoon. North Carolina was working in 2013 on two different bills — one that they would introduce that was milder if they had upheld the Voting Rights Act, and another that they called the monster that they would unleash if Shelby went the way they wanted. They went with the monster.

Roberts presumably gets the newspaper. He would have understood what was happening in all of these states. And if he truly believed that things had changed in the South, he might have looked at what was happening in state legislatures and said, “Maybe things haven’t changed as much as I thought.”

And if he didn’t think that in the days leading up to issuing the decision, the rush of legislation immediately afterwards might have pointed this out. It didn’t. And here they are, spouting the same lines 13 years later. It’s as if this is their intention.

And now that the deed is done, it’s hard to imagine them blocking any gerrymandered.

Daley: I imagine that by April it would be too late, but one should never underestimate the determination of red state trifecta governments to work to dilute and suppress the voice of minorities and their political power.

And it’s a matter of whether the Supreme Court has the willingness to say, “Hold on for a second,” which I think—anyone at this point who thinks the Court is going to side with voters over the interests of white Republicans is sadly mistaken.

So it seems like the only way to remedy this situation and get a new Voting Rights Act passed without it getting struck down is to expand the Supreme Court?

David Daley: I think the Court certainly has to be expanded. It certainly has to be reformed. We have to talk about term limits, ethics guidelines, whether it should be allowable for justices to time their retirements so that they can be replaced by a president of their own choosing.

I think there are bigger questions we have to look at as well. Are there questions over the kinds of cases that they can have jurisdiction over? At this point, I’m not above stripping them of their grand temple to justice and making them work out of an office mall in Silver Spring to remind them that they’re a court and not a super-legislature that has final say.

So I think that there are lots and lots of reform ideas here, and that until and unless we get serious about this — and it’s going to have to be the Democratic Party that gets really serious about it at the next trifecta moment that they might have — because if they don’t, this Court is going to continue to claim the final say until the 2050s. The supermajority is going to be in power.

So Democrats who think that things will go back to normal once Trump leaves don’t understand that it’s the U.S. Supreme Court that has really become the main source of Republican political power in the nation.

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On the topic of Democrats getting the message, a few years ago, they did essentially nothing to pursue all the revelations about the conservative justices’ blatantly corrupt relationships with right-wing billionaires.

Democrats didn’t have the votes to oust a justice, but I argued at the time that making a big show of it and issuing subpoenas and getting behind the idea of expanding the Supreme Court could have possibly chastened those justices, maybe stop them from being so bold in their decisions. Do you think that would have made a difference? Or was I just delusional?

David Daley: I don’t know the answer to that. But I do think, in many ways, that the lesson of President Roosevelt and his serious threat of court-packing in the 1930s put the Court on notice that it had gotten far outside the mainstream of where America would like it to be.

And I’m not sure John Roberts cares. I start my new book with a quote from Roberts in 2009. Let me read it: “The most important thing for the public to understand is that we’re not a political branch of government. They do not elect us. If they do not like what we are doing, it’s more or less just too bad.”

That’s actually not how it works. And I think some serious threats, and then action to reform this Court, to bring it back in line, to reduce its chutzpah, are very much called for and required in this moment.

To me, this is the bigger project of the conservative legal movement. It’s the inversion of laws intended to protect minorities, the same way the right attacks DEI as being racist and the separation of church and state as the persecution of Christians.

Daley: I think you’re right. I think it’s all the same. I think it’s all the same playbook, and I think a lot of this comes from the same impulse.

You can look at one of the very first major decisions Roberts handed down. This was the school desegregation cases — I think it was Seattle and Louisville, Kentucky. And the most famous line from that decision is when Roberts says, and I paraphrase, but I’m close, “The way to stop discriminating based on race is to stop discriminating based on race.”

I lived in Louisville, Kentucky for a few years, and Louisville is one of the most segregated cities in the nation. They attempted to do a couple of little things to make themselves slightly more equitable. Even that was a bridge too far for the Chief Justice.

You look at a case like Shelby County. The Shelby County case was brought by Edward Blum, who is the same person who brought the university affirmative action cases. So there’s a similar legal principle they’re trying to advance — race neutrality and colorblindness.

And this tracks all the way back into the 19th century. This was very much the way that those who were conservatives in the 1970s looked at the civil rights movement. You see it every year on Martin Luther King Day when they pull out the one King quote that they know about colorblindness.

There is, among this conservative legal world, a desire to say: how long do we have to keep giving special treatment? There’s an impatience with racial progress and a determination to declare the job finished and complete.

And you see this in Shelby County, in which Alito and Roberts are asking how long this is going to go on. It’s beginning to look like this is going to go on forever. Well, Congress said 25 more years, and then they’ll revisit it. And they’re the ones who get to make that decision, especially if you’ve read the text of the 14th Amendment.

It’s a direct echo of the Court decisions in the 1870s that effectively smothered Reconstruction. You see all of these cases — the Civil Rights Act cases, the Enforcement Act cases, United States v. Cruikshank — in which the justices essentially say, “It’s been 15 years since the Civil War. Is this kind of treatment going to go on forever?”

Meanwhile, there are still Americans bearing the effects of slavery. But these white justices were already trying to figure out how quickly they could turn the page and move on. And here we are today, and this Court is doing the exact same thing.

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I was ready for this Supreme Court decision. Let’s hope Democrats planned, too. Here’s what it means and what comes next.

Note: The far-right’s fascist takeover of this country is being aided by the media’s total capitulation to Trump’s extortion. It’s never been more critical to have a bold independent media willing to speak up against the powerful. That’s what I’m trying to do here at Progress Report.

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The Supreme Court eviscerated the Voting Rights Act on Wednesday, handing down a decision that could fundamentally change who controls power in the United States for decades to come.

In a 6-3 ruling authored by ultra-conservative Justice Samuel Alito, the court rejected a Louisiana Congressional map that deliberately drew a second Black-majority district. While not technically fully destroying the Voting Rights Act, the decision called the map an illegal racial gerrymander.

This sets a new precedent, lifting a ban on splitting up members of racial and language minority groups to prevent them from having significant say over their representatives (a tactic known as “cracking and packing.”). In a searing dissent, liberal Justice Elana Kagan said that it will now enable states to “without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power.”

Since the VRA’s passage in 1965, states and municipalities have been compelled to draw districts that provide opportunities for minority voters to choose representatives that reflect their community.

That will no longer be the case; instead, the Supreme Court has created a veneer of “race neutrality,” part of an ongoing conservative project to redefine the idea of consideration for minorities into a form of discrimination against majority populations; courts have similarly weakened rules meant to separate church and state, casting Christians as discriminated against when the government has prevented prayer in schools or funding for religious organizations, for example. It is also at the core of the right’s war on DEI, which it has framed as a sort of reverse-racism.

This decision overturns not only the original Voting Rights Act, but an amendment passed by Congress in response to a 1982 decision in City of Mobile v. Bolden. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that discriminatory intent was required to prove vote dilution, and in response, Congress changed the law so that it only required discriminatory results to prove illegal dilution.

Now what?

Well, first, we remember that Democrats could have fortified the Voting Rights Act and avoided this whole problem when they had full control of government back in 2021-22. Former Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s refusal to move on the filibuster were most directly responsible for this failure, but plenty of other lawmakers only said they’d vote to change the racist old procedural rule because they knew that it would not pass.

This Supreme Court was clearly eyeing a final finishing blow to the VRA when Democrats were in power, and instead of providing the most basic protections for the constituents who make up their base, they decided to stand behind a tool best known for being used to prevent civil rights laws from being passed.

With that out of the way, we can consider the immediate and long-term electoral and legal consequences, which will be seismic.

Research by Fair Fight Action and Black Voters Matters Fund found that Republicans could realistically redraw and flip up to 19 Congressional districts currently designed to empower minority communities. On the state level, up to 191 Democratic-held seats could be redrawn to be safe Republican seats.

On the national level, some of this has already happened in Florida, where the legislature just passed a map that deliberately ignored the VRA’s Section 2, anticipating this decision.

Given the timing of the decision, it’s more likely that massive redistricting will take place in 2028.

Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves this week called for a special session of the legislature to redraw the state’s map, which will now be unencumbered by any hint of fairness. The state’s one minority-led district is now in danger, though according to the voting rights group Issue One, the fact that Mississippi already held primaries in March will make change this year will be difficult to defend.

Similarly, Georgia’s early primary voting began this week, which will make further gerrymandering difficult this year (though don’t put it past them to try). Louisiana will also likely have trouble drawing a map that completely eliminates Black representation, at least this year, because the state’s primary takes place on May 2nd.

All of this adds even more urgency to flipping Congress and winning as many state legislature as possible. In 2010, Republicans took over swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina, allowing them to create gerrymanders that are still giving the party disproportionate representation. Democrats were able to claw back majorities for a time in Michigan and Minnesota, and pass independent redistricting amendments in several states, but that will no longer be enough; so long as this new ruling stands, they will have to get aggressive in amending the process to allow them to redraw every state that they control.

This is why I started FlipSeats.org, which breaks down state legislative races and contains a growing repository of information about flippable seats in states where Democrats can either win majorities or break supermajorities. Once again taking trifectas in Michigan and Minnesota, flipping Wisconsin and Arizona, breaking supermajorities in Kansas and North Carolina — all of these things are possible, and they just got a whole lot more urgent.

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The algorithm that determines the list and its rankings are something of a black box — it definitely isn’t based solely on sales, I’ll tell you that much — but I won’t complain about suddenly finding the newsletter ranked #66 after months of net subscription loss. I don’t do this work for status, but the ranking helps with visibility, gaining new subscribers, and making the work sustainable, so I can’t just ignore it, either.

The Best Seller list resets every morning, so there is precious little time to capitalize on this rare bit of momentum. So tonight, I’m asking you to upgrade to a paid subscription to Progress Report, and to make it more enticing, I’m offering 50% off a monthly or full year subscription.

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As you’ll see on the leaderboard below, I’m in the company of some great publications and utter lunatics, including blogger Michael Tracey, who made headlines this weekend for trying to fight former CNN anchor Jim Acosta. One of those radical centrist contrarians, Tracey has busied himself with the bewildering work of protecting rich pedophiles named in the Epstein files. That he tried to throw down with Acosta at the party thrown by Substack before the White House Correspondents Dinner suggests that this website could use some new protagonists.

The kind of work that we do at Progress Report isn’t super sexy — interviews with underdog progressives challenging corporate Democrats in primaries, building websites that document legislative elections and state and local ballot initiatives, diving deep into policy doesn’t sell like Trump-related hot takes. This is a rare opportunity, so I hope you’ll find the $2.50 per month to help Progress Report rise of the list and become more sustainable.

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Whenever people ask me how I stay sane despite working in politics and journalism for a living, I laugh and shrug my shoulders and say something corny like “who said I stay sane?” But the truth is that as horrendous and dystopian as our civic society has become, it’s never been easier to keep a cool head. This is not a good thing.

Tonight I have some thoughts on the weekend chaos and a new video with Mayor Mamdani, and some reported interviews coming later this week.

Note: I’ll be honest, this newsletter’s paid subscribers have plummeted since I came back from open-heart surgery. It’s making it hard to do this work, because there are real expenses, including site coding, web hosting, electoral resources, media access, and more. This is a second full-time job, and if you can help make it sustainable, it will allow me to report and amplify stories you won’t find elsewhere.

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Within minutes of the news breaking that a gunman had run through the White House Correspondents Dinner at the Hilton in DC last night, my Twitter feed divided itself into six basic threads:

1. Annoyance that NBC had interrupted the NBA playoffs to show breaking news coverage from DC

2. Journalists in the room posting photos and detailed narratives about what it was like to be with other journalists in the middle of the danger

3. A screeching chorus of right wing influencers calling the incident evidence that Trump’s White House grandiose ballroom must be built

4. Other right wing influencers blaming liberals for their “violent rhetoric”

5. Jokes about how RFK Jr seemed to ignore his gobsmacked wife during the chaos while Stephen Miller used his pregnant wife as a human shield

6. Immediate suspicion that this third assassination attempt was staged to revive Trump’s flagging poll numbers.

You’ll notice that none of the immediate reactions were at all somber, measured, or anything resembling ways that people would have once responded to an attempted assassination of the US president. The intervening 24 hours have only hardened these reactions, a symptom of the larger cultural and political nihilism that has become the norm ofer the past decade.

There’s no reason to believe anything or take anyone seriously, because everything is a grift, a cynical con, or so undermined by bad faith political actors that sobriety is foolish and cringeworthy. CNN anchors and right-wing actors who now clutch pearls over the would-be assassin’s BlueSky-coded diatribes against the Trump administration ignore the role they play in delivering us to this cultural nadir.

Last night, the MAGA influencers got their marching orders before the public had any chance to make sense of the shooter news, turning an assassination attempt into a meme about the ballroom.

Today, as if there was nothing more important to do — like perhaps look into why the security was so lax at the Hilton last night — the DOJ spent its Sunday writing a letter urging the construction of the ballroom as a matter of national security. Worst of all, contemptible Butterball dipshit Randy Fine took a break from burping up racial slurs and cheering on genocide to introduce a bill mandating the ballroom’s construction.

It’s this kind of brazen and immediate exploitation that makes it impossible to take anything seriously, even when it’s dead serious. Trump and his flunkies have spent the past decade destroying any notion of objective reality, trashing the government’s credibility, and turning conspiracy theories into seemingly viable possibilities. Saturday night was another opportunity to hack away at our collective reality, and people reacted by asking for the basketball game to come back or with immediate skepticism because they’ve been conditioned to do so.

How do you trust the official story of an administration that is weaponizing the DOJ to pursue absurd allegations of interference in the 2020 election?

How can you trust the advisories of a White House that sets health policy based on the raving pseudoscientific beliefs of a fully unqualified raccoon penis collector?

Believe the legal briefings offered by a clusterfuck of skinheads that justifies murdering innocent people in the streets by calling them terrorists?

How does one buy the promises of a lifelong salesman who starts pointless, economy-wrecking wars and lies about everything from downed planes to peace negotiations?

Why would anyone not believe in conspiracy theories when it turns out that the one we laughed at the most — that the government and society are run in large part by a cabal of powerful pedophiles who can barely work a Blackberry — turns out to be more than a little bit true?

Epstein aside, this exactly what the Trump administration wants. If you can’t trust what you see and hear, you either tune out or subscribe to their alternate reality, consume their spoonfed dopamine, accept their simple version of events. You summon the indignation and moral outrage because it makes you feel something.

This isn’t all Trump’s doing; for example, it turns out that everyone in DC seemed to know that the leading contender for governor in California was a huge sex pest and just kind of kept it a secret. John Fetterman had a personality transplant. AIPAC and Peter Thiel have turned campaign ads into weapons of mass disinformation. The Biden era gave us the blatant lies about Israel’s genocide and crackdown on student protestors who just didn’t like seeing children blown apart. Why have faith in anyone?

Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I see memes almost every day that use 9/11 as a punchline — and after two decades of that horrible event being cynically exploited to sell disastrous wars, justify torture, and create a vast surveillance state network, not to mention be used as a cudgel to dominate our culture, force-feed us phony patriotism and silence dissent, it’s pretty hard to not see it as a tool of oppression, to not scoff and laugh at its invocation?

I don’t yearn for a more serious or sober politics; I think I abandoned my sense of earnestness somewhere in middle school. Gentility means nothing without humanity. That said, nihilism is an act of self-defense, because you’d rather feel nothing when nothing feels good. And when society stops caring, that’s when evil festers and people get hurt.

New York: Mayor Zohran Mamdani spoke to supporters who spent the day canvassing for city council candidate Lindsey Boylan. I was on hand and caught the entire thing, so you can call this an exclusive:

The special election, for a seat located on the west side of Manhattan (Hell’s Kitchen, Chelsea, West Village) will take place on Tuesday.

California: Election officials confirmed that a strict voter ID and citizenship verification amendment will be on the ballot in November. The proposal would require voters to show ID in person or use a special pin number every time they vote by mail. Moreover, election officials would have to verify that every voter is a citizen, which is almost impossible to do; states do not keep citizenship databases, nor does the federal government.

Idaho: Activists seeking to overturn the state’s ultra-strict abortion ban are closing in on qualifying a constitutional amendment. They’ve collected over 100,000 signatures and hit its goals in 19 legislative districts, and if verified, that would be more than enough to get a reproductive rights guarantee in front of voters in November.

Missouri: Gov. Mike Kehoe visited a rural part of the state to promote his economic development agenda, including a hearty defense of data centers. He should keep it up, because if any issue will break the GOP’s lock on rural voters, it’s this one.

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I’m writing this introduction on the train back to New York after four days in DC for More Perfect Union’s spring retreat. It was a packed week, so I’m only now getting to write, but I’ve got plenty of stories and new ideas in the works for the weeks and months to come.

While we were busy — I spoke with labor organizers, healthcare experts, voting rights lawyers and more — Washington itself was pretty sleepy. The area around the Federal Triangle and Dupont Circle is an eerie place: serene streets are surrounded by old houses and mid-rise office buildings filled with some of the best and worst people in the world. War criminals and humanitarians stand side-by-side in line for salads during lunch hour.

The political energy in the city right now reminds me of the summer I spent in DC as a college intern in 2006: A moronic Republican president causing chaos in the Middle East, corrupt corporations and conservative lobbyists feeding on the public trough, a voting public souring so thoroughly on the leadership it just re-elected that a recently feckless Democratic Party is getting a bit of swag ahead of the midterm elections. May Rahm Emanuel stay far, far away this time.

The stakes are somehow even higher, and the loathing of the administration is even more extreme now, as violent federal occupation has extended to domestic front. This, spotted near the White House, gives you an idea of the vibe:

Today I’m going to run through some news updates — I’ve been on the ballot initiative beat — and stories that I think you should read, and normal service, with original reporting, will resume going forward.

Note: I’ll be honest, this newsletter’s paid subscribers have plummeted since I came back from open-heart surgery. It’s making it hard to do this work, because there are real expenses, including site coding, web hosting, electoral resources, media access, and more. This is a second full-time job, and if you can help make it sustainable, it will allow me to report and amplify stories you won’t find elsewhere.

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Democrats pulled out a close victory in Virginia’s special redistricting election on Tuesday, securing a new map that could lead to the party picking up four additional Congressional seats.

Just as importantly, the party’s leadership seems to have grown a spine… or at least the beginnings of one. Whereas Democratic leaders in the Senate and White House meekly accepted the preservation of the filibuster when they could have rammed through a new and revitalized version of the Voting Rights Act in 2021 or 2022, the party has stepped up and fought back in response to Donald Trump and the GOP’s gerrymandering gambit.

Instead of complaining about aggressive partisan redraws in Texas and Ohio and cowering at the prospect of losing special elections, Democrats used all available power to implement their own new maps in California and Virginia, then spiked the football when they declared victory.

It’s rare for me to cite a Hakeem Jeffries with anything but exasperation, but the statement he offered in the hours after the win in Virginia was genuinely heartening:

“While many expected Democrats to roll over and play dead, we did the opposite,” Jeffries boasted in his statement, which ended in a striking promise: “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time.”

While often milquetoast on policy and reluctant to stand up to organized money, Jeffries showed a killer instinct during the referendum campaign, which should come as little surprise: this was about power, not ideology, and victory would get the Congressman from Brooklyn much closer to becoming Speaker of the House.

But for all the personal motivation, Jeffries also declared a broader philosophical shift for Democrats, taking the party from Michelle Obama’s famous declaration that “when they go low, we go high” to a much more era-appropriate mantra of “when they go low, we hit back hard.”

It’s a welcomed change for a party used to wringing its hands instead of getting them dirty, and the reward for shattering once-cherished norms should help convince lawmakers in DC to take dramatic action to pass a new federal voting rights act the next time Democrats have a trifecta. Ideally that comes in 2029, though the DOJ and Supreme Court will do their best to make it structurally impossible. Nothing motivates a politician like survival.

So again, it’s worth noting that this effort was made in service of securing power, not wielding it to materially improve the lives of constituents. There’s still a lot of work to do on that front: consider that at the same time that she campaigned to pass the redistricting amendment, Gov. Abigail Spanberger made draconian changes to a new law that would finally provide Virginia’s public employees the right to collectively bargain. Her proposed changes, which the Assembly will have to override, would so significantly water down the workers’ new rights that they’d be rendered almost useless.

As the Economic Policy Institute recently calculated, public sector workers in Virginia make on average 26.7% less than their private sector peers, a product of Jim Crow-era anti-union laws from a very different era in the state’s history. Speaking with folks from labor in Virginia, passing the public sector worker bargaining rights was a top priority, so much so that the unions held off from criticizing Spanberger when she said that she would not support a repeal to the state’s broader “right to work” anti-union law before the Democratic primary last spring.

Spoiling Republican plans to sabotage democracy and win more seats for Democrats has to be the means, not the end.

Primary surprise: The Sacramento Bee’s editorial board surprised northern California political observers this week when the newspaper endorsed City Councilwoman Mai Vang over longtime Rep. Doris Matsui (CA-7) in the upcoming Democratic Congressional primary.

Vang, 41, is running as a fresh, progressive, community-focused alternative to the 81-year-old Matsui, a moderate has represented the district since winning a special election in 2005 after her husband, Rep. Bob Matsui, died in office. The councilwoman has been highly critical of the incumbent, accusing her of failing to stand up to ICE during federal raids in Sacramento’s immigrant-heavy neighborhoods last summer.

As the daughter of refugees from Laos, the issue is personal to Vang; as the eldest of 16 children who grew up in poverty, so is the government’s role in providing relief and creating opportunity for people. Matsui is married to the billionaire founder of an energy company in Virginia, and has done little to engage with constituents. Her refusal to meet with the Bee’s editorial board disqualified her from contention for the endorsement, but the paper made it clear that Vang was not simply the default:

Vang is truly a people’s candidate. She has been a tireless advocate for her council district, seemingly everywhere and never afraid to engage a constituent in a discussion. Matsui’s refusal to discuss Sacramento’s future in a conversation with Vang and The Bee is not some exception to the rule. Matsui avoids public meetings requiring spontaneous exchanges. In one virtual “town hall” in 2024, it was clear that both the questions and answers were scripted in advance. Matsui’s eyes moved from left to right as she read the prepared responses.

This congressional district, significantly redrawn last November via the voter-approved Proposition 50, now covers the southern half of Sacramento and heads south to Lodi, west into West Sacramento and east to Placerville and El Dorado County. Much of this territory is even new to Matsui.

Vang will be tasked to champion the needs of new communities and neighborhoods, including the very different challenges facing rural residents. This district is not some haven of privilege. Most voters have much in common with Vang, and little with the incumbent.

For more on the race and the challenger herself, check out my February interview with Councilwoman Vang right here:

Prefer to read? You can do that here.

Ballot initiatives: Voters continue to gain additional issues to ponder as new amendments and referenda wind their way through the long and sometimes arduous qualification process. I’m updating the lists over at the On The Ballot site, including these new additions:

• Missouri: Gov. Mike Kehoe wants to phase out and replace the state’s income tax with an increased sales tax, a very regressive proposal that the GOP legislature just put on an upcoming ballot. It remains to be seen whether it will go before voters during the August primary or in November.

• California: Anti-tax activists have qualified an amendment that would severely cap local real estate transfer taxes, which provide a large percentage of the budgets in some of the state’s biggest cities. It’s aimed in particular at LA’s 5.5% mansion tax. It would also make it virtually impossible for local voters to raise taxes on the ballot.

• Maine: Activists are aggressively challenging petition signatures on the ballot measure that would ban trans kids from playing girls’ scholastic sports. Secretary of State Shenna Bellows has said that there aren’t enough challenged signatures to put the qualification at risk, activists with Equity Maine are more bullish on the chances of knocking the initiative off the ballot.

• Akron, OH: Voters approved the creation of a police oversight board in 2022, after the local police murdered a 25-year-old motorist named Jayland Walker during an attempted traffic stop. Now, local activists are pushing to reform the board selection process, to prevent it from being stacked with law enforcement members and allies. The group behind the initiative, Freedom BLOC, is also pursuing a pair of housing ballot initiatives from a list of 14 proposals released earlier this year.

• San Diego, CA: The City Council is backing a potential ballot initiative that would place a tax on corporations that “own and rent out more than 10 single-family homes or homes in small buildings like duplexes.” It may or may not wind up on the ballot in November, as lawmakers could wind up deciding to conduct further research or negotiate a deal with the real estate industry.

• Illinois: With the Supreme Court poised to kill off the rest of the Voting Rights Act, legislators in Illinois are looking to create a list of priorities that must guide future redistricting decisions. They have until early May to approve a state constitutional amendment that would go before voters later this year. The districts would have to ““to be substantially equal in population; to ensure that no citizen is denied an equal opportunity to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of his or her choice on account of race; to create, where practical, racial coalition or influence Districts; to be contiguous; and to the extent practicable, to be compact.”

Abortion: States continue to move in diametrically opposite directions on the right to choose.

• In Pennsylvania, the state Supreme Court overturned a ban on state Medicaid funds being used to pay for abortion. The Democrat-dominated court’s decision marks the first time the high court has found that the state constitution guarantees the right to reproductive choice.

• South Carolina Republicans moved forward with a bill that would ban abortion from the moment of conception, remove exceptions for rape and incest, and charge women who terminate pregnancies with a crime. The proposal would put doctors in prison for up to 20 years and imprison women for up to two years. GOP Sen. Tom Davis has vowed to block the bill from becoming law; in the meantime, the legislature voted unanimously to approve tax credits for donating to so-called “pregnancy crisis centers.”

Bad bosses: With just 1800 OSHA inspectors across the nation, enforcement of workplace safety rules has become almost non-existent; with 160 million workers in eight million workplaces nationwide, that’s just one inspector per 84,000 workers. According to the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, a worker dies every 104 minutes in America.

This dearth of enforcement makes the work of the nonprofit even more important, and on Wednesday, NCOSH released its Dirty Dozen annual report on twelve companies that have brazenly put workers’ health and safety in danger in pursuit of profits. According to NCOSH, a worker dies every 104 minutes in America.

Cruelty is the point: As the Trump administration gets set to strip SNAP benefits from millions of Americans, a new study finds that work requirements do not reduce the unemployment rate. Instead, they simply lead to people with jobs missing out on their benefits due to bureaucratic issues and prevent people who can’t hold jobs from eating.

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Since this is a good news edition of the newsletter, I will not be mentioning the New York Mets, a lifeless wreck of a team that has now lost 11 games in a row. Nope, no Mets tonight.

I’m headed to DC in the morning for a retreat with my coworkers at More Perfect Union. I’ll let you know if I see Kash Patel or Pete Hegseth out at the bars.

Note: The far-right’s fascist takeover of this country is being aided by the media’s total capitulation to Trump’s extortion. It’s never been more critical to have a bold independent media willing to speak up against the powerful. That’s what I’m trying to do here at Progress Report.

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On a more positive NYC-related note: Mayor Zohran Mamdani endorsed my friend (and friend of the newsletter) Lindsey Boylan in her special election campaign for city council. Lindsey, who was the first woman to publicly accuse Andrew Cuomo of sexual harassment, spent most of last year working to defeat the disgraced governor and get Mamdani elected, braving the countless slings and arrows from Cuomo’s dirty PR operation.

Mayor Mamdani returned the favor on Saturday at a rally in Chelsea, just as early voting begins in the April 28th election. I was at the rally, where former comptroller and current Congressional candidate Brad Lander also spoke and endorsed Lindsey. Lander lingered afterwards meeting with supporters, but the mayor made a quick exit. Next on his to-do list? A meeting in the Bronx with former President Barack Obama, who gave a crucial boost to his universal childcare program.

This was the first time that Obama and Mamdani, both considered generational politicians, had met, though they spoke on the phone last summer. I’m not too concerned about their personal relationship, but symbolically, their appearance together, especially at a Bronx pre-k, matters a lot.

The circumstances have certainly changed over the last year, with establishment Democrats shifting from apocalyptic warnings about nominating Zohran to swiping his focus on “affordability” (even if just in messaging), but there is still a portion of the party that treats the young mayor and his democratic socialist movement with disdain. Obama’s friendly appearance was a seal of approval both for the mayor and for his childcare program, essentially making it the standard for Democrats going forward.

Idaho: The people of Idaho are proving to be legitimately more progressive than I could have ever expected.

Read more

As promised, I’ve got a big story on the hot trends in ballot initiatives so far this year, which I think serves as a microcosm of the broader political mood.

If you’d rather hear me talk about these things, you can tune into SiriusXM Radio Progress (channel 127) throughout the weekend, which will be replaying my friend Joe Sudbay’s show State of the States. Joe was kind enough to have me on today for a pretty substantive conversation about ballot initiatives and vital swing districts, a generous promotion for to my new sites OnTheBallot.news and FlipSeats.org.

Don’t have SiriusXM or just hate to wait? You can listen to my appearance right here:

I’ll be back later this weekend with good news, for paid subscribers only.

Note: I’ll be honest, this newsletter’s paid subscribers have plummeted since I came back from open-heart surgery. It’s making it hard to do this work, because there are real expenses, including site coding, web hosting, electoral resources, media access, and more. This is a second full-time job, and if you can help make it sustainable, it will allow us to focus on the kinds of stories and candidates that you won’t find anywhere else. If I can do more of this work, it’ll only help Democrats on the state and local levels nationwide.

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With Congress now useless and so many state legislatures either split, bought off, or out of session, direct democracy — ballot initiatives, constitutional amendments, and even local referendum — has become perhaps the most effective tool for influencing government policy and enacting tangible change.

Even though only roughly half of the states permit citizen-driven ballot questions at the state level, activists (and lawmakers) had already qualified 83 initiatives by the end of March, with hundreds of others in the exploratory phase. Add that to the 92 legislative proposals that have already passed out of at least one chamber of their state houses and you’re looking at an incredibly busy year for direct democracy even as much focus is on the battle for Congress.

I’ve documented the biggest pending initiatives and amendments at On The Ballot, the new website I launched last week, and will continue to add and adjust them as they make it for the ballot — I look forward to switching Idaho’s abortion rights amendment’s status to a clear qualified. The initiative list is already somewhat exhaustive, and a few patterns clearly stand out.

On the Ballot

Democracy on the ballot

That old chestnut that democracy itself is on the ballot is literally true this year: according to the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, 31 election-related initiatives have already qualified for the primary or November ballot, with 87 more in progress.

The proposals are a mixed bag, with attempts to expand direct democracy and voting rights as well as conservative-pushed restrictions on people’s fundamental rights. Virginians will vote on Tuesday whether to temporarily redraw their Congressional map to heavily favor Democrats; in November, Missourians will decide whether the GOP’s new gerrymander should continue to stand after this campaign cycle.

In Ohio, Massachusetts and Arizona, activists are pushing to qualify amendments that would codify broad access to the ballot.

Ohioans for Secure and Fair Elections just won the blessing of the state Supreme Court to move forward with an amendment that would institute automatic voter registration, guarantee same-day registration adjustments, and ensure accommodations for voters with disabilities, among other things.

Massachusetts will also ask voters whether to allow for same-day voter registration.

Down in Arizona, legislators and activists are pushing a amendment that would codify early and mail-in voting in the state constitution.

Elsewhere, the ballot initiative itself is… well, on the ballot. Frustrated by their constituents’ maddening tendency to vote for progressive policies when offered the direct opportunity, red state legislators have worked in recent years to both neuter the laws passed by voters and ensure that they won’t be able to pass them again.

• In Nebraska, the GOP majority’s decision to weaken and roll back a minimum wage increase passed by voters in 2022 has activists pushing for a constitutional amendment that would curtail such sabotage: Respect Nevada Voters amendment would require an 80% majority of the legislature to change laws passed by voters.

• This winter, the Arkansas Supreme Court gave the legislature carte blanche to undo voter-passed initiatives so long as they have a 2/3rd majority. It was the latest blow to direct democracy, which was weakened several years back when the legislature dramatically increased the number of counties from which activists have to collect petitions. The Protect AR Rights campaign would undo these limitations and protect activists from any further interference in the qualification process.

• In Montana, voters will have a chance to stop the meddlesome interference that local elected officials often impose on the ballot initiative system. The state could soon pass a constitutional amendment requiring impartial, predictable, open, and timely processes for citizen ballot initiatives.

• Missouri has dueling amendments: one, sponsored by Republican lawmakers, would require initiatives to win majorities in all eight of the state’s Congressional districts — an essentially impossible task, with only 5.3% of initiatives projected to reach that absurd standard. On the other hand, the Respect Missouri Voters campaign aims to entrench the process as it stands in the state constitution while also banning legislators from simply rolling the laws back.

• Voters in both North Dakota and South Dakota will be asked in November to increase the threshold for constitutional amendments to 60% approval, which is almost impossible to attain: consider how Florida, which made that switch a few years ago, was able to keep abortion illegal despite 57% of the state’s voters supporting a pro-choice amendment at the ballot box in 2024. Utah Republicans want to do the same thing specifically for tax-related measures.

• Then there are the cynical and misleading initiatives and amendments, which capitalize on right-wing disinformation: Nevada and North Carolina will vote on requiring strict voter ID, while South Dakota and Kansas will ask voters to amend their state constitutions to affirm that only citizens can vote (which is already the law, of course).

They won’t all be a bummer, but I must unfortunately note that several states are expending considerable funds and directing public energy toward needless attacks on trans kids. This is all that conservatives really have now, so they’re trying to goose dissatisfied base voters with opportunities to bully children.

Refuge of the losers

There are no fewer than three anti-trans initiatives in Colorado this fall, including ones that would ban forms of gender-affirming care and bar trans girls from competing in girls’ sporting events (preventing something that happens without incident maybe once a year).

Washington State and Maine will also have trans sports participation on the ballot this year, as the dismal right wing minorities in those states try to ride a buzzy, outrage topic to relevance. Perhaps most egregious is the bigoted bait and switch being pulled in Missouri, where conservatives have attached a ban on trans care for minors to an amendment that essentially re-ban abortion just two years after voters passed it.

In Arizona, where former Gov. Doug Ducey already signed a law banning trans girls from competing in high school sports (he failed to fix the water crisis or the housing problem in Arizona, but hey, he got that done), activists are moving on to an effort to dictate where kids take showers and sleep during field trips.

Soak the rich

It’s not all bad; in fact, progressive policy is on the march in many right-leaning states, while new and more aggressive leftist economy proposals are starting to take root in more blue states and large cities.

There will be a number of ballot initiatives aimed at forcing the very wealthy to pay their fair share: progressives in Washington State will have to defend the recently passed millionaire tax, which is the state’s first-ever income tax (really!). And in California, in addition to the high-profile billionaire tax battle, voters will get to decide on several creative city-based wealth taxes, specifically targeting business executives.

In June, voters in San Francisco will have a chance to enact a surcharge on companies that are worth $1 billion or more and pay their CEOs one hundred times more than the median worker in the city; the tax, sponsored by two chapters of the SEIU, would raise around $200 million per year.

There’s a similar proposal in Los Angeles, where companies would get slapped with a 0.5% tax on large companies with public contracts and a CEO that takes in at least one hundred times more than the median employee.

Somewhat similarly, Arizona activists are pursuing an initiative that would limit the pay package for healthcare executives. Something like that might seem like a symbolic act — it’s just a few people per hospital — but should it pass, it will move the overton window for public policy and create a new paradigm for what angry economic populists are willing to do to create some economic justice.

On the other hand, the effort to increase working people’s wages and benefits continues in states red and blue. Oklahoma will finally get to vote on an increase to the minimum wage (likely hitting $15 a decade or so after many states), DC is set to weigh in on a living wage for all (or, a $25 minimum wage with an end to the tipped credit). Oakland and the rest of Alameda County is pursuing its own living wage, which it projects to be set at $30/hour by 2030.

Arizona is also looking to end the subminimum wage, which would be groundbreaking. The group One Fair Wage has come close to doing that in several strong blue states, but has hit roadblocks with lawmakers. In Arizona, it’s all up to the residents.

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Today is tax day, and to celebrate, I’m taking a look at the various efforts to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans. I’ll be back later this week with a ballot initiative breakdown and a heaping of good news.

Note: The far-right’s fascist takeover of this country is being aided by the media’s total capitulation to Trump’s extortion. It’s never been more critical to have a bold independent media willing to speak up against the powerful. That’s what I’m trying to do here at Progress Report.

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New York Gov. Kathy Hochul budged… at least a little bit.

With the state budget two weeks late and growing pressure from her left flank to raise taxes on the wealthiest New Yorkers, the governor endorsed an annual surtax on second homes in NYC worth $5 million or more. It’s estimated that the pied-à-terre tax would raise $500 million per year, and I suppose might free up a few luxury apartments that get relinquished by the obscenely wealthy and civically disengaged.

Not going to do much for the housing supply, but with a $5.4 billion budget deficit, it would raise a decent bit of change. More importantly, it’s a major philosophical concession by the governor, who has been steadfast against raising any taxes.

Why Hochul drew the line at $5 million, I’m not sure — for an idea of just how big and expensive an apartment that is, consider that you can get a remodeled two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in a high-end building in Manhattan for about $1 million (not that I know from personal experience). Remember, the proposal would tax these mansion apartments only if they’re somebody’s secondary residence, an apartment-mansion that sits empty for more than half the year.

We’re talking an exceedingly small number of people who would be taxed, and they can’t argue that they already contribute to the city’s tax base, given that they are not full-time residents and are exempt from income tax.

“Those who benefit from the city without living in a full-time capacity should contribute to the costs that it takes to run the city: public safety, world class parks, amenities, the roads, the subway system,” Hochul said, making exactly that appeal.

The real estate lobby was able to convince Andrew Cuomo to kill his own pied-à-terre proposal in 2019, but times have changed, to say the least.

While it’s true that some of the potential payers will probably find some accounting loophole out of the tax, there are at least some civic-minded ultra-wealthy people in the city. I recently spent a few weeks talking with a few of them about why they actually wanted to pay more taxes (or, maybe not wanted, but at least were willing, able, and thought it would be a good idea).

One of these noble elites, Morris Pearl, the board chair of Patriotic Millionaires, was the subject of this new report that I wrote and produced for More Perfect Union.

A few things really stuck out to me during our conversations (which are reflected in the interview above).

First, he was candid about his conversations with Governor Hochul, who repeats the myth that raising taxes by 2% on the richest New Yorkers would spur an exodus that would destroy the economy. As he explains, people like him (ie rich people) live in NYC because it’s where they want to live; otherwise, they’d already be living somewhere cheaper, where they can get twenty times the square footage for the same price. New York has always had its share of obscenely wealthy people, even back when their taxes were much higher (so, less than a decade ago).

A tax hike would amount to a rounding error for many of them, and that’s only if you tax capital gains and other non-income holdings.

So why are some ultra-wealthy people so outspokenly opposed to paying a bit more in taxes to do things like fund universal childcare? Pearl says that for many of them, net worth is at the core of their self-worth, and they measure their personal value by the value of their bank accounts. To use a sports analogy, they like to run up the score, even when it’s abundantly clear that they have won the ultimate prize.

We’re speaking in generalities here, and I wouldn’t want to assign motives to any one individual person based on their net worth. But I appreciated Morris’s willingness to speak out and no doubt burn some bridges in service of the public good. The video has amassed more than four million views across platforms in less than a week, and while I can’t prove the governor has seen it, I’m glad we were able to add to the escalating pressure.

Because despite what some partisans and consultants will tell you, it’s almost always a good and productive thing to pressure your own party into doing the right thing. Look at Maine, where Gov. Janet Mills has finally done an about face and blessed a millionaire tax, which passed through the legislature last week.

A centrist who has put together a largely anti-union record and vehemently opposed taxing the wealthy or businesses, Mills essentially had to approve the surcharge on income exceeding $1 million this time around, given how far she trails populist oyster farmer Graham Platner in the state’s Democratic Senate primary. To be fair, she wasn’t exactly pushed to the far left on this: Mainers voted to approve a wealth tax in 2016, only for corpulent conservative Gov. Paul LePage to repeal it in the state’s budget.

Wealth taxes are all the rage in blue cities and states these days. As detailed on our new site OnTheBallot.news, there will be a number of ballot initiatives aimed at forcing the very wealthy to pay their fair share: progressives in Washington State will have to defend the recently passed millionaire tax, which is the state’s first-ever income tax (really!). And in California, in addition to the high-profile billionaire tax battle, voters will get to decide on several creative city-based wealth taxes, specifically targeting business executives.

In June, voters in San Francisco will have a chance to enact a surcharge on companies that are worth $1 billion or more and pay their CEOs one hundred times more than the median worker in the city; the tax, sponsored by two chapters of the SEIU, would raise around $200 million per year. There’s a similar proposal in Los Angeles, where companies would get slapped with a 0.5% tax on large companies with public contracts and a CEO that takes in at least one hundred times more than the median employee.

And don’t listen to business shills or centrist scolds who tell you that these proposals will grievously damage the economy: California’s $20 an hour minimum wage for fast food workers, enacted in 2024, has had almost no appreciable impact on prices or employment. Meanwhile, take-home pay for workers in that segment has risen 11%.

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Progress Report has raised over $7 million dollars for progressive candidates and causes, breaks national stories about corrupt politicians, and delivers incisive analysis, and goes deep into the grassroots.

None of the money we’ve raised for candidates and causes goes to producing this newsletter or all of the related projects we put out. In fact, it costs me money to do this. So, I need your help.

For just $5 a month, you can buy a premium subscription that includes:

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The President of the United States is a one-sided social media beef with the Pope. And that’s not even the dumbest or most disgusting thing he did today.

Seeking to shore up the worst approval ratings for any president since the advent of modern polling, Trump held a little photo op at the White House to remind people that his reconciliation bill eliminated taxes on tips. But just as he’s finding that he cannot bend reality to his will in the Middle East, the event underscored the catastrophic consequences of American decline and late capitalist corporate plunder.

It was a surreal and stupid setup: a DoorDash delivery worker shuffled up to the backdoor of the White House, rang the doorbell, and handed a bag of McDonald’s to a smirking Trump. Later, the president handed her a $100 tip as she stood in front of reporters, dodging questions while Trump doubled down on his attacks on the pope.

Yet nothing about the exchange was inspirational or an endorsement of Trump’s economic policies: the delivery worker, Sharon Simmons, is an older woman from Arkansas — she wore a shirt that said “DoorDash Grandma” — who was forced to participate in the gig economy to help pay for her husband’s outrageously expensive cancer treatment.

"In the process of the treatment, even with insurance and stuff like that, I mean, let's face it, we've run through our savings," Simmons said.

Simmons said that not having to pay taxes on that money provided some much-needed relief in an otherwise devastating year. What went unsaid was that Simmons’s total tip income, $11K, was low enough that she wouldn’t have had to pay taxes on it anyway. Not that Trump would know or care.

Tonight I’m unveiling a new project, with much more to come in the days ahead.

Note: The far-right’s fascist takeover of this country is being aided by the media’s total capitulation to Trump’s extortion. It’s never been more critical to have a bold independent media willing to speak up against the powerful. That’s what I’m trying to do here at Progress Report.

You can help keep Progress Report afloat and build that network for just $5 a month — every subscription helps!

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Doing this work requires three things: time, patience, and spreadsheets. The sheer number of states, elections, and policies demand constant tracking and organizing, and there just aren’t resources freely available to the public with that kind of specific information in an easy-to-digest format.

Until now.

Last month, I launched FlipSeats.org, a website devoted to the most competitive state legislative races in the chambers that Democrats have a real chance of flipping blue — or at least breaking a veto-proof GOP supermajority. I’ve been told that the site, which I continue to update, has proven useful to people, so I’ve spent the last week or so building out a new and even more exhaustive site, this one dedicated to direct democracy.

Introducing OnTheBallot.news, a new online resource dedicated to tracking state and local ballot initiatives, referendums, and constitutional amendments. It focuses on a wide range of topics, from economic justice, the environment, and housing to voting rights, reproductive rights, and even the growing movement against data centers.

In an era of an evil federal government and state governments that are usually gerrymandered, dominated by conservatives, or just unwilling to take big swings, ballot initiatives and amendments have given people the opportunity to take democracy into their own hands and pass progressive policies in places where that would otherwise be impossible. And now conservatives are trying to use them in the same way, especially in blue states, making this year’s crop more important than ever.

The site is now online and fully functional, and I’ll continue to update it as initiatives move through the qualifying process, new referenda emerge, and I drill down into extremely local contests all around the country. Expect much more to come.

Tomorrow night, I’ll be back with a reported breakdown of the trends around these policies and proposals. For now, bookmark OnTheBallot.news and find a cause worth backing with your time or money.

On the Ballot

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Last night, I hosted one of the fastest rising stars in Democratic politics. She’s running for Congress in Denver, primarying a 30-year incumbent and riding a wave of momentum and a surge of interest all around the country. You can watch my entire conversation with Melat Kiros above or read on for my write-up and several clips.

Here are the previous entries in this year’s interview series with primary challengers: Mai Vang, Patrick Roath, Michael Blake

Note: The far-right’s fascist takeover of this country is being aided by the media’s total capitulation to Trump’s extortion. It’s never been more critical to have a bold independent media willing to speak up against the powerful. That’s what I’m trying to do here at Progress Report.

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The way Melat Kiros sees it, Democrats have a six-year window to revive democracy and transform the economy to serve working and middle class Americans. And because her member of Congress, Rep. Diana DeGette, hasn’t been able to deliver on any of those fundamental goals in her 30 years in DC, and nobody else was willing to challenge the incumbent in a cycle of mass Democratic primary challenges, Kiros stepped up to run herself.

“My plan was I want to sign up to volunteer for whoever’s going to do this because this is the most anti-incumbent cycle, so obviously, someone’s going to run against her. And that just wasn’t the case,” Kiros told Progress Report during a live interview on Thursday evening. “And so for me, there has to be a challenge. And if no one else is going to do it, I think I can speak to the issues that matter the most to Denverites, which is that it’s too damn unaffordable right now.”

At 28, Kiros would be one of the youngest members of Congress, and wasn’t even born yet when DeGette was elected back in 1996. In the past, that experience gap — Kiros is an attorney and former campaign manager, but hasn’t served in government — might be used against her. But in this environment, with Democratic voters so pissed off at an inert leadership that has failed to stand up to Donald Trump or protect the rights they purport to hold so dear, a fresh perspective and a far more urgent approach has been winning over supporters — a lot of them.

Last month, Kiros and her campaign shocked the Colorado political establishment when she not only won the Democratic Denver County assembly caucus vote last month, but demolished DeGette, more than doubling her vote total. She took home around 67% of the vote in the complicated process, which engages the party’s most tuned-in and passionate members. So thorough was the walloping that DeGette nearly didn’t make the primary ballot, qualifying by just a few points.

Kiros almost didn’t contest the assembly caucus, as she’d focused for months on qualifying for the ballot by collecting signatures from residents of the district. All of that groundwork helped her earn the endorsements of progressive groups like Justice Democrats and DSA, which brought the kind of grassroots support that helped another 28-year-old barista to a shock primary upset against an entrenched Democrat in a deep blue district back in 2018.

The parallels to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are natural and fitting, both in their biographies and the kind of contrast they offer to a long-time incumbent. The Democrat that AOC defeated is now a corporate lobbyist; DeGette’s campaign has been inundated with cash from corporate PACs, including from the likes of Lockheed Martin, Walmart, and every major pharmaceutical company. And like the Bronx congresswoman, Kiros is a passionate advocate for Medicare for All, universal childcare, a moratorium on AI data centers, and ending military aid to Israel.

The last one is pivotal to her story: Kiros moved to the US from Ethiopia as a little kid, and in recent years watched a civil war and genocide rip the country apart, with death toll of upwards of 600,000. It was a horror that led her to speak out early on against the burgeoning mass slaughter in Gaza.

In the fall of 2023, while working as a lawyer in New York, she wrote an article decrying both antisemitism and the way that it was used as a cudgel to silence anyone critical of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Her law firm asked her to take down the article.

“Having lost family members in that war [in Ethiopia], I said, ‘No, I can’t. I can’t take this down. This is the truth, and I refuse to shy away from it,’” Kiros recalls. “And then the next day I was let go.”

So much has changed in the two and a half years since that incident, and it’s likely that she wouldn’t be fired if the article went up today; the genocide and now the Iran War have compelled even the most hawkish Democrats to condemn Israel’s conduct. Because she took an early stand, though, the decision served as an inflection point: Kiros moved back to Denver, began a PhD program, worked for political campaigns, took on part-time jobs to pay the rent, and now she’s a few months from potentially pulling off one of Congress’s biggest upsets.

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This is a quick one tonight, as I’m working on a new project that I hope to debut tomorrow night. We’ve also got a live stream interview with an exciting progressive Congressional candidate scheduled for Thursday evening — I’ll send an email out tomorrow with more information.

Oh, and some quick election news: Liberal judge Chris Taylor won the Wisconsin Supreme Court election tonight, giving Democratic-aligned justices a 5-2 edge on the state’s top court. It’s a remarkable 180-degree turnaround from the majority held by conservatives less than a decade ago, which allowed for gerrymandered legislative and Congressional majorities that are only now in range of reversing.

In fact, it was a great night for Democrats in Wisconsin, as they also flipped the mayor’s office in Waukesha, a longtime GOP suburban stronghold.

Note: The far-right’s fascist takeover of this country is being aided by the media’s total capitulation to Trump’s extortion. It’s never been more critical to have a bold independent media willing to speak up against the powerful. That’s what I’m trying to do here at Progress Report.

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As many readers know, I underwent my sixth open-heart surgery in November. I was fortunate to have it done at a top hospital and immensely lucky to have health insurance that covered the cost of the operation and 10-day hospital stay — all $448K of it, due to the Byzantine and bloated healthcare billing system. There were still thousands of dollars in ancillary expenses — flights to the hospital in Cleveland and back, a hotel room on campus for my wife, food, some tests, etc. — but in terms of medical care, insurance worked the way it was intended.

I cannot say the same thing about my dental insurance.

Over the past six months — with a long layoff for the heart surgery — I’ve been dealing with two troublesome molars, which have required a crown, extraction, and replacement. I’ve had maybe five appointments, adding up to about three or four hours in the dentist chair. And so far, the work has cost me $8400 out of pocket, a massive drain on my savings. My dental insurance has proven almost useless, even though it comes from the same employer as my health insurance.

The outrageous difference got me wondering why dental insurance covers so little, and more broadly, why it’s even separate from health insurance. After all, oral care is a huge component of healthcare, especially for somebody like me, who has to studiously avoid infections that start in the mouth and work their way down to the heart.

Fortunately, I have a job that allows me to explore these questions in service of the public interest, so I’ve spent the last few months working on the video below, which debuted today:

For all the triumphs of the early-to-mid-20th century, including Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid, the story of the American social safety net at that time is one of missed opportunities that would have led to a very different and far more equitable country.

FDR first suggested a national health plan in the 1930s, and his successor, President Harry Truman, nearly made it happen. That would have included both health and dental care, which had been considered separate ever since the 1800s, when John’s Hopkins medical school refused to admit dental students and they were forced to create their own separate track. The American Dental Association campaigned hard against comprehensive national insurance, working with the healthcare sector to invoke the specter of communism and insisting that practices remain “independent,” or not tied to any pay formula.

Dental insurance emerged in the 1950s as a bonus plan for the children of workers in the longshoremen union in Washington State, and dentists accepted it as the lesser of two evils. Ironically, antitrust exemptions allowed a few insurers to become so dominant — Delta Dental has 60% market share in many states, and even more in several — that they now essentially control the income of so many dental professionals. They have not increased payments rates in pace with inflation and out of pocket maximums for patients have remained stagnant for decades upon decades. As one long-practicing dentist told me, insurance used to cover a lot of care, and now it’s hardly worth having.

The other part of he video focused on dental service organizations. These are largely private equity-owned companies that roll up dentists offices and squeeze patients and doctors alike, often in unethical ways, as you’ll see in my piece above. Most infamous is Aspen Dental, while Heartland Dental is the biggest chain. Both are known for putting pressure on dentists to produce as much as possible, and as a Heartland dentist tells me in the piece, it often crosses over into financial executives essentially making care decisions for patients based on reimbursement rates and how much they can charge.

There’s more to the system, including ridiculously high — like half a million dollars easy — student loans from dental school and the soaring cost of dental tech, resulting in doctors who are forced to work for these huge corporations or go out of network. There are 72 million Americans without health insursnxe, and many millions more who can’t afford care despite having it.

Don’t worry: the video isn’t just a doomer piece, because we go over what states are doing to fix the situation. It’ll take national legislation (and Medicare for All) to ultimately repair our grievously broken dental health system, but reforms to how much of their premium revenue insurance companies must spend on care reimbursements (a key feature of Obamacare) and regulating and even prohibiting corporate ownership of medical offices are two solutions that are emerging in the meantime.

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Happy Easter and Passover to all who celebrate. Tonight’s newsletter will be a bit tighter, part of my effort to produce more frequent and slightly shorter newsletters to get the news to you more quickly.

Note: The far-right’s fascist takeover of this country is being aided by the media’s total capitulation to Trump’s extortion. It’s never been more critical to have a bold independent media willing to speak up against the powerful. That’s what I’m trying to do here at Progress Report.

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Last week, I received an email from a political comms firm with the news that George Allen, a former governor and senator from Virginia, was challenging current Gov. Abigail Spanberger to a debate over the redistricting amendment currently on the ballot. I ignored the email because challenging people to a debate is annoying and George Allen is irrelevant, now two full decades removed from exiting the Senate.

Back in 2006, Allen’s re-election to the Senate seemed inevitable, just a formality before he launched a highly anticipated presidential campaign. But it all fell apart for Allen that summer, when he was caught on camera calling a tracker for his Democratic opponent Jim Webb “macaca” during a routine event. The term, it turned out, is an obscure old racial slur, and when the video surfaced, it created a firestorm that ultimately played a big role in his stunning loss. A comeback attempt in 2012 was spent mostly trying to convince people that he was tolerant of racial and religious diversity — a proto-woke — and he got smoked by six points by Tim Kaine.

So while Allen is fully irrelevant, I do think about his downfall quite often these days, as a point of comparison to measure the degradation of politics and accountability. Don’t get me wrong: I think it’s largely lame to complain about the lack of civility in today’s discourse, and almost useless to wring one’s hands over most of Donald Trump’s obscene lunatic rants. I’m actually all for trash talk in politics. Yet it’s still hard to reckon with the fact that there are zero consequences when the president explicitly threatens to commit mass war crimes on civilians and mocks a global religion, as Trump did on Sunday.

It’d be easy to shrug this kind of thing off as all in a day’s work for the president, and matter-of-fact media reports don’t come close to capturing the magnitude of the situation. But in any sane world, the grammatical ineptitude of writing “reign down” instead “rain down,” as Trump did on Saturday, would be enough to draw mockery and questions about the president’s mental competence. So would the fact that he actually posted the word “Fuckin’,” and not just because it’s incredibly lame, pseudo-tough guy stuff to include the apostrophe at the end. But in our nightmare dimension, the president has what is essentially impunity to threaten and carry out war crimes.

It’s the same tired routine: liberals and foreign policy experts are horrified, conservatives are silent, and we have to continue financing an illegal war being prosecuted by a madman at the expense of what remains of the American social contract.

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GOP Exits

Like rats fleeing a sinking ship, Republican elected officials are scurrying away from re-election campaigns.

The pace of retirements on Capitol Hill has been relentless: so far, 36 members of the House and seven senators have decided to call it quits. And at the state level, there have already been 14 Republican leaders who have retired, including the two top legislators in Wisconsin. North Carolina Republicans lost Senate Pro Tempore Phil Berger in a massive primary upset, their second GOP leader to make their exit in the last year, while Iowa’s Senate Majority Leader is also retiring (though he’s dealing with health issues and I wish him all the best).

Last month, when I launched FlipSeats.org (which is being regularly updated and will grow in scope soon!), the goal was to highlight the most important races in the legislatures that could realistically either flip from red to blue or see Democrats break a GOP supermajority. Not all of the leaders represent flippable seats, but many of their exits are notable in that they clearly telegraph the belief that they would be losing their power come November.

Progressive ballot initiatives

Unions are leading the way in the fight to close the vast inequality gap in California.

The 5% net worth tax on the state’s 200 billionaires, slated for the ballot in November, has gotten most of the attention; that initiative, backed by California’s biggest healthcare workers union, has drawn the ire and bottomless spending of big tech barons, along with countless headlines as the avatar of big electoral class war. The attention is warranted: a groundbreaking proposal, it would represent a new horizon in how America deals with outsized wealth. But there are several other initiatives, each sponsored by unions, that would also make history.

The Healthcare Executive Compensation Act, also sponsored by SEIU-UHW, the healthcare union, would limit the pay of executives at medical groups and privately run hospitals to $450,000 per year (pegged to the President’s salary). It’s a pay package that would still put recipients in the upper echelon of American earners, yet represent a massive pay cut for many executives: the state’s average hospital CEO pay is $920,000, while many make far more than that. The CEO of the nonprofit Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, for example, took home $5.7 million.

Studies have found no correlation between executive compensation and hospital performance, and the dual pressures of slashed federal funding for healthcare and rising costs make it almost impossible to justify sky-high salaries. Last week, the union delivered than a million petition signatures to qualify it for the ballot, indicating solid support for the initiative.

The third wealth-related tax will be on the ballot in San Francisco this summer, as voters will once again weigh in on an adjustment to the excessive CEO pay tax. The Overpaid CEO Act would increase the tax charge against companies that pay their CEOs more than 100 times more than the median employee.

This being San Francisco, the tax pretty specifically targets tech companies, but because it targets large companies that have operations in San Francisco and not simply those headquartered in the city, the business lobby writ large is spending millions of dollars to stop it. Small businesses are exempt from the tax: to qualify, companies need to have at least 1000 employees and produce $1 billion in revenue. Proponents estimate that it would raise $200 million a year for the city, which currently has a $1 billion budget deficit.

And in Ohio, grassroots activists got the go-ahead on Thursday to start collecting signatures for a proposed ballot initiative that would ban the development of all new large-scale data centers. The campaign is product of a backlash against Gov. Mike DeWine’s courting of these facilities, which have proliferated around the state thanks to generous tax credits. There are now more than 200 data centers in Ohio, fifth most in the country, and they each are financial boons to the energy companies who quite literally own the state government.

It’ll be a challenge for activists to qualify this initiative: with the language approved last week, they have until July 1st to collect at least 413,000 valid signatures. That it’s an all-volunteer operation makes it more difficult, but also guarantees that everyone involved will be pouring themselves into collecting those signatures.

Voting rights: Nearly half of the states have sued the Trump administration over the president’s new whacked out executive order targeting mail-in voting. You can read all about the order, how it would work, and its dubious constitutionality in a feature I published last week.

Redistricting: The Virginia redistricting referendum will be very close, and early vote totals have been stronger for Republican-leaning districts, but a new poll suggests that Virginians narrowly support the temporary new map. If it passes, Democrats will likely win 10 of Virginia’s 11 Congressional seats.

Maine: Gov. Janet Mills pulled out of an upcoming debate with progressive populist oyster farmer Graham Platner on Sunday. Mills is flailing in her attempt to take down the upstart Democratic candidate, who has thus far survived all the bad headlines and a barrage of negative ads to hold a commanding lead against the 78-year-old political stalwart.

The governor has already been pushed left in this race, flipping to support a proposed millionaires’ tax that she previously vetoed. Included in a recent budget passed by a key legislative committee, the proposal would add a 2% surtax to incomes over $1 million for single filers and $1.5 million for married couples. Incredible what competitive primaries can do to establishment politicians.

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I feel zero sympathy for Pam Bondi, but her firing once again leads me to ask why anybody has ever agreed to work for or been loyal to Donald Trump. From contractors in Atlantic City to his own vice president, it invariably ends with disgrace, humiliation, and unceremonious disposal. There has never been a person in his life who he hasn’t thrown to the wolves, but at least over the past decade, they’ve all deserved it.

Bondi heads back to Florida after spending a year covering up for pedophiles, thwarting investigations into killer ICE agents, and running failed prosecutions of Trump’s political enemies. Whoever replaces her will be just as bad, because the rot comes from the top, but it’s always worth enjoying some schadenfreude when it happens.

Good news roundup coming this weekend!

Note: The far-right’s fascist takeover of this country is being aided by the media’s total capitulation to Trump’s extortion. It’s never been more critical to have a bold independent media willing to speak up against the powerful. That’s what I’m trying to do here at Progress Report.

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There’s a reason why artificial intelligence companies are planning to pour more than $100 million into this year’s midterm elections: people really don’t like AI.

This according to a new poll from Quinnipiac, which found declining sentiment toward the technology:

• 80% are somewhat or very concerned with AI generally;

• 76% of respondents say they frequently do not trust the answers produced by AI platforms like ChatGPT and Claude;

• 55% believe that AI will do more harm than good in their day-to-day lives;

• 70% say that the technology is likely to reduce the number of jobs available

• 30% are worried that AI is going to take their jobs

Reporting has suggested that corporations are using AI adoption as an excuse to cut jobs, the numbers are proving the concerns are legitimate. A new study found that of the 60,000 jobs cut in March, a full quarter of them were related to artificial intelligence. The tech industry is positively bleeding jobs right now, with an even higher percentage related to AI uptake.

The Quinnipiac poll is not a one-off, either; polling across the board shows bleak public opinion on artificial intelligence.

In an NBC News poll earlier this month, just 26% of respondents said that they had positive feelings about AI, with 46% professing negative sentiment. Even grimmer, 57% of respondents said that they believe the risks outweigh the benefits of AI, which are in the eye of the beholder.

In that sense, surveying people on the broad field of AI is a bit reductive and ignores the vast scope of what the technology can accomplish. Quinnipiac found that that 51% of respondents said they use the technology for research, even if they don’t trust the results, and nearly 30% use it to write. Plus, 20% of respondents use it for medical advice — something I’d have to cop to as well, having consulted it to decipher doctors reports and operative notes during my heart surgery saga.

How do we explain the seeming contradiction? It’s simple: most people are personally using ChatGPT et al as a more coherent Google search engine and quiet cheat code for mundane work tasks, so they see them really more like small technological improvements than any breakthrough or threat. On the other hand, the news is saturated with dystopian stories about surveillance, deepfakes, and the government insisting that it should be allowed to use AI to kill people.

It’s not simply a specter, either; data centers are popping up in communities all across rural and suburban America, often kept secret by NDAs and layers of LLCs. The incessant noise and resource extraction have long since superseded any supposed economic benefit that developers promise. In the Quinnipiac poll, 65% of respondents said they opposed the construction of data centers in their communities, with just 24% in favor.

The opposition is more than theoretical and reflects more than dread: people across the political spectrum are rising up to oppose these new energy-sucking monoliths, often in raucous town hall meetings that go viral and inspire further resistance. This grassroots backlash and activism has led to $64 billion in data center projects being blocked or delayed.

The Political Implications

Many of the issues that dominate our politics are astroturfed into relevance; think the right’s obsession with trans people and suddenly renewed fear of Sharia Law. Artificial intelligence represent the other side of the coin: a major concern among voters across the partisan divide, one that has people clamoring for intervention — Quinnipiac found 74% of voters believe that government has not done enough to regulate the technology — but to this point, largely unclaimed by politicians of either party.

On the left, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have called for moratoriums on data centers, while on the right, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a man who has never met a big business tax incentive he doesn’t like, has also worked to limit their development in his state. But for the most part, neither party has really distinguished themselves as having the pulse of the people on AI, as the NBC poll indicates.

It’s really a jump ball at this point; 20% of respondents said that Republicans would do a better job on dealing with artificial intelligence, compared to 19% who gave the nod to Democrats. That’s well within the margin of error, and Democrats are much better positioned to make the argument that they’re willing to stand up to the world’s most powerful and unpopular tech companies. Doing so would help to recapture rural voters, libertarians, and a litany of other lot voters.

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They can thank Donald Trump for setting the biggest contrast; the president in December issued a (likely illegal) executive order that purports to preempt any state-level regulation of artificial intelligence. His Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, has repeatedly waged public battles with Anthropic over the right to use their AI product, Claude, to murder people without limits. And the White House counts some of the biggest AI boosters as very vocal cheerleaders and advisers, tying the administration inextricably to the technology.

Trump’s backing of AI is another strike against him among blue collar and working class voters, who are the least likely to use artificial intelligence and most skeptical of the technology.

Democrats, on the other hand, have been far from perfect on the issue — Hakeem Jeffries was following the money when he created the House caucus’s commission on AI — but have shown far more fortitude and defiance. Opposing data centers and regulating AI are now core parts of many progressive candidates’ campaign pledges, and the industry itself is in many ways helping drive the perception that the left opposes unfettered AI with its massive, intrusive election spending.

It’s happening on the state level, too. Whereas the promise of construction booms led to 38 states creating tax incentives for data centers in recent years, the tide is beginning to turn the other way. A flood of repeals have been introduced by Democratic lawmakers in various legislatures, including Virginia, Michigan, Arizona, Maryland, and Georgia. Other states, like New York, Oklahoma, and Vermont, have seen full-on moratoriums on data center construction introduced, and on Thursday, word emerged that Maine is moving forward with a pause on the energy-sucking behemoths until November 2027.

It would be wildly premature to suggest that the party is poised to win this issue, because Democrats have a remarkable talent for fumbling the bag, stepping back from the brink of showing courage, and proactively winning policy arguments that go beyond rejecting what a Republican is doing. Fortunately, AI touches on so many of the issues where Democrats have recently struggled, including but not limited to energy, security, and the economy.

This is a rare opportunity to own an issue that is set to dominate people’s lives, and inspire populist backlash, for the next generation, and right now, there’s little popular belief that this party stands for anything; in NBC’s poll, the only subjects less popular than AI are Iran… and Democrats.

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Progress Report has raised over $7 million dollars for progressive candidates and causes, breaks national stories about corrupt politicians, and delivers incisive analysis, and goes deep into the grassroots.

None of the money we’ve raised for candidates and causes goes to producing this newsletter or all of the related projects we put out. In fact, it costs me money to do this. So, I need your help.

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All eyes were on Donald Trump as he plopped down at the Supreme Court to watch his executive order revoking birthright citizenship get mostly demolished by even the justices he appointed. The court may soon have to consider yet another outrageous and blatantly unconstitutional executive order from the president — and tonight, that’s what we’re discussing, in the wake of a DNC lawsuit seeking to block it filed this evening.

Note: The far-right’s fascist takeover of this country is being aided by the media’s total capitulation to Trump’s extortion. It’s never been more critical to have a bold independent media willing to speak up against the powerful. That’s what I’m trying to do here at Progress Report.

You can help keep Progress Report afloat and build that network for just $5 a month — every subscription helps!

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Foiled in his attempt to cajole the Senate into passing the SAVE America Act, President Trump on Tuesday afternoon announced a new executive order ostensibly intended to ensure that only US citizens vote in elections.

Much like Trump’s previous election-related executive orders, this one’s real purpose is to effectuate a federal takeover of election administration and make it much harder for certain communities to cast ballots. And much like those previous orders, this one is blatantly unconstitutional, on several levels.

But there is one key difference: this new executive order is utterly baffling and mildly incomprehensible, even to the experts. It takes aim at voting by mail, but the details are frequently muddled.

When I spoke with Jon Sherman, the litigation director at the nonprofit Fair Elections Center, he was actively trying to parse out what the order commands and working to make sense of the instructions in the text. Set aside the whole blatantly unconstitutional thing and there are two main functional problems: the order depends on faulty systems — “the entire executive order is based on a fantasy,” as Sherman put it — and leaves out crucial procedures for its execution.

Sherman suggested that voting rights groups will be quick to file for injunctions — the White House still has no constitutional role in the execution of elections, which led to the last order being blocked — but it should not be discounted as an important indication of what the administration is hoping to accomplish, or what states might try to do on their own. And given the rightward lean of the federal judiciary, there’s always the possibility that Trump’s latest gambit could stick around longer than expected.

And so, I asked Sherman to break down the executive order, how it would work, why it wouldn’t work, who it would hurt, and where it simply doesn’t make any sense.

What Does the Executive Order Say?

There are two main parts to the order, Sections 2 and 3.

“Section 2 directs the Secretary of Homeland Security, along with the commissioner of Social Security Agency, to essentially compile state-specific citizenship lists ‘using the SAVE system, SSA records, federal citizenship and naturalization records, and other federal databases,’” Sherman explained.

The administration has been working tirelessly to acquire state voter rolls — it’s sued more than two dozen states for the information, which White House officials want to vet for non-citizens. It’s had mixed success at best, so instead of demanding information from states, the executive order instructs DHS to create a federal list of eligible voters to send to states, with the expectation that state and local officials remove people as instructed.

Section 3, the other part of the order, instructs the US Postal Service to only send absentee or mail ballots to verified citizens, checked against a list that has yet to be created and does not have a defined source. That makes three lists of voters, cobbled together from incomplete (and mystery) sources, as a ramshackle confirmation process designed not to confirm.

“It’s a little obscure and unclear how these various lists interact,” Sherman said. “But they’re trying to essentially make access to mail-in voting contingent upon verification of US citizenship.”

Is The First Part Even Doable?

Here’s the problem: putting together an authoritative, updated list of citizens that does not disenfranchise large swaths of people is essentially impossible, given how our federalist system functions. The order seeks to combine several databases, but as Sherman explained, each of them is deeply flawed as a source for voter eligibility.

The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system is used to verify the immigration status or citizenship of people applying for public benefits or drivers’ licenses. The data “can be quite outdated and unreliable,” Sherman said, and in 2023, the Fair Elections Center subpoenaed records that showed “massive data integrity issues” in the SAVE database.

“There were issues with maiden names; compound last names, which are common among Hispanic and other voters; transposed names, which happens often with Asian-American citizens,” Sherman said. “All of these data integrity issues mean that often people can’t be found in the system and can’t be verified as having naturalized subsequent to whatever they showed — their green card, for instance, or other proof of legal presence — at the DMV.”

Last year, Trump ordered the agency that oversees the SAVE system to include information from the Social Security Administration, but that’s far from complete, too.

“While SSA records provide an indication of citizenship, they do not provide definitive information on US citizenship,” Sherman said. “Individuals report their citizenship status to SSA when they apply for a Social Security number. The citizenship data it maintains merely represents a snapshot of the individual's citizenship status at the time of their interaction.”

This is important, because lots of immigrants apply for Social Security numbers long before they become citizens; you only need a work permit to get one. People may then go on to become naturalized citizens, but if they don’t update their information with the SSA — and why would they? — they’re not going to be identified as citizens in the database.

Back in 2006, it was estimated that 18 million people in the SSA database had incomplete or faulty information. And while the agency began teaming with DHS to automatically update some newly naturalized immigrants in 2024, Trump shut that down when he returned to the White House. Not a lot of foresight there.

Besides, the SSA didn’t even collect citizenship information before 1981, which would potentially disenfranchise generations of naturalized immigrants.

“It’s a fantasy to be able to put together an accurate, up-to-date list of United States citizens, and a fantasy to be able to think you can put together an accurate, up-to-date list of non-citizens,” Sherman. State governments have no greater ability. They have less ability to do that.

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How About The Second Part?

Trump has long sought to enlist the postal service in his hypocritical war on voting by mail, and advocates already fear that new rules instituted by USPS last year could lead to slower ballot delivery time and discounted votes.

Here, there are two main issues: how it’d work and whether Trump has the authority to implement it.

The first one is no exaggeration: the language in the order calls for the USPS to use a “Mail-In and Absentee Participation List” in order to vet whether people should be sent mail ballots. You’d think that list would be the same as the one put together by the federal government, but you’d be wrong: the order commands states to submit a list of mail voters to the USPS, which would then create its own list and subsequently use it to determine who actually receives ballots by mail.

Or something like that. There’s really been a collective shrug over this second part; after we spoke, Sherman sent me some analysis from Aaron Blacksberg at Institute for Responsive Government, who took a stab at parsing out the vague and illogical order.

It’s entirely unclear to me from the face of this EO how these three (?) lists actually interact. My suspicion is that the rulemaking will result in something like, states can submit those lists of mail voters to USPS, USPS will check that list against the “State Citizenship List,” and the “Mail-In and Absentee Participation List” emerges from that process. Maybe with some way that voters can directly ask USPS to get on the list and USPS will then check that voter against the State Citizenship List. I’m spitballing there but that’s the only way I can make this make sense.

It’s a coin flip whether the administration actually thought through the logistics of this thing; one suspects it’s confusing on purpose. Either way, even though it’s technically parked in the executive branch, the White House has no direct jurisdiction over the USPS. Instead, the postal service is run by a Board of Governors, which at the moment only has four members — not enough for a quorum necessary to effectuate the policies.

No Carrots, Just Sticks

Maybe the White House recognizes that it can’t actually command states to do any of this, because the order attempts to get around the constitution by threatening to withhold federal funding from states that don’t comply.

Then again, maybe not, because the order also gives the attorney general discretion to prosecute state and local officials who issue federal ballots to individuals not eligible to vote in a federal election (as according to the USPS list of mysterious propriety).

Which again, the constitution’s Election Clause prohibits.

“Because the Congress didn’t bite with any of the 31 flavors of the SAVE Act that were proposed,” Sherman said, “they’re effectively trying to implement a citizenship verification regime by executive fiat.”

Several states are already working on challenging the order in court, and the DNC just filed a lawsuit; if any sanity prevails, it will be struck down sooner rather than later.

Then again, if there’s one silver lining, it’s that this could have been worse; it was only last month that the Washington Post was reporting that people close to Trump were pushing an executive order that would have sought to declare a national emergency, institute impossible voter ID requirements, and banned mail voting. That the administration went in this direction suggests that it is losing confidence in its ability to seize election systems.

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Got a quick newsletter for you tonight, focused on some good news from the past week. It ranges from big election polls to nuanced housing policy, and I’m trying to figure out which kind of thing people like better in this newsletter.

That’s a broader question — I’m producing bigger projects like FlipStates.org, a growing (and frequently updated) database of important state legislative elections, but I’m also trying to figure out the best way I can serve people (ie you) with news. Do you want big national stories? Election news? A focus on policy? Opinion? Candidate interviews?

There are so many Substacks nowadays, it makes sense to zero in on a few things. Please let me know in the comments what you’d prefer: what would be useful? What is worth your subscription fee?

Note: The far-right’s fascist takeover of this country is being aided by the media’s total capitulation to Trump’s extortion. It’s never been more critical to have a bold independent media willing to speak up against the powerful. That’s what I’m trying to do here at Progress Report.

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Democratic Senate candidates: I wrestled with how exactly to list this one, because if you’re running for office in November, you can’t exactly be a “winner” based on a poll in March. But numbers like this aren’t a fluke, and portend what could be a historic year, so screw it, let’s embrace good news when it’s available.

In Alaska, a new poll has Democratic former Rep. Mary Peltola up nearly five points on incumbent Sen. Dan Sullivan, in the final round of ranked choice voting.

In North Carolina, former Gov. Roy Cooper is up eight points on RNC Chair Michael Whatley.

In Maine, it’s a seven-point lead for Graham Platner over very concerned Republican incumbent Susan Collins.

In Ohio, former Sen. Sherrod Brown has a two-point lead over appointed incumbent John Husted — in a poll conducted by a GOP firm.

None of these polls mean that victory is guaranteed, and we all know that a Democrat winning a Senate election doesn’t exactly guarantee progressive legislation (or stopping bad conservative legislation). Voters have to be engaged year-round, not just right before election day. Such is the value of protests like No Kings Day, which remind Democrats that there are material benefits to siding with the vast majority of Americans — and consequences for turning your back on them.

Libs in Wisconsin (so far, tentatively): Another year, another pivotal state Supreme Court election in the Badger State.

Liberals flipped the court in 2023, taking control after 15 years in the minority, and kept their majority in last year’s ultra-high-profile election. This year, the race is to replace retiring conservative Justice Rebecca Bradley, and if liberals win again, they’ll expand their majority on the high court to 5-2, a remarkable turnaround from where it was just a few years ago.

This election hasn’t been nearly as buzzy as the $100 million race last year, which is reflected in the most recent public opinion snapshot: with just two weeks to go before election day, a new poll found 53% of Wisconsinites undecided about who they’d support. On the plus side, state Court of Appeals Judge Chris Taylor, the Democratic-backed candidate in the race, holds a solid 23-17% lead over her Republican counterpart, Judge Maria Lazar.

It’s worth noting just how much the Wisconsin Supreme Court has changed in just a few years: In 2022, Bradley wrote a majority opinion banning ballot drop boxes, and since then, she has been on the losing side in cases that have tossed Wisconsin’s abortion ban and gerrymandered maps, among others. Like retiring House Speaker Robin Vos, she’s simply taking her ball and going home. Good riddance.

As for the gubernatorial race in Wisconsin, there’s some good news there, too: every Democratic candidate save one is leading Rep. Tom Tiffany.

Civil rights in New Jersey: New Gov. Mikie Sherrill signed three bills intended to limit municipal cooperation with ICE and protect NJ’s large immigrant population.

The first bill, which former Gov. Phil Murphy refused to sign, essentially codifies the Immigrant Trust Directive, instructions given by the state’s attorney general in 2018. Here’s the gist:

The legislation blocks state and local police from aiding U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in raids or providing them with local law enforcement resources, including office space, databases, and property. State correctional officers also cannot allow ICE to interview individuals detained on criminal charges, and New Jersey prosecutors cannot use a defendant’s immigration status as the sole measure for detaining them before trial.

The other two new laws limit when ICE agents can wear masks in public and prevents the government and healthcare providers from collecting and sharing some personal information, including immigration status. A full quarter of people living in New Jersey are immigrants, including half a million who are undocumented, and much of Sherrill’s first few months in office has been spent working to protect them.

Charles Barkley: The NBA Hall-of-Famer and iconic broadcaster used a post-game discussion of UConn’s thrilling Elite Eight victory over Duke tonight to condemn ICE’s brutality, appealing to Americans’ better angels in an uncharacteristically serious and understated commentary:

UConn’s come-from-behind victory was an instant classic, so millions of people wer watching Barkley’s coherent, rational, and compassionate appeal to humanity. And deliciously, he made the comments on CBS, which has otherwise become a vehicle for Larry Ellison and Bari Weiss’s pandering to the far-right. Given just how terribly Weiss’s rebooted CBS Evening News is performing, she might want to take notes.

America’s Social Safety Net: The Trump administration whiffed big time in its attempt to find a critical mass of undocumented immigrants stealing health insurance benefits… because it doesn’t exist.

Last year, the White House sent the names of hundreds of thousands of suspected undocumented recipients of Medicaid to states, with the explicit instructions that they perform background checks and remove those confirmed ineligible beneficiaries. But according to KFF, their lists were almost entirely useless.

Officials in Colorado and Pennsylvania told the nonprofit that they could not find a single improper beneficiary among the 79,000 names they checked, while Texas identified a mere 77 out of 28,000 people screened. In Ohio, it was 260 out of over 65,000 people investigated.

The administration has been banging the “waste, fraud, and abuse” drum as a way to justify draconian cuts to the low-income health insurance program, but the facts simply contradict it. For Republicans, the cruelty is the point, and they really ought to just admit it.

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Patients in New York: In a rare twist, the Department of Justice is pursuing an antitrust case against a powerful institution that may, even if incidentally, benefit consumers.

The NewYork-Presbyterian hospital system runs eight major hospitals in downstate New York, giving it control of more than 30% of the patient discharges in Manhattan. That’s a huge market share, and the DOJ is accusing the hospital system of using its size to force insurance companies into placing it in more favorable benefit categories despite charging higher prices.

In doing so, NYP allegedly ices out other, cheaper hospital systems like Mount Sinai and NYU, thereby forcing patients to pay higher premiums and more out-of-pocket charges. I can attest to this: my insurer dropped Mount Sinai and I currently owe NewYork-Presbyterian over $500 for a heart check-up that was ostensibly covered by my plan. NYP was recently in the news because thousands of its nurses went on strike for weeks in pursuit of a fair contract that protects patients. Incidentally, the non-profit hospital system’s CEO made $26 million last year.

A Medicare for All system would solve a lot of these problems, so highlighting and prosecuting these scams serves the dual purpose of improving access and showing just how broken our current healthcare system has become.

Affordable Housing in Washington: It was a rough week for NIMBYs in the Evergreen State, where Gov. Bob Ferguson signed a raft of pro-housing laws that will limit local governments’ ability to say no to housing for low-income residents.

The marquee bill will require local governments to permit the construction of transitional and permanent supportive housing in both residential and hotel development zones. Many communities — especially wealthier ones — refuse to permit the construction of this kind of housing, which provides homeless people with safe places to stay and long-term homes for disabled people. Now, local governments cannot hold such housing to higher standards than any other development.

One of the other laws signed by the governor prevents local governments from barring residential building on land zoned for mixed-use — think strip malls and other commercial developments. That may sound small, but one of the more positive trends in housing these days is the unexpected mixed-use fusion of large commercial projects with affordable housing, including this Costco in LA that will have 800 units attached, including 180 reserved for low-income residents:

As a bonus, you could go get a cheap hot dog for lunch every day to further add to the affordability factor.

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Good news: The Colorado bill that would ban AI-driven surveillance pricing and wage-setting passed the state House by a considerable margin today. It moves on to the state Senate, which is also controlled by Democrats. I spoke with the bill’s primary sponsor in this feature story last week.

Reminder: After countless hours of work, I’ve launched FlipSeats.org, an all-in-one state legislative election resource and guide to flippable seats at the state level. I’ll be continuing to update and add to it as candidates declare and primaries roll on, so please use it and spread the word. And support this tireless work with a donation or paid subscription if you can!

FlipSeats.org

One more thing: I’ve tended to write really long newsletters, which limits the frequency of output. I’m considering sending out shorter, more frequent newsletters; how would people feel about that?

Weekly winners and losers post for paid subscribers coming this weekend!

Note: The far-right’s fascist takeover of this country is being aided by the media’s total capitulation to Trump’s extortion. It’s never been more critical to have a bold independent media willing to speak up against the powerful. That’s what I’m trying to do here at Progress Report.

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Last year, Republicans in Utah tightened what were already the nation’s most stringent ballot initiative requirements, in part to prevent the public from being able to weigh in on gerrymandering in the future.

It turns out they were a little too conniving for their own good.

A GOP-sponsored constitutional amendment that would have repealed the state’s fair redistricting law will not make the ballot in November after falling just shy of satisfying Utah’s new petition requirements. The failure sends Republicans back to the drawing board in their quest to re-rig Utah’s Congressional map, which a judge’s decision adjusted this year to include a safe Democratic seat in and around Salt Lake City.

Conservatives were attempting to qualify a repeal of Prop 4, an amendment passed by voters in 2018 that banned gerrymandering and created an independent redistricting commission. The GOP went ahead and gerrymandered the map anyway, splitting up the blue SLC region to give Republicans all four of Utah’s Congressional seats, only to have a judge replace it after giving the legislature a chance to draw a fair one. They’ve been scrambling ever since, filing appeals with the state Supreme Court and federal judiciary, both of which were rejected.

That made repealing Prop 4 the next best option, but in a bit of sweet irony, they were ultimately undone by their own antipathy for direct democracy.

First, they tried to repeal it by legislative vote, but that was deemed unconstitutional; the state Supreme Court ruled that if voters approved an amendment, they’d have to approve its appeal. And that’s where they trapped themselves.

Utah already had the most stringent signature-gathering law in the country, requiring among other things that organizers gather 4% of eligible voters in at least 26 of the state’s 29 Senate districts. Republicans doubled that specific standard in 2025, a move designed to thwart future progressive amendments, with Prop 4 still freshly in mind.

Requiring organizers to collect signatures from 8% of the voting population in counties all throughout the state meant that progressives couldn’t simply focus their efforts on the liberal-ish Salt Lake City — but as it turns out, it also meant that Republicans had to be wary of the liberals in Salt Lake City.

After pouring millions of dollars from a Trump-linked dark money group into signature-gathering and calling in conservative campaign professionals from Turning Points USA, the organizers behind Utahns For Representative Government thought it had collected enough petitions to qualify the amendment for the ballot. And it had, at least at first. But their campaign had been plagued by broad-based (and frequently substantiated) accusations of petition-gatherers misrepresenting to people what they were signing, and an anti-gerrymandering group launched a campaign to convince people to withdraw their signatures.

Over 9,000 people have requested to have their names pulled from the petitions, including nearly 1000 people in Senate District 15, which took activists below the 8% threshold. Time has expired on collecting new signatures, rendering the whole operation — they spent at least $4.3 million on signature-gathering alone — a failure. All the tweets and appeals from Donald Trump, JD Vance, Gov. Spencer Cox, and the state’s Republican legislators, all in vain, and all because Republicans made a cynical attempt to silence voters and only wound up silencing themselves.

There will likely be legal challenges, but even the chair of the Utah Republican Party (and founder of Utahns For Representative Government) had to admit at least temporary defeat on Thursday.

“Utahns spoke loudly in the face of an unprecedented onslaught of biased media coverage, outside influence and judicial interference,” GOP chair Rob Axson said. “Whether now or in the future, by litigation or initiative, we will Repeal Prop 4. This fight is not over, but just beginning.”

Republicans are working to expand and stack the state Supreme Court, so they may one day overturn the decision that their gerrymandered map was indeed gerrymandered. But this year, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that one of Utah’s four Congressional seats will be represented by a progressive Democrat, reflecting the will of a bipartisan coalition of voters.

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In other redistricting news…

The future of Missouri’s newly gerrymandered Congressional map remains in flux, but the prognosis is not great at the moment.

It was a one-two punch this week. First, the state Supreme Court gave its blessing this week to the redrawn districts, rejecting a lawsuit over a plan that would likely give Republicans seven of the state’s eight seats in DC.

And then today, a Cole County judge dismissed a challenge to the implementation of the map, so as of now, it looks like the gerrymander is going to stay in place. If it stays that way, it’s likely to give Republicans an extra seat at the expense of longtime Rep. Emanuel Cleaver.

But here’s the thing: the judge who made the ruling today had to ignore a century’s worth of precedent to green light the gerrymandered map; notably, he rejected the lawsuit filed by the ACLU on standing, not merit. Because as I’ve covered here before, the new map should have been set aside once a group called People Not Politicians had collected enough signatures to qualify a ballot initiative that would repeal the gerrymander. That’s the way repeal initiatives work in Missouri.

So what gives? Not Missouri Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, who clearly doesn’t care about the law, because this whole mess is only happening due to his intransigence. Hoskins simply refuses to officially tally up the signatures and certify the initiative for the ballot, even though data from his own office indicates that activists filed enough valid petitions.

It’s a mess, to say the least, and the ACLU of Missouri has pledged to appeal the judge’s ruling today.

“This order defies over a century of judicial precedent while rendering Missourians’ constitutional right to the referendum process second to the will of politicians,” the organization said in a statement. “The ACLU of Missouri is committed to our state constitution’s founding principle that all power is derived from the people, not loaned from the government. We will immediately appeal this decision.”

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It’s opening day of Major League Baseball (good!), Mo Salah is leaving Liverpool (bad!), and I’ve got a big new project to share with you. Let’s get to it!

Note: The far-right’s fascist takeover of this country is being aided by the media’s total capitulation to Trump’s extortion. It’s never been more critical to have a bold independent media willing to speak up against the powerful. That’s what I’m trying to do here at Progress Report.

You can help keep Progress Report afloat and build that network for just $5 a month — every subscription helps!

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Earlier this month, I launched a spreadsheet designed to track state legislative elections. The goal was to keep up with the most flippable districts (along with some hopeful reaches) in the most flippable legislatures as well as legislatures where Democrats stand a chance of breaking GOP supermajorities.

It was useful, I thought, but between its long URL and wonky format, not particularly accessible. And if the point of the spreadsheet was to provide the information to as many people as possible, it had to be far more available and useable. And so, over the past few days, I’ve been putting together Flip Seats, a new dedicated website meant to be a one-stop depot for district, candidate, and election dynamics.

Visit Flip Seats!

There’s still much work to be done, beyond the inevitable little tech glitches I need to fix: there will be new candidates to track, new states to watch, more primaries to follow, links to fill, and as time goes on, interviews to conduct and post. I’ll be updating and linking to the site frequently, and by tomorrow, it’ll be synced with my new ActBlue for the swing legislative candidates it features.

For now, you can donate here — there are a lot of candidates on there, so feel free to pick just a few:

Donate to swing legislative races

I’ve grown reticent to raise money for many candidates or focus too heavily on elections as a means to an end without really examining the larger context beyond partisan scorekeeping — it’s critical to know who these candidates are, what they stand for, and how likely it is that they’ll wind up being big disappointments.

But in the face of federal tyranny, legitimate designs on dictatorship, the military occupation of cities and small towns alike, along with the collapse of any real hope of improving the national social welfare for the next few years minimum, securing state legislatures could not be more important.

So, I will strive to make sure every candidate we promote and support fit our ideals, but also see this as an all-hands-on-deck moment where, in certain states, we first fight for power, and then over how to wield it. Just look what’s happening in Virginia, where Democrats won a trifecta in November, are moving towards codifying abortion rights in the constitution, and just passed the first paid leave program in the South.

Please, bookmark the new website, spread the word, and return to it often. It’ll continue to be updated.

Visit Flip Seats!

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Progress Report has raised over $7 million dollars for progressive candidates and causes, breaks national stories about corrupt politicians, and delivers incisive analysis, and goes deep into the grassroots.

None of the money we’ve raised for candidates and causes goes to producing this newsletter or all of the related projects we put out. In fact, it costs me money to do this. So, I need your help.

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Spring is officially here. We took our three-year-old to the playground twice this weekend. He shared his soccer ball with a kid who returned the favor with some Pringles. They didn’t speak one another’s language — my son’s Spanish is limited to a few words like “leche,” “agua,” and “tigre” — but they had no problem hashing out games (chasing the ball is universal), sharing, or taking turns on the slide. I think this makes them more emotionally qualified to serve in Washington than most people there.

Okay, lots of news to review, so let’s dive in.

Note: I don’t like talking about business or being vulnerable, but I’ll make a rare exception here. Paid subscribers have dropped off a cliff since late November, when I went in for my sixth open-heart surgery, and it’s making life difficult.

I took a few weeks off to heal from surgery but resumed the work way earlier than recommended, diving right in with live-streamed interviews and special election-related projects. I know times are tough, but if you’re reading this and want to pitch in to help keep this independent media project afloat, now would be a great time.

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Democrats in Wisconsin: Democrats need to flip two seats to take back control of the state Senate for the first time in nearly two decades, a task that got a bit easier this week after the retirement of one of the state’s most endangered GOP lawmakers.

No longer beneficiaries of an absurd gerrymander and in some cases weighed down by age and personal tragedy, Republicans are starting to bow out from the grind of elected office. This week, longtime state Sen. Van Wanggaard (SD-21) announced that he will retire instead of try to defend a district that was redrawn to favor Democrats.

The 78-year-old Republican has lost all three of his siblings and had a daughter diagnosed with cancer since his last re-election in 2022. While he said that his staff tried to find ways to make another term doable, given the circumstances, the fact that his redrawn district would have narrowly voted for Kamala Harris in 2024 likely made the decision to step aside that much easier. He’d almost downed tools on fundraising, taking in just $36,000 as of January, and faced a strong challenge from Democrat Trevor Jung, the young Racine transit director.

Wanggaard’s retirement means that two of the Democrats’ top three targets will be open-seat races; the most endangered member, Sen. Rob Hutton (SD-5), announced that he’s stepping aside in January. His newly reconfigured district would have voted for Kamala Harris by six points, which was impetus enough to peace out even before Sutton and his wife were awarded $3.5 billion in punitive damages by a local jury in a lawsuit over a fire in their home caused by a faulty dehumidifier (a verdict that is unlikely to stand, to say the least).

Popcorn entrepreneur and powerful House Speaker Robin Vos announced he’d be stepping aside last month, and on Thursday, his counterpart in the state Senate, Majority Leader Devin LeMahieu, revealed that he’d be following him out the door. Both men know that there’s a solid chance they’d be serving in the minority next year due to the confluence of a national blue wave and the new Democratic-leaning districts in the Badger State.

You can dig deeper into the most competitive Wisconsin races in Progress Report’s competitive district tracker spreadsheet.

Workers in Virginia: Governor Abigail Spanberger is expected to sign newly passed legislation that will make Virginia the first state in the South to create a paid family and medical leave program for workers.

Starting in late 2028, employees in the state will be eligible to receive up to 12 weeks of paid time off to have a child, deal with personal health issues, or to help a family member receiving medical care. Workers would be eligible to recieve up to 80% of their average weekly pay, capped at the average state income (just over $1,500 this year). The program will be funded by a small payroll tax on employers and employees, like unemployment insurance.

Virginia will be the 14th state to create a paid family leave program, as well as the 19th state to establish the right to paid sick leave.

Stoners in Vermont: A new bill in the Senate proposes to raise the maximum amount of cannabis that can be purchased at one time from one ounce to two, while also doubling the (unusually low) THC potency limit in legal weed.

Interestingly, the legislator behind the proposal, Sen. Kesha Ram Hinsdale, suggested that it could be an antidote to the social isolation plaguing society, especially in a rural state like Vermont.

“We have seen our cannabis industry follow all the rules, give people a third place, give people the opportunity to find community and they have done it in a more constrained market than the states around us,” Ram Hinsdale said on the floor of the Senate.

Economic fairness in California: A new poll finds that 52% of Californians currently back the proposed billionaire wealth tax, which would impose a one-time, 5% surcharge on the assets of the every billionaire in the state as of January 1st. The partisan split is notable: 72% of Republicans say they oppose the tax, while 72% of Democrats are supportive — this despite most prominent Democratic elected officials in the state coming out against the proposal.

The tax would generate around a hundred billion dollars, most of which would be used to bolster the state’s healthcare system in the wake of draconian cuts made by the GOP’s Big Beautiful Bill. It is being vociferously opposed by most of the state’s billionaires, especially the more reactionary crew in Silicon Valley, where increasingly political oligarchs are pledging tens of millions of dollars to stop its passage.

Given the national climate, the percentage of Democrats who back the tax really should be higher, but I’m willing to bet that the level of support is being suppressed by the fact that many of the state’s best-known elected Democrats have come out in opposition to the proposal. That includes Gov. Gavin Newsom and those who want to succeed him, such as former Rep. Katie Porter. Though Democratic voters have shown a burning desire to replace party leadership this year, there is still an element of the base that falls in line with the most prominent figures with the biggest megaphones.

Democracy in Missouri: A bit of good news in the long gerrymandering saga unwinding in the Show Me State, where if nothing else, voters will not be misled during the upcoming ballot referendum on the GOP’s rigged map in November.

Hold tight, because this might get complicated. Or at least complicated-sounding.

For context: the existing map gives the state five Republican districts and two Democratic districts, while the proposed gerrymandered map makes it 6-1 for the GOP. Republicans passed the gerrymandered map in September, but advocates have a chance to pause its implementation by qualifying a repeal ballot initiative.

The state secretary of state is required to propose wording for initiatives before they officially qualify for the ballot, and the lawsuit was over allegations that GOP Secretary of State Denny Hoskins produced biased language likely to fool voters.

Hoskins actually admitted as much during the trial; his summary called the old map — aka the fair map — gerrymandered and designed to protect incumbents. Essentially, he was inverting reality, which is exactly what Ohio’s secretary of state did in 2024, allowing Republicans to defeat an anti-gerrymandering constitutional amendment.

Hoskins’ admission made it easy for a state judge this week to order him to rewrite the initiative in a more accurate way. That’s the first piece of good news, and assuming the initiative qualifies, Missourians won’t have to decode confusing and dishonest language on the ballot.

There isn’t much question that the initiative will qualify; the real issue is when that will happen and what it means for the rest of this year’s ballot. Hoskins, committed to abusing his power in every way possible, refuses to certify it in a timely manner, hoping that if he waits long enough, the state will have to use the gerrymandered map passed by the legislature in the 2026 elections.

It’s an unprecedented attempt to subvert what is a very clear and established process: once referendums that would repeal newly passed laws qualify for the ballot, they freeze those laws’ implementation until people vote.

So, what does the legal decision mean for this year? Nothing explicit, but according to People Not Politicians, the group backing the initiative, the judge’s language foreshadows a positive outcome in the attempt to freeze the map and use the 5-2 plan in this year’s election. How do they know? The judge in this case is also going to decide the larger map debate.

Get all that? If not, here’s what you need to know: It’s unclear whether Missourians will have a fair or gerrymandered Congressional map this year, but activists are optimistic that it will be the former. And either way, they will definitely get a chance to block the use of the gerrymandered map in future elections.

Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress: It was another bad week for the GOP on Capitol Hill, where the SAVE Act looks doomed and their refusal to extend Obamacare subsidies is coming back to haunt them.

According to a new poll from nonprofit healthcare news outlet KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation), 80% of respondents who re-enrolled for ACA insurance plans say that their costs are higher this year, with 51% reporting costs that are “a lot higher” this time around. More than half of re-enrollees say they are paring down their spending on other things, including food and basic household items, to afford their monthly premiums and higher deductibles.

Now, those things can’t be inherently bad in Republicans’ eyes, because they undoubtedly knew that people would struggle if they slashed ACA subsidies. You could even say that they are getting their desired policy results. The reason why this pole is likely causing agita among GOP consultants, however, can be found in this tidy infographic from KFF:

It’s a breathtakingly bad poll for Republicans, as anyone who isn’t a hardcore MAGA supporter blames the party for the explosion in healthcare costs. Republicans writ large blame the GOP (16% blame Republicans in Congress, 14% blame Trump) more than Democrats (27% total), and not even MAGA supporters think Congress did the right thing by allowing the subsidies to expire. It’s looking bleak among independents, too: 66% blame Republicans for the ongoing catastrophe, including 30% who blame Congressional Republicans.

Kids and taxpayers in Texas: Families whose kids never attended public school make up the majority of the applicants to the state’s new private school voucher program, just like Republicans and conservative activists drew it up.

The parents of more than 200,000 students have applied for the vouchers, which cover up to $10,500 a year in private school tuition. Of those students, 71% either attend private school or are home-schooled this year, destroying the farcical notion that vouchers provides choices to kids in public schools. Nearly 30% of applicants are from homes that make above $165,000 per year. Texas will spend $1 billion on vouchers next year.

RFK Jr. and the medical misinformation movement: MAHA has been taking it on the chin lately, and unfortunately, Ivermectin and fishbowl cleaner do not cure embarrassment or shame.

This week brought two particularly stinging court losses. The first ruled against a CDC board’s decision to reduce the number of recommended childhood vaccines. It was a major blow to RFK Jr.’s flagship priority, and comes as the most cursed Kennedy tries to enhance federal compensation for vaccine “injuries.” The judge ruled that Kennedy’s firing of the entire vaccine board and replacing it with antivax hacks compromised the decision-making; the ruling actually stays the appointment of the 13 new members, who have been on the board since last July.

The second ruling concerned the HHS’s declaration that puberty blockers and other treatments for gender dysphoria were inappropriate and dangerous for children, clearing the way for doctors to begin providing them at their discretion. The HHS declaration came without public consultation, review, or opportunity to comment, and the judge who issued the decision was scathing when addressing the illegal process employed by RFK Jr. and the agency.

“The notion that ‘I will go forward and issue a declaration and see if we can get away with it’ is not a principle of governance that adheres to the overarching commitment to a democratic republic that requires the rule of law to be regarded and respected and honored as a sacred,” the judge said in a passage that might as well have been addressed to the entire Trump administration.

AIPAC: The far-right pro-Israel group burned $12 million in an unsuccessful attempt to buy two Congressional seats in Illinois.

Not only did it’s preferred candidates lose, the interest group actually made a fierce enemy out of someone who would have likely otherwise been a solid ally and bridge to skeptical progressives: Evanston Mayor Daniel Biss, whose mom is from Israel, was the subject of early AIPAC opposition because he took a more nuanced stance than “it’s okay to do a genocide in Gaza and colonize the West Bank.”

After he won the IL-09 primary on Tuesday, Biss ripped the organization, accusing it of trying to buy elections.

“AIPAC found out the hard way — the 9th District is not for sale,” Biss said in his victory speech.

Perhaps most damning were the words of Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, a former major AIPAC donor who dinged the group in an interview with the AP.

“It became an organization that was supporting Donald Trump and people who follow Donald Trump,” Pritzker said. “AIPAC really is not an organization that I think today I would want any part of.”

Pritzker’s strong stance is especially notable because he is almost certainly going to run for president and is seeking out positions that appeal to a broad swath of the Democratic base electorate. AIPAC has become persona non grata among Democrats, a fact that its leaders very much acknowledge. The organization dropped $20 million on races in Illinois, and as has become its won’t, none of the ads or other campaign materials it paid for actually mentioned Israel.

That omission made an AIPAC spokesperson’s spin that Israel was not a determinative issue in this election pretty ironic, and the organization’s usage of benign, progressive-sounding cover groups to spend its campaign money point to just how toxic the subject has become.

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Been a bit under the weather this week, hence a newsletter a day later than anticipated. But it’s a good one, following up on my story this winter about how AI policy is the next big generation-defining political frontier, so I think it’s worth the wait. Big news digest coming this weekend!

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There is no issue that is driving more debate in state legislatures than how to deal with artificial intelligence and its massive ramifications, and there is no state where the debate — and proposed regulation — are as advanced and contentious as it is in Colorado.

Since January, lawmakers in Colorado have considered a number of major bills that would regulate both the technology and the resource-intensive data centers required to power it. This week has been particularly busy, with hearings and a committee vote on proposed legislation that would ban surveillance pricing and wage-setting, tense negotiations over amendments to a landmark law that will govern AI systems used to make high-stakes decisions, and hearings on bills that would either make the state a haven for data centers or subject them to some of the most intensive regulations in the nation.

Some sort of progress is being made on multiple fronts: after a contentious debate, the House Business Affairs and Labor subcommittee voted 7-6 to advance HB26-1210; the ban on surveillance pricing and wage-setting would severely curtail the use of personal data — think search history, location, shopping — to set personalized prices and wages. A day later, a task force convened by Gov. Jared Polis announced a new framework for the landmark AI anti-discrimination and decision-making law that has been on hold since passing in 2024.

Grassroots activists and business lobbyists have flooded the capitol building in Denver in hopes of shaping what has become a miniature version of the debate currently playing out across the Democratic Party. The playing field is somewhat unique in Denver: Colorado has become a tech hub and is currently led by Gov. Jared Polis, a centimillionaire who made his fortune in the industry and considers himself something of a business libertarian. Last summer, Polis called a special session of the legislature to delay the onset of the landmark AI law, which aims to prevent discrimination in algorithmic decision-making.

At the same time that the governor is boosting the industry that made him unfathomably wealthy, Colorado is an increasingly progressive state with a strong environmental movement, along with a severe housing and affordability crisis that has fueled a populist backlash — even if Polis did proclaim Wednesday the first annual Colorado Tech Day. Needless to say, not everybody was celebrating; Polis may have declared the holiday a year too late.

Right at the center of the debates is state Rep. Javier Mabrey, who has been at the center of many of the more populist efforts in the legislature since he was elected in 2022. He’s the sponsor of the surveillance price and wage ban and has been a central voice in the fight over the landmark AI regulations (as well as the ongoing battle over finally repealing the state’s anti-union “right to work”). Mabrey spoke with Progress Report this week about the shifting politics of AI, the growing backlash, and how the industry is fighting lawmakers.

Progress Report: You introduced the surveillance pricing and wage-setting last year, when it failed in the Judiciary committee. It feels like there’s been a sea change in people’s perceptions of AI; how do you think the politics of this bill and issue have changed in the last year?

Rep. Mabrey: I think one of the ways the politics on it has changed is that people are becoming more aware that this is happening. The New York Times has done reporting on it. It’s been on the nightly news. A Delta executive on an earnings call bragged that they’re going to be doing this to increase revenue. There was a big story with Instacart where basically their customers found out they were doing this and they backed down in response to public outrage.

I also think that politicians in every party at every level have gotten the poll testing that we need to be focused on affordability. And this sort of legislation, it just makes sense for people. I think that we as consumers have the experience of feeling like we’re getting scammed online.

Do you hear from constituents about this very much? Has that increased?

I definitely hear from folks about the surveillance pricing issue, although that’s kind of a chicken-egg question: I hear from folks, but also I’m in the news talking about it. But only somebody who is getting paid by a company who does this — and I include lobbyists in that — could think that surveillance price-setting is somehow good for consumers. It just doesn’t make any sense that companies would spend millions of dollars investing in this technology to charge us less, right?

That is the talking point the opposition to the bill is using. They’re saying these are consumer-friendly tools used to offer discounts. Well, in the committee hearing, in response to that, I said... How can we know it’s a discount if there’s no set price? What is the set price?

As you mentioned, these companies have gotten a lot of blowback for their AI pricing. Have they been lobbying the legislature on this bill? Has it been a full-court press?

I would definitely say we’ve gotten a full-court press. We’ve made changes to the bill in response to legitimate feedback and concerns. One thing in particular that I’ll flag is loyalty programs.

People like loyalty programs. We’re not trying to say that King Soopers — that’s Kroger here — or like Costco can’t give you the gas points. So in crafting the legislation, we have been very mindful of taking feedback from business. I mean, we got a 20-page memo from TechNet; they’re just this vague lobbying conglomerate that seems to represent everyone from Google to Uber to DoorDash. We got like a 20-page document from them and we made a lot of changes in response.

We’re willing to take feedback on the bill if at the end of the day the bill protects Colorado consumers from their private data being used to set individualized prices for them. So I think the way we’ve been able to manage the full court press at this point is like we are being responsive to feedback that we’re getting.

Although, what I will say is I’m skeptical about the opposition actually playing ball in an honest way where there’s going to be some breakthrough where we get a bill that still does the thing right and they’re like, “Thank you for responding to all the concerns.”

We’ve heard a lot about surveillance pricing, but not so much about surveillance wages. The idea is that these companies use people’s online behavior to create a “desperation score” and that dictates how much they’ll pay a job applicant, right?

You should read Enshitification by Cory Doctorow. Read the chapter on Uber, which has a breakdown of surveillance wage setting. Basically, in the gig economy, companies can infer things about you that will lead them to pay you less if they think you’re more desperate for money. How quickly somebody accepts a ride — if they’re in a pattern of quickly accepting rides, that can indicate more desperation for money.

Another thing — and this is one we heard from Uber drivers — is that Uber has what sounds almost like a Venmo debit card sort of situation where you as an Uber driver can get instant access to the money that you’ve earned. And Uber drivers have talked in committee about how if they are more quick to take that money, they notice that they start getting paid less.

The governor’s “task force” says it found a way to balance regulation of AI — basically keeping people from being discriminated against — while respecting the imperatives of businesses who have complained about being limited in what they can do to people with algorithms. Do you think a deal is near?

Yeah, I’m skeptical. We’ll see what happens. I mean, the task force did their work outside of the scope of the legislature. We are going to get a chance to take a look at what they’re putting out there when it hits bill paper. But I’m not confident that any sort of agreement is necessarily going to hold.

Because it’s a bad deal? Or people just aren’t going to wind up being satisfied by it?

I am skeptical that the big tech companies are going to be willing to not come down to the Capitol and lobby against any sort of bill that creates a risk of liability on them.

Is Gov. Polis still Mr. Big Tech, advocating against regulation? Or has the changing politics changed his tune a bit?

You know, it’s our job in the legislature to give him the opportunity to do the right thing. Every politician is saying “affordability, affordability, affordability,” like it’s Beetlejuice and you say it three times and then affordability appears. We’re offering a real solution that makes sense to voters, that is evidence-based. The way big tech has gamified the economy is screwing over the people of Colorado. And the people of Colorado understand that. So it’s kind of a weird environment to be on the side of big tech when they’re spying on us to scam us.

There’s also a fierce debate over data centers in Colorado, with two very divergent bills that would set the state’s overarching policy. What are you hearing about those from the public?

Oh, the general public are like, “Why would we want these data centers humming and increasing our power bills?” And the lobbyists are like, “Oh, what about the jobs?” And it’s like, okay, how many jobs is it actually creating? And by the way, the more we double and triple down on AI, we’re losing jobs elsewhere. So we’ll see what happens, but I do think that there’s a disconnect between how people are talking about it in the building and how people feel about it in the community.

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We’ve got a run down of good news for you tonight, because why not start off the week with some positive vibes for once?

More interviews to come later this week — now on to the news worth celebrating.

Note: I don’t like talking about business or being vulnerable, but I’ll make a rare exception here. Paid subscribers have dropped off a cliff since late November, when I went in for my sixth open-heart surgery, and it’s making life difficult.

I took a few weeks off to heal from surgery but resumed the work way earlier than recommended, diving right in with live-streamed interviews and special election-related projects. I know times are tough, but if you’re reading this and want to pitch in to help keep this independent media project afloat, now would be a great time.

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99% of Washington State residents: It took nearly a century, but the Evergreen State finally has an income tax — at least for a relative handful of residents, anyway. After a bitter, 24-hour fight in the House and more sedate debate in the state Senate, a 9.9% tax on income over $1 million is headed to the desk of Gov. Bob Ferguson, who has promised to sign the historic legislation.

The tax, which is due to begin in 2029, would impact around 20,000 residents, or about 0.5% of Washington’s population.

As in California, where there’s a billionaire tax on the ballot in November, the state’s ultra-wealthy are throwing a fit about actually having to pay even a modicum of their fair share (again, Washington has never had an income tax until now, so these people have never had to contribute in any progressive way!).

Starbucks founder Howard Schultz, who I tormented for several years while covering the union drive at his company (and ultimately helped force out), announced last week that he’s moving his family’s office to Miami, where he just bought a $44 billion penthouse at the Four Seasons. Nobody wants to hear a billionaire’s moans about being persecuted or financially strapped, but if you’re going to attempt to play that card, buying a $44 million penthouse is not the way to do it.

The blowback has already led to the likely partial rollback of the new estate tax passed last year, and it’s only a matter of time until a new Super PAC run by wealth-hoarding heathens starts up a ballot initiative to undo the millionaire tax. Then again, there are often conservative ballot initiatives backed by ultra-wealthy cranks in Washington, and they rarely wind up passing.

Workers and consumers in Colorado: A House committee voted to move forward on a bill that would ban both surveillance pricing and wage-setting, setting up what could be a landmark law in an economy increasingly driven by algorithms and spyware.

House Bill 1210 outlaws using a person’s internet browsing history — including search, location, and previous purchases — to set personalized prices on items purchased online. Both regulations would be historic; while banning surveillance pricing has been proposed in several states, only New York has managed to pass any legislation, and that simply requires a disclosure of algorithmic pricing. Lawmakers in the Empire State are also pushing for an outright ban on the practice.

What we haven’t seen anywhere is Colorado’s proposed prohibition on employers using applicants’ personal data to lowball them on salary. Some companies have been found to create “desperation scores” based on a scrape of an applicant’s personal history, including having applied for unemployment benefits or payday loans.

The bill is facing frenzied opposition from retailers and tech companies, which have argued that it could ban things like discounts for loyal customers and people who have items left in their online shopping cars. The sponsors addressed some of those objections with amendments that would exempt these specific scenarios, allowing HB 1210 to squeak through committee on a 7-6 vote.

There’s still a ways to go; big tech will be spending heavily to kill the bill in the legislature, and Gov. Jared Polis may not need much convincing if it gets to his desk.

Taxpayers and workers in New Jersey: As the federal government cuts back on funding for social safety net programs like Medicaid and SNAP, states will either have to provide less for their most vulnerable constituents or find creative ways of finding the money. For New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, the solution is obvious: end the free rides… for big corporations.

There are no bigger welfare cheats than major corporations like Walmart and Target, which pay their employees so little that they’re forced to rely on social safety net programs like Medicaid and SNAP. In Sherrill’s new budget proposal, she includes a fine on large employers (those with 50 or more employees) for every one of their workers on Medicaid. The charges would reach $725 per employee on Medicaid and raise around $145 million annually.

With upwards of $3.3 billion in potential cuts from the federal government, this proposal wouldn’t come close to plugging the gap, but it’s at the very least a deft plan to put pressure on these corporations and educate people as to why so many people rely on government benefits — it’s certainly not out of laziness.

Amazon has the most employees on Medicaid in New Jersey, with more than 5,600 workers enrolled in state benefits that cover about 10,000 family members as well. Walmart, Wawa, temp employer Century II Staffing, and Target rounding out the top five most shameful big employers in the Garden State.

Transparency in Montana: Consider this points for determination. Not long after the state Supreme Court tossed a proposed constitutional amendment that would ban dark money and stop corporations from spending in elections, the activists behind the proposal returned with a ballot initiative that would do largely the same thing.

To be clear, this is the backup plan, as initiatives can be much more easily changed or thwarted by a hostile legislature, but any opportunity to even slow down the tyranny of dark money — and to give voters the opportunity to weigh in on doing so — is worth pursuing. In this case, the proposed initiative would threaten corporate charters if they violate business conduct regulations, which would include spending on political speech.

Submitting the proposal as an initiative instead of an amendment cuts in half the number of petition signatures required to get on the ballot, a key consideration with a June 17 deadline approaching.

Civil rights in Western Pennsylvania: Allegheny County became the latest large municipality to ban most local cooperation with ICE and other federal immigration enforcement officials. Unless otherwise required by pre-existing law, county officials are now prohibited from:

• Inquiring as to a resident’s immigration status

• Retaining citizenship information provided on county documents for more than 60 days

• Entering into a contract with federal authorities to access county data to support immigration enforcement

• Detaining a person for no legal reason other than a federal immigration detainer request

• Assisting ICE or border patrol “in any capacity” with enforcement operations.

A law like this can be superseded by federal and state law, so it can only do so much, but simply requiring extra steps and explicit authorization goes a long way in a system built on slimy idiots who bend the rules.

Public school families in Arizona: Forget preschools in Minnesota, the real education subsidy fraud scandal is happening in states with private school vouchers. It’s been especially rampant in Arizona, where taxpayers are now paying a billion dollars a year for wealthy families to bring their kids to Broadway shows (in New York!) while public schools shut down.

Not that anybody’s surprised: teachers, union officials, public education advocates, and activists all predicted this would happen as soon as conservative lawmakers passed school privatization back in 2022. I even made a video about it, now nearly three years ago, and I’m no Nostradamus:

There was a major effort back in 2023-24 to end the voucher program while it was still in its early stages, but its failure to qualify for the ballot ended any hopes of avoiding what was obviously destined to be a catastrophe. Now, fresh off several investigations revealing the sheer magnitude of waste, fraud, and abuse draining the public coffers and robbing students across the state, the teachers’ union and the nonprofit Save Our Schools are pursuing another initiative, this one to place significant limitations and guardrails on the voucher program.

The measure, called the “Protect Education Act,” would require unused funds to be returned to public schools, mandate fingerprint clearance for voucher-funded school employees, ban the use of funds for luxury items, and prohibit families earning $150,000 or more annually from participating in the program, among other restrictions.

This will be a hard-fought battle; there are 100,000 families that now receive vouchers, which is a relatively small number, but the school privatization has essentially unlimited funds from the Betsy DeVoses of the world to muddy the water during a campaign. Then again, they tried that in Nebraska, only to get blown out of the water even while Donald Trump was rampaging in the state.

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Progress Report has raised over $7 million dollars for progressive candidates and causes, breaks national stories about corrupt politicians, and delivers incisive analysis, and goes deep into the grassroots.

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