Well, I’m back with the news and analysis, with more to come this weekend — a lot is happening right now and there are a good number of stories to explore and catch up on.

Before we get started, I just want to thank everyone for their very kind words of empathy and encouragement as I deal with this ongoing heart issue. I’m dreading surgery but your notes and comments have made it a bit less lonely and daunting.

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A month after a democratic socialist tsunami wiped out establishment-backed politicians in New York and Colorado, a progressive wave is now making its way to the Upper Midwest.

According to new polls, expensive and bitter primaries in both Wisconsin and Michigan are on the verge of turning into blowouts for left-wing populist outsiders. In the Badger State, several polls show state Rep. Francesca Hong with an overwhelming lead on the other candidates: Marquette Law School has her ahead by 22% over former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, with Milwaukee County Exec David Crowley clocking in at just 7%. Barnes dropped out of the race on Thursday, which won’t likely do much for Crowley’s chances: Marquette also polled voters on their second choices and found that with Barnes out, Hong’s lead grows to a whopping 33%.

The Wisconsin numbers are equally dismal in a poll by State Navigate, which found Hong with a commanding 29-point lead over Crowley, who led Barnes by one point in the race for second place. Recalibrated after Barnes’s exit, the poll has Hong with a 28-point advantage over Crowley, with 17% still undecided even as early voting has begun.

Over in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, a very progressive public health official, has built as much as a 15-point advantage in the state’s US Senate primary. He has surged ahead of his one remaining opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, a centrist who has received the backing of virtually the state’s entire roster of Democratic elected officials since state Sen. Mallory McMorrow left the race. Stevens has also been the beneficiary of more than $50 million in outside PAC spending, including $30 million from AIPAC alone.

So how are they doing this?

Both Hong and El-Sayed dominate with younger voters… and others

Barnes’ exit from the race on Thursday will ostensibly allow Crowley, a centrist who quit several weeks ago, only to be summoned back into the race by a panic-stricken Gov. Tony Evers, to consolidate the anti-Hong vote. Just where that will come from, however, is unclear.

In the State Navigate poll, Hong took 66% of the vote among voters 18-29, with the second-closest choice being “not sure” with 17% of the vote. In the Marquette poll, Hong’s lead among voters aged 30-44 sat at 42 points above Barnes; only voters 65+ did not rank her at the top.

El-Sayed, meanwhile, enjoys a 34-point advantage among the 18-29 crew, and remarkably for a one-on-one race, owns a 54% advantage among voters 40-49. That resiliency among “older” voters reflects an unexpected strength with a number of demographics that might typically lay outside what an establishment-bucking, DSA-tinged Muslim candidate might expect to earn.

As expected, El-Sayed, who is ideologically far to the left of centrist Stevens, trounces his rival with college-educated voters, to the tune of a 33% lead. But he nearly breaks even with voters who have at most a high school degree, trailing by just 3%, and actually leads among graduates of vocational and technical schools, a significant demographic in Michigan.

Gender also defies typical fault lines, as El-Sayed holds a 14% lead among both men and women. Physically shredded, especially for a national politician, El-Sayed has tried to emphasize his masculinity in non-toxic ways, including in a recent ad that prominently featured his muscles straining during an indoor rock climbing session. The campaign has been happy to lean in on his “bro” reputation, at least to a point, figuring that it’s better to embrace it than fight and alienate half of eligible voters.

A little help from their enemies

Hong and El-Sayed support Medicare for All, have spoken out defiantly about the genocide in Gaza, and support abolishing ICE. They want to tax the rich and offer structural solutions to the economic precarity long experienced by working and middle class Americans. These positions place them well out of step with the median Democratic elected official, but right in line with a voting base that has moved to the left during the Trump era, especially over the past few years.

Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that Democratic voters have always leaned further to the left, but until recently, they were so spooked by the prospect of losing that they would sacrifice ideology for “electability.” For decades, that’s been code for pro-capital centrists, and the base has dutifully agreed to nominate bland, right-leaning, replacement-level politicians. But between the disastrous 2024 election and the party’s ongoing inability (or refusal) to put up a strong united front against Donald Trump, Democratic voters are simply not buying the argument that corporate-friendly milquetoast is electable anymore.

And that’s a problem for party leadership, because they’ve spent the past month trying to stop Hong and El-Sayed’s grassroots momentum with electability arguments, warning Democratic voters that nominating the two progressive populists will lead to certain doom in November.

It’s been an all-out barrage. In Michigan, nearly all of the most prominent elected Democrats, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, have all thrown their weight behind Stevens, while taking aim at El-Sayed for everything from his campaigning with uber-popular lefty streamer Hasan Piker to misleading accusations of misogyny. Rep. Hillary Scholten has gone so far as to call El-Sayed antisemitic and refuse to say she’ll vote for him if and when he becomes the Democratic nominee.

In Wisconsin, meanwhile, the panic over Hong’s huge lead — and rumors of an unflattering investigation of Barnes — led Gov. Tony Evers to summon Crowley back into the race weeks after he dropped out. Hong’s lead has only grown since Evers’ desperation move, and Crowley is unlikely to gain any ground with Barnes’ departure.

If anything, the wagon-circling and coordinated attacks look to be backfiring, reflecting an unprecedented anti-incumbent, “throw the bums out” posture from Democratic voters. Widespread disgust with leadership has voters rejecting anything associated with senior Democrats, regardless of ideology. Hong, for instance, carries wide leads with very liberal and liberal voters, but perhaps even more significantly, only trailed Barnes among moderate/conservative voters by a mere three points. El-Sayed has made AIPAC’s support of Stevens a central plank of his campaign, leading to awkward exchanges like this one, with Stevens weaponizing Jewish voters’ fears in order to defend $30 million in dark right-wing money.

Many of the attacks on Hong and El-Sayed are cynical dog whistles and attempts to weaponize the fact that Republicans will undoubtedly run racist, misleading ads against the two firebrands. That said, it doesn’t mean that they are entirely off-base. Recent polls show Crowley (and Barnes) slightly better positioned to beat Rep. Tom Tiffany, the extremist Republican nominee for governor, and the same goes for Stevens against former Rep. Mike Rogers. Republicans are already attacking Hong for her call to defund the police during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, comments that she’s disavowed but cannot erase from her past.

Still, no matter how much this annoys Democratic Party power-brokers, this what democracy looks like: sometimes people vote their values instead of making calculated decisions intended to mitigate supposed risk. It’s unfortunate that Hong and El-Sayed will have to bear the burden of proving the left’s theory that progressive populism can win back working class voters, especially because they are actively being sabotaged by liberal influencers. A new poll, released Thursday evening, shows that 12% of Stevens supporters would cross over to back Rogers if El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination, a direct result of these internecine attacks on his character.

Still, there’s probably going to be no better year or political environment to create a watershed breakthrough for the left. It’s unfortunate that it may hinge on whether centrists are willing to make ideological concessions and giving up total control of the party.

Federalize this: President Trump has asked the Supreme Court to intervene after an appeals court last week denied his administration’s bid to resume implementing an executive order designed to severely restrict mail-in voting. The ruling kept in place an injunction granted to 23 states that sued over the policy.

Among other things, the Trump administration wants to run every state’s unredacted voter roll through shoddy citizenship check databases, and the executive order prohibits the USPS from mailing ballots to anyone in states that do not comply. Initially, a lower court judge refused to intervene on the states’ behalf because the USPS had not yet refused to send ballots, but a second judge came to the opposite conclusion, based on the fact that several components of the order were patently unconstitutional.

By a 2-1 vote, the Massachusetts-based appeals court agreed with the latter judge, rejecting the cynical attempt to run down the clock inherent in the original argument.

“As the district court reasoned, the [executive order] lays out a clear set of rapidly approaching deadlines by which states must ​coordinate with federal officials and comply with new voting procedures – all while ‌the states must also ensure that their officials ‌and the public understand the evolving set of rules that would govern the upcoming September and November elections,” the judges wrote in a 2-1 decision. “The Plaintiff States have no practical choice ‌but to respond to the [order] now.”

On Wednesday, I joined a press call hosted by the Fair Elections Center and asked them about the administration’s request that the Supreme Court overturn the appeals court decision and allow the USPS to withhold ballots from tens of millions of Americans. Officials there weren’t exactly sanguine about the high court’s record on voting rights and what might happen with this case.

“The Trump administration has not generally been shy about going to the Supreme Court to try to get what they want,” Michelle Kanter Cohen told me. “We’ve seen just recently the Court both gutting the VRA yet also upholding the opportunities for voters to have their postmarked ballot counted [in Watson v RNC]. So it’s something we’re watching. It’s we really can’t predict sort of the outcomes here.

Rebeka Caruthers, the CEO and president of the Fair Elections Center, was sharper in her criticism of the court:

“We see that there are folks on the Supreme Court that have different viewpoints on who should be able to vote and what standards should be used and shouldn’t be used,” she said. “I would characterize the Supreme Court as a court that isn’t showing willingness to support expansive voting or a representational democracy.

“Ultimately there has to be real legislative change. If we want to make sure that people’s right to vote is enshrined, if we want to make sure that people really have the right to vote in this country, there’s going to have to be a set of strong effective laws that are very clear on the right to vote in this country. We are hopeful that there will be a pro-democracy Congress at some point that would choose to strengthen voting laws in this country.”

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Being sick is a full-time job, even when you have a short runway to surgery: between conferring with doctors, additional tests, more conferring, hammering out logistics, and figuring out finances, there’s barely enough time to process what you’re actually facing. Add in a full-time job, the fear of the unknown, the deep familiarity of the pain that comes with the best-case outcome, and having an adorable three-year-old son who can’t fully comprehend why you’re so bummed and distracted (plus guilt that comes with being bummed and distracted in the few weeks left before surgery), and functioning becomes a legitimate challenge. Writing highly technical news about the federal government and all 50 states at times feels impossible.

I’m not writing this to complain or fish for sympathy; I’m a pretty private person, I get nauseous at the thought of public vulnerability, and most of me thinks this is gratuitous and annoying (apologies if you agree). But I have paid subscribers who expect and deserve regular output, and over the past week, I’ve fallen short of that responsibility. Not for lack of trying — I have started two or three new newsletters, only to stop halfway through, pressed for time and unable to focus. Nobody sees those half-written drafts, though, so they really don’t mean much at all.

Everyone has been very kind about my situation — the comments in the last post were really uplifting — and this email isn’t a response to any demand from anyone. I just thought I’d give you all a heads up, along with an explanation for the radio silence.

Anyway, the plan is to get back to sending out newsletters tomorrow or Thursday at the latest; I’ve got a big news roundup in the works as well as another newsletter on Trump’s assault on our elections on tap. After that, I’ll do my best to keep them going until I have to enter the hospital for an IV blood thinner transition on August 16th.

(Why am I explaining the medical process? Well, I can’t find any case studies or first-person stories about somebody who has had a seventh open-heart surgery, especially not in my circumstances, so if nothing else, it’d be nice if my experience could be something that other people could reference one day.)

Thank you all for your patience.

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I was halfway through writing Wednesday’s newsletter when I got a call from my cardiologist. That part wasn’t a surprise; I’d underwent an MRI on Tuesday to establish a new physiological baseline nine months after my sixth major open heart surgery, so I was anticipating the call. I wouldn’t say I was looking forward to it, but I was hopeful I’d get the all-clear after a difficult rehab period.

Ironically, when a doctor tries to cushion the blow by opening by saying he has “a bit of disappointing news,” it creates a spike in blood pressure that really isn’t productive in situations like this one: it turns out there’s a leak somewhere in my aortic graft, it’s causing a pseudoaneurysm, and I’ll need a seventh surgery. ASAP.

For those of you who are new here, or weren’t subscribed until after I returned to work in February, I’ve dealt my with heart issues my entire life, largely surrounding my valves, and it’s required repeated intervention. Humans aren’t really built to have their chests cracked open, ribs split apart, and most delicate organs rearranged that many times; it takes a huge toll on the cardiac tissue and body at large, recovery is more difficult with each surgery, and it has you thinking about death way more than you ought to. The only thing worse than paranoia about your health is suspecting the worst and being right, and unfortunately, that’s where I am right now. I’ll be blunt: terrifying.

My fifth surgery took place in February 2024, followed by sixth surgery late last November, two days before Thanksgiving. It took me a long while to recover both physically and mentally from the last one; I actually haven’t even finished cardiac rehab, and now here I go again.

With the world on fire last winter, I restarted the newsletter about a month after my most recent surgery, writing and reporting from my bed, powered by painkillers to numb the aches and the urgency that pushed me through them. It’s this ongoing health problem that first turned me on to progressive politics — my first big issue as a teenager was single-payer healthcare — and once again, I’m lucky to have the health insurance that made it possible for me to undergo the routine MRI that caught this latest issue before it quite literally blew up on me.

Yesterday, as I waited for the CT scan, my appointment was pushed back while the hospital administration waited for authorization from the insurance company; it was inconvenient and annoying, and yet I’m lucky that inconvenience and annoyance were all I had to navigate. The thought that so many people are simply not able to get care at all right now (especially with Medicaid being slashed to the bone) makes me viscerally angry, so as unfortunate as these setbacks are — and man, the experience is months of awful — they also motivate me to do whatever I can to create a system in which everyone has the opportunity to recover from surgery instead of just dropping dead (or declaring bankruptcy).

Right now, the surgery is scheduled for the third week in August and there’s lots to do: prepping for an operation like this is a time-consuming, with paperwork, logistics (it’ll be in Cleveland, I’m in NYC), and trying to stay healthy. Plus, I need to spend as much time as I can with my three-year-old son before I go under the knife, both because I’ll be gone for at least a while and there is always the chance that it doesn’t go as planned (I just don’t want to assume anything, this is inherently risky stuff, though my surgeon is thankfully amazing). So I’m going to continue the newsletter until the week of the surgery, including the interviews and live streams, but the editions are not going to be as frequent for a while.

(That said, I may start documenting the heart surgery experience, if that’s of interest, but that probably won’t involve much political news.)

After the surgery, assuming everything goes well (pray for me), I’ll hope to get back to the political newsletter by late September, but it’s hard to say for sure; a seventh surgery comes with a lot of uncertainty. If you’re a paid subscriber, definitely feel free to pause or cancel your subscription until I’m back full force. This has become a decent chunk of my income, but I know times are tight and always want to deliver on the promise that comes with a paid subscription.

I’ll end the ramble here; thank you as always for reading and the support.

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A few things before we start.

1. Andy Burnham will become the new Prime Minister of Britain today. I was really impressed with his speech at the Labour conference last week, which was less a technocratic laundry list of policies than a narrative that explained the country’s decline and his vision for its revival. Burnham directly blamed four decades of Thatcherism for the vast gulf in wealth and steep downturn in economic opportunity, then explained how his approach will be different, promising a populist government that sharply contrasts with that of his predecessor, Sir Kier Starmer. It’s just too bad he’s an Everton supporter.

2. It looks like former state Senate President Troy Jackson, a pro-labor progressive, will be the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine. While he gubernatorial bid fell short this year, he was ideologically similar to Graham Platner (politically, anyway) and able to run the sort of grassroots-insider campaign that the Senate sprint required.

3. Look at this clueless loser refuse to get off the stage:

OK, lots to discuss tonight, so 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.

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Ls for DOJ: A federal judge tossed the Department of Justice’s lawsuits against both Virginia and New Mexico seeking the state’s unredacted voter rolls. The DOJ has sued for voter rolls from 30 states and Washington DC, and so far, they’re 0-for-15, with a majority of lawsuits tossed by Republican-appointed judges.

Save us from SAVE: The Trump administration also wants states to run those voter rolls through a database known as the SAVE system and purge voters accordingly. But SAVE is used for federal benefits and is frequently inaccurate and out of date, so it’s been known to wrongly flag citizens for removal. This week it emerged that after Texas’s Secretary of State used SAVE to check on 2000 voters, it returned such flawed results that she wrote a letter to the feds questioning its data, essentially accusing it of flagging citizens for removal. Embarrassing and dangerous.

I explored this effort at mass disenfranchisement in a report for More Perfect Union this spring:

Timely: More good news: a county judge in Kansas came through in the clutch, reinstating a law that counts mail ballots postmarked by election day that arrive up to three days late. The grace period became law in 2017 and was repealed last year; without that extra time, more than 2000 votes would have been tossed in 2024.

The ruling applies only to the upcoming primary election, as Attorney General Kris Kobach — who supported the law back when it passed in 2017, then took Donald Trump’s cues and went to war on mail voting — plans to appeal to the state Supreme Court. In something of a pleasant surprise, the US Supreme Court just upheld the Mississippi law that allowed for a post-election day grace period.

Take 2: A coalition of activists and lawmakers in Michigan is calling for a constitutional amendment to implement surtax on the state’s richest residents, reviving an effort that fell flat last year. The proposal would add a tax on an individual making over $500,000 or a married couple earning over $1 million, with the proceeds going toward pre-K-12 education, childcare, health and human services funding, housing and water infrastructure.

The hiccup right now is that they are seeking to pass the measure not as a ballot initiative, but through the legislative process. Doing so requires a two-thirds majority of votes in each chamber, and at the moment, Republicans control the state House. Yet another reason why we need to focus on flipping the state.

Losers can’t make the electability argument

As someone whose job entails a lot of being online and talking about government and elections, I have to regularly remind myself that most of the political arguments that play out across siloed social media and snippy tabloid reports do not reach everyday voters. Nobody in the real world cares when coalitions of whiny backbenchers write obnoxious and disconnected open letters, what think tank presidents tweet, what influencers with ghost-written books say on afternoon cable news hits, or whatever grievances high-level aides divulge to Axios on condition of anonymity.

As so many primaries have shown this year, support from the political establishment has become more harmful than helpful. This is confounding to Democratic leaders who are so used to controlling the party and its loyal voters, and over the past few weeks in particular, their loosening grip on power has inspired increasingly vitriolic and desperate attacks on the left and DSA in particular.

There is a bitterness to what is clearly a shift in ideology and temperament among voters, which would be amusing if it didn’t come paired with tens of millions of dollars in dark money from right-wing special interests. As my friend Greg put it so smartly in response to a CNN story about Hakeem Jeffries’ attempts to stop Bernie Sanders from endorsing leftist primary candidates: “If Bernie was a crypto-fueled super PAC he would’ve been warned against NOT meddling.”

Sanders was in Michigan this weekend to rally support for leftist Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, whose race against Rep. Haley Stevens has become the apex of this Democratic civil war. Unbelievable sums of money has poured in on Stevens’ behalf these past few weeks, upwards of $30 million from AIPAC its affiliates alone, a new record. As depressing as it is to see a Democrat eagerly accept help from right-wing billionaires and corporate slush funds, it isn’t particularly surprising, and the only reason it’s even worth commenting on in this space is the absurdity of the narrative being pushed by panicked centrist pundits and the avalanche of ads.

There are a lot of ideological differences between El-Sayed and Stevens: he’s a DSA member who backs Medicare for All and ending military aid to Israel, while she’s a center-right type who backs Israel to the end and continues to tout her role on the auto task force during the early Obama years. Establishment Democrats know that she is ideologically out of step with base voters, so instead, they’ve focused on the nebulous electability argument, insisting that Stevens would appeal more voters than El-Sayed.

But here’s the problem with that argument: if electability is a candidate’s main asset, it really shouldn’t require a deluge of dark money, upward of $50 million in TV ads and direct mailers, to convince the party’s most loyal supporters to hold their collective nose and vote for said electable candidate. It also shouldn’t require Islamophobic dog whistles and baseless insinuations that the insurgent candidate is misogynist, rumors that AIPAC is injecting into the discourse in an attempt to prove the establishment’s point about electability.

A similar story is playing out in the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary, where state Rep. Francesca Hong — who we featured very early in her run — has built an unprecedented grassroots machine and taken a firm lead in the polls. The leading establishment Democrat, Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, was forced to drop out of the race this week due to financial struggles, and things have gotten so dire that Gov. Tony Evers convinced centrist David Crowley, the Milwaukee County Executive, to jump back into a race that he left ten days earlier.

Like El-Sayed, Hong is a democratic socialist, outspoken about populist economic issues and American involvement in war crimes. As a single mother who still works in restaurants, she too is a somewhat unconventional candidate for a Midwestern state, and the party establishment are quaking at the thought of the attack ads that will come her way should she become the nominee.

Hong certainly represents something new for the state’s politics, and it’s possible that concerns concerns about both her and El-Sayed’s electoral viability do prove to have merit. But the people making that argument no longer have the credibility to do so: Democrats, under their current leadership, are a void of charisma, manifestly disliked in survey after survey, and only beating Republicans in generic head-to-head polls because Donald Trump is now the most unpopular president in modern history. And remember, Trump is only in office because these same leaders managed to lose to him twice in both Wisconsin and Michigan

Strategy aside, this sense of entitlement to control of the Democratic Party is completely undemocratic, made even more so by their efforts to close ranks and invitation to conservative dark money groups to pour money into misleading ads intended to mislead their own base voters. The Democratic Party consists of the voters who support it, and to ignore the clear policy and political preferences of those supporters because elites “know better” is both patronizing and doomed to fail. Blissful ignorance of what regular Americans are thinking and feeling has created an unfounded arrogance that fuels this collapse in public support.

There are some candidates whose flaws are obvious and overwhelming enough that it would be impossible for them to win, but the Democratic Party’s understanding of what is electable is rooted in a politics that no longer exists. At this point, “electable” is as much a kind of candidate than it is an apt description, meaning milquetoast, mildly conservative, and gutless more than someone who can win elections.

That centrists and neoliberals are panicking and scolding young people over the left winning elections is exactly why the left is winning elections: centrists and neoliberals spend their time panicking and scolding young people instead of trying to win elections. Those losses will continue to pile up until Democratic leaders come forward with new ideas that actually address people’s problems and prove that they can win elections.

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I’m working on a few big stories and booking interviews for the upcoming weeks, so there’s a lot to be excited about. And on that note, if you’ve ever bought or sold anything online, you’ll want to watch tonight’s story — it’ll make you angry and ideally laugh some, too.

Note: Think of Progress Report as the news before you read the news, bringing you conversations with up-and-coming candidates, behind the scenes with activists running critical campaigns, and perspectives you don’t hear on cable news. It’s a one-man publication and a second full-time job, so if you value this work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for just $2.50 a month — it’s the only way I can keep the work going.

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It was two city heat waves ago that I sat in the steamy garage of a makeshift production studio, sweating through a three piece suit made from i could have sworn was a couch my grandparents owned in the 1980s. It somehow fit me better than any suit I’ve ever worn, despite the fact that I bought it “off the rack” from SHEIN, the ultra-cheap fast fashion online retailer whose clothes tend to fall apart at the seams. But I needed the suit ASAP, and I only needed it once, and beside, I’ve spent the last few months reporting on how Amazon, the undisputed go-to online mall for these kind of situations, isn’t exactly the cheap and convenient retailer it claims.

Next week, California Attorney General Rob Bonta will argue a motion for an injunction against Amazon that would require the shopping behemoth to end a longtime practice that has soaked American consumers and burned small businesses for the past decade. The strategy, at one point referred to internally by the company as the price parity policy, has driven up prices across industries and retailers, manipulating markets and costing hundreds of millions of Americans many tens of billions of dollars.

Evidence unsealed in April illustrate how pernicious the company has been and how clear a case Bonta has; this is real mafioso material, or as Bonta put to me, “real smoking gun stuff” that rarely arrives this blunt.

California’s lawsuit against Amazon, which goes to trial next year, is one of several seeking to end the practice, which uses the company’s market size to extract obscene fees from vendors and force price increases at every other retailer, while fooling customers into a false sense of competition.

The Biden FTC under Lina Khan also sued Amazon for its price-fixing regime, which has driven inflation enough that it’s one of the few cases against big business that the Trump administration has seen fit to continue pursuing. There’s also a massive ongoing class action lawsuit over Amazon’s price-fixing, led by the same firm that scored billions for college athletes just a few years ago. The allegations against Amazon amount to mass extortion and economy distortion, and potential remedies could see the monopoly broken up.

I spoke with Bonta, class action attorney Steve Berman, prominent Amazon sellers, and other experts for the piece below, which I wrote, produced, and hosted for More Perfect Union. If you’ve ever bought anything online — or even just watched an old film noir — you’ll want to watch this one.

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Thank you to everyone who tuned in this morning to watch my live stream with my good pal Jason Sattler, who you probably know on the internet as ! He’s been doing smart, witty, and selfless work on behalf of democracy for years now and was kind enough to discuss upcoming elections and my various projects — see: On the Ballot and the Flip Seats legislature index. You can watch the conversation above, and in tonight’s edition of the newsletter, I dive deep on some of the news that we reviewed.

As for today’s biggest headline, the death of South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham, my first reaction was less glib than you’d expect. It actually wigged me out, because he died from a dissected aorta, a fate that I narrowly avoided when I was 23-years-old. That part of my heart has haunted me: the main focus of my surgery last fall was replacing the aortic valve and root, and it’s constantly on my mind. It’s impossible to root for someone to suffer that kind of fate.

That said, Lindsey Graham was a blood-thirsty hypocrite (in so many ways!) who spent three decades cheerleading endless war and the deaths of countless innocent men, women, and especially children. I think he was well aware that he hurt millions of people, but for whatever complicated or twisted reason, he just didn’t care.

OK, let’s get to the good stuff.

Note: Think of Progress Report as the news before you read the news, bringing you conversations with up-and-coming candidates, behind the scenes with activists running critical campaigns, and perspectives you don’t hear on cable news. It’s a one-man publication and a second full-time job, so if you value this work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for just $2.50 a month — it’s the only way I can keep the work going.

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The US Supreme Court’s ongoing dismantling of voting rights and the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on elections are together enough to create a sense of despondency, as if the fundamentals of democracy are irrevocably doomed here in the United States. But as usual, you can look o the states for a bit of hope.

Or, more specifically, you can look to the people in the states, who are finding innovative new ways to fight back against fascism.

It’s become a predictable, even rote routine: citizens get together, spend several years hustling to get a progressive initiative — be it abortion rights, Medicaid expansion, minimum wage increase, etc. — on the ballot, and then overcome steep odds and millions of dollars in right-wing money to pass it in their politically conservative state. And then before they’re even done celebrating their grassroots victory, Republican legislators find a way to stymy the will of the people.

Sometimes, they try to ignore the result until they’re sued; other times, they roll back a popular policy. And increasingly, state Republicans are striving to blow up the whole initiative and amendment process altogether, making it all but impossible for citizen activists to qualify, much less pass, popular laws.

All of the above is happening in Missouri, which has become ground zero for the struggle over the future of democracy. On August 4th, the conservative attack comes to a head, as voters will be asked to weigh in on four ballot initiatives, including one that would make passing a citizen’s amendment so difficult that a resolution declaring “all puppies are good” would be a challenge. Amendment 4 would require that an initiative win majority support from all eight Congressional districts in the state, which is both very rural and very gerrymandered.

To understand just how impossible it would make it to pass an amendment, take the amendment that re-legalized abortion in Missouri in 2024: Amendment 3 won with 51.6% of the vote but only took a majority in three districts; today, with the new gerrymander, it’d probably only pass in two of them. Notably, the new standard would not apply to amendments sent to the ballot by the legislature, giving them a big leg up when they try to pass things like this November’s amendment to re-ban abortion and trans care for minors.

Reversing the will of voters is one of the Missouri GOP’s specialties: In January, Gov. Mike Kehoe signed a law that rolled back a key element of a successful ballot initiative to raise the state’s minimum wage: while the boost to $15 held, the legislature revoked the right to earn guaranteed paid leave, stripping access to sick time for more than 700,000 Missourians.

Okay, this hasn’t been too uplifting or encouraging yet, so here’s where the good news kicks in: activists are fighting back in Missouri and beyond.

In response, organizers quickly put together the Respect MO Voters coalition and qualified an amendment that would protect the initiative process from interference, preventing frequent GOP tactics like changing signature thresholds, shrinking collection periods, and arbitrarily rewording initiatives. The amendment would also require an 80% majority of the legislature to change voter-approved initiatives, which not even Missouri Republicans have been able to muster.

(Activists in Nebraska are also advancing such an amendment, having seen their people-approved minimum wage increase gutted, and just submitted more than 180,000 signatures to get on the ballot in November.)

Missouri Republicans are trying to pre-empt this display of democracy by scheduling their anti-initiative amendment for the August primary election. Perversely, that only has to win a simple majority to pass and make it harder to win future initiatives, but if activists can defeat it next month, they’ll be in good position to protect their rights in November.

And it’s not just Missouri: similar efforts are happening in other states where democracy, civil rights, and bodily autonomy have been under attack.

Fighting Back in Red States

Perhaps the most innovative pro-democracy amendment campaign this year is happening in Montana, where activists want to strike a major blow in the fight against corporate donations and dark money in the political process.

Read more

Thanks to everyone who tuned into our interview last night; you can watch the whole thing above or read about it and watch clips below. It’s the latest in our series featuring progressive activists and down ballot lawmakers running in tough primaries, aiming to remake the Democratic Party and Congress altogether.

In exciting news, Denver activist and soon-to-be Congresswoman Melat Kiros will be joining us again on July 21st for a discussion about her triumphant campaign, how she pulled it off, and where she goes from here. Watch our first conversation, from back in April.

Note: Think of Progress Report as the news before you read the news, bringing you conversations with up-and-coming candidates, behind the scenes with activists running critical campaigns, and perspectives you don’t hear on cable news. It’s a one-man publication and a second full-time job, so if you value this work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for just $2.50 a month — it’s the only way I can keep the work going.

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The shift left could be shifting west.

Longtime activist and organizer Kai Newkirk is challenging former Phoenix mayor and four-term incumbent Rep. Greg Stanton in Arizona’s fourth Congressional district, betting that the grassroots uprising against corporate-friendly, right-leaning Democrats can flourish in the desert, too.

After major wins for progressives and democratic socialists in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Denver, the next big opportunity — and the only primary in July — has presented itself in the suburbs of Phoenix. Newkirk is a peace activist who has worked for years on immigrant issues and pivoted to become an early voice against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. His campaign video was produced by the same team that made NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign spots, and he’s working with the campaign manager who led democratic socialist Chris Rabb to victory in a Philadelphia Congressional primary in May.

Stanton, meanwhile, has voted in recent years to support the right-wing Laken Riley Act and has unceasingly supported Israel, even speaking out against President Joe Biden when he sough to temporarily block the sale of 2000-pound bombs used to devastate Palestinian cities. AIPAC is his single-biggest campaign contributor.

A supporter of Medicare for All and opponent of big data centers, Newkirk is generating enough heat that Think Big, the PAC funded by pro-AI group Anthropic and Marc Andreesen, just dropped $227K on ads intended to stymy his campaign.

Word of those ads first reached the internet just before Progress Report’s interview with Newkirk last night, but I was focused on another piece of breaking news: the AZ Young Democrats issued a statement Thursday evening rescinding their endorsement of Newkirk due to rumors of “concerning patterns of behaviors,” without offering any specifics or hints.

The Arizona Republic reported today that there still have been no specific or substantiated allegations made against Newkirk, only vague insinuations; much of the noise seems to be based on an essay about his time organizing in his native West Virginia, which said he’d had consensual relationships with other organizers. One of the authors of that essay has since renounced it and endorsed Newkirk, which the campaign pointed out on social media.

As a reporter, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask Newkirk about it. So early in our interview, I put it to him point blank, which you can watch below:

The left is obviously skittish right now after the controversy in Maine with Graham Platner, but it’s important to note that these situations, as of now, are nothing alike. The campaign alleges that the Stanton camp is playing dirty, dredging up old rumors.

Newkirk has been an activist for the better part of 25 years, going back to the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. He is running an uphill campaign, and the allegations makes the challenge steeper, but 11 days out from the election deadline, internal polls have him tied with Greg Stanton while the big spend from the AI super PAC indicates that there is real concern that this will be the next big upset.

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Tonight we’re going to talk about — you guessed it — Graham Platner.

And on another Democratic primary note, on Thursday evening we’ll be live with Kai Newkirk, the dynamic activist who is challenging Rep. Greg Stanton in Arizona. Keep an eye out for the invite.

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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Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner was accused of sexual assault on Monday by a former girlfriend, the latest in a long line of scandals that seems almost certain to result in his ouster as the Democratic nominee. It’s really only a matter of time — the Maine Democratic Party chair released a video tonight promising an “open, inclusive, transparent, and fair” process for replacing Platner and revealing that his campaign has been trying to shape the process of selecting a new nominee.

What comes next should be easy: Platner needs to drop out of this race. He lied to Mainers time and again, which negates any mandate or claim to represent the wishes of Democratic primary voters. There should be no equivocating, no trying to name his successor, no leverage plays.

That being said, establishment Democratic leaders cannot simply say “told ya so,” do some gloating, and then push some empty suit or corporate stooge when the party picks its nominee later this month. Because despite what all the angry centrist trolls in my Twitter mentions have been screaming for the last 24 hours (welcome to my world), this calamity is not simply a matter of terrible and flimsy vetting and eager leftists investing their hope in a very troubled candidate, though both of those things were of course factors.

Instead, as I wrote exactly one month ago, the Platner phenomenon was a symptom of a bigger problem, one that won’t disappear when the candidate exits stage left:

Graham Platner’s ascendancy is as much a condemnation of a sclerotic national establishment as it is affirmation of his talents. To put it simply, nobody outside of local seafood aficionados would know Graham Platner’s name if Chuck Schumer and the DSCC hadn’t cleared the field for a 78-year-old centrist governor who’s been in public office since the 1980s and didn’t ever seem all that interested in going to Washington.

In the most turbulent and dangerous times of our lives, they went with business as usual. Mainers responded by giving Platner a 64-26% lead in April.

Is Platner that compelling? He’s a decent speaker with a compelling background, but he’s no rock star or Barack Obama, and it’s safe to say that he would probably not be drawing massive crowds at raucous rallies if there were some other candidate who was willing to speak truth to power, channel populist outrage, and promise to work on behalf of working people.

If Democrats had welcomed a competitive primary and backed a half-decent elected official with a pulse, Graham Platner probably never would have been recruited by outsiders, much less become the presumptive nominee for Senate.

About a week ago, a report in NOTUS about Chuck Schumer’s heavy involvement in candidate recruitment essentially confirmed the most important element of this thesis: the DSCC wanted Gov. Janet Mills as its nominee from the start and warned off other younger, progressive, and presumably less problematic potential candidates, using the specter of a massive fundraising and institutional disadvantage to prevent them from running.

There were some denials from Schumer’s camp in the story, but it was really a matter of semantics, as the DSCC acknowledging that it had “made clear from the start that it would back Mills’ potential candidacy.”

A few other candidates did declare for the race, but with the thumb on the scale for Mills and Platner gaining steam — he was the one who did not heed the DSCC’s warning and jumped in before the governor — there was just no oxygen for a third contender. Considering how poorly Mills campaigned and how little money she raised, it’s very feasible that without the DSCC staying neutral could have made it a three-way race.

Instead, they wound up with a charismatic sociopath, a selfish and violent man, a black mark on the party and a black eye for people who thought better was possible.

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That voters flocked to Platner was indicative of the desperate thirst for populism, for something new and uncensored, for somebody who understands the financial and existential struggles that they face and won’t respond to them with platitudes and expiring tax credits. Graham Platner wasn’t just a tatted up ex-Marine oysterman and his appeal wasn’t just aesthetic: he stood against outrageous wealth inequality, backed Medicare for All, and had no problem calling what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide. He was walking, talking proof that “electability” was no longer code for moderate, milquetoast, and poll-tested, and that people who never pay attention to politics can be activated by an authentic, inspiring leader.

People thought they could believe in Graham Platner, which, along with the fact that the guy seemingly hurt a lot of women, is the larger tragedy here. He was a legitimate populist phenomenon; people who had never before engaged in the political process packed his town halls in the most rural parts of Maine, waited hours to meet him, volunteered for a movement that looked poised to realign the state.

But the people who recruited Graham Platner were so eager for something and something new that they failed to vet him, ignored all the red flags, foisted him on the public, promised that he was the real deal, took their time and money and belief. And in exchange, all voters got was disappointment and more reason to be cynical, with the easy takeaway being that anyone who offers them the hope of something better is full of shit. Worse, this sloppy and disastrous operation sends the message that regular people can’t run for office, that working people aren’t to be trusted and should just leave governing to the “professionals” and forget about even being involved.

We need more oyster farmers — people who work with their hands, who make money off labor and not investment income — in Congress. This feels like a setback on that front.

It should be a lesson for the left, too, because even avowed socialists are prone to searching for a savior and worshipping a hero. It’s easy to start making excuses for people, to rationalize their flaws, to say maybe this time, it’s other people who are lying and that our guy is the victim even in absurd circumstances. For what it’s worth, I was never fully sold on Platner, even if I did — and still do — believe that we need candidates who break the mold and the death grip that the party establishment as on the nominating process. Here’s what I wrote way back in October, when the Nazi tattoo story first broke:

Let’s be objective: Platner is a history buff who apparently liked taking his shirt off at big parties. Is it really possible that he went nearly two decades without either stumbling across the image of the SS Totenkopf or having someone tap him on the shoulder and politely inform him that he had the insignia of the Nazi concentration camp guards above his right nipple?

Criticizing Israel’s government and genocide has opened the left to deeply cynical and unfair accusations of antisemitism, but it’s going to be that much harder to combat them if activists stick with a guy who had a giant Nazi tattoo for nearly 20 years. This isn’t to say that Platner is actually a Nazi or that he’s lying about his political convictions, but the bar for a political candidate has to be higher than broad ideological agreement, especially when it comes to this particular subject.

If Platner can prove that he really didn’t know the significance of his tattoo up until this month, I’m happy to retract my skepticism, but if we’re going to call out conservatives for believing Trump’s lies because they love tax cuts and ICE raids, we should think twice about buying such a far-fetched story.

Our democracy, with its individual candidates in a first past the post system, almost demands cult of personality around politicians, which invests them with far too much power. Graham Platner was the avatar of this movement, but it does not belong to him. Whoever gets the nomination after him should be somebody who can galvanize, not simply satisfice in a year where real change is in the air.

The process should be as democratic as possible, with no maneuvering by party insiders to promote one candidate over another. Platner didn’t work out, but his voters should not be punished. They showed faith and a rare desire to involve themselves in politics, so the only way for Democrats to make anything positive out of this mess is by honoring the message they sent.

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How was your July 4th weekend? It felt strange to celebrate the country at this moment in time, but I always see it as a way to honor the people who have given everything to bring the US closer to the lofty ideals it espouses. That and an excuse to eat hot dogs and stand on my roof to watch amateur fireworks explode over Harlem, the Bronx, and Queens.

Tonight is a delight for me personally, because we’re covering two of my favorite things: soccer (it’s political, don’t worry) and ballot initiatives.

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It’s not very often that my obsession with soccer intersects with this newsletter, but the news today that Donald Trump pressured FIFA into allowing US striker Folarin Balogun to play in Monday’s match despite the red card he received last week is a perfect encapsulation of his idiotic, short-sighted reign.

In isolation, Balogun’s availability is a boon to the US on the pitch, as he’s emerged as the team’s best forward and leads the squad with three goals in the tournament. But the way he became eligible also creates a huge distraction that threatens to overshadow what should be the biggest match in US Men’s history. It’s a no-win situation, even in the event of a win.

Let’s game it out: If Balogun plays and the US defeats Belgium, one of Europe’s best sides, to advance to the quarterfinals, it would be the most iconic victory in USMNT history — and forever tainted by its association with Trump’s blatant corruption.

And in the extremely unlikely event that US coach Mauricio Pochettino leaves Balogun out of the lineup in the interest of fairness, well, he’s going to draw the ire of both Trump supporters and many liberal American soccer fans, a decision that would probably cost him his job if the US loses.

Given America’s belligerence, you may not think that it’s a big deal if the US’s greatest victory is tainted in the eyes of the rest of the world. But here’s why it matters: lifting the trophy has never been the primary American goal of this World Cup; instead, it’s been a decade-in-the-making endeavor to integrate American soccer with the rest of the world and enrich a growing domestic league.

Things were going well, too, with all the nasty politics, worries about ICE at stadiums, and sky-high ticket prices fading into the background during what’s been an incredible tournament. But Trump, the US’s biggest liability with the rest of the world, just had to insert himself.

Maybe some other president’s involvement would be okay, if they were a respected figure who made a passionate public case and built international support for a reversal based on fairness and mutual respect. But instead, Trump went about it like a mob boss demanding a favor from a corrupt public official, reminding the world of the gross lead-up to the tournament, everything they hate about this country, and the absurd corruption that continues to blemish FIFA.

Like America’s CEOs, FIFA president Gianni Infantino has fallen over himself to flatter Trump, including handing him the organization’s inaugural “peace prize” weeks before the president attacked Venezuela and Iran. The soccer federation also rents an office in Trump Tower that it barely uses. The Balogun decision is another tribute to Trump, and it’s already triggered international outrage.

Belgium’s coach likened it April Fool’s Day. The Belgian football federation has called for an investigation. And UEFA, the governing body of European football, plans to echo that demand. Triggering Europeans probably delights Trump’s base, but this entire tournament has been focused on finally establishing the United States as a true soccer nation, and as much as that requires Americans to love the sport, it also mandates the rest of the world respecting the American game.

MLS is bringing in more European stars than ever, and the league is changing its entire structure to align its season with the continent’s various domestic leagues, all in hopes of appealing to the same fans who are now livid at FIFA’s decision. Instead of grudgingly respecting to the US team, Trump has given the world every reason to root against them and root instead for Belgium, which now has to throw days of preparation out the window.

Even Alexi Lalas, the Trump-supporting former USMNT star turned oft-criticized broadcaster, and a guy never known for his self-awareness, recognized the problem this creates.

"I will say this: It is now USA vs. the world after this decision," Lalas said during Fox’s pregame broadcast tonight, "because any support or a treaty or benefit of the doubt kind of just went out the window with this. Because we will be seen after this, and we're already starting to see, some of this as being given special treatment right now.”

Lalas wasn’t too worried about the international scorn, but he’s a myopic former player who is widely hated by the rest of the world. Trump, so eager to win and take credit for it, may have just sealed that fate for the national soccer program, wasting a full decade of hard work and graft by countless others.

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The Headline: Ballot Box Blitz: Direct Democracy Fights Escalate Ahead of November

The Lede: Citizens groups across the country hit July signature deadlines this week in some of the year’s highest-stakes ballot fights, even as courts remain the real gatekeepers on several of them.

The Details:

Arkansas: It was good week for democracy in Arkansas. A federal judge ruled that most of the state’s new ballot petition-restriction laws — photo-ID and residency requirements for canvassers among them — are unconstitutional, a win for organizers even as the state appeals to the Eighth Circuit.

Separately, the coalition Protect AR Rights submitted over 108,000 signatures for a constitutional amendment that would make the citizen-initiative process itself a protected right, require notice before rejecting signatures, and cap the legislature’s ability to override citizen-passed laws. They need 90,704 valid signatures to qualify.

There was one hitch, unfortunately: For AR Kids — spot the naming trend? — fell short of the number of signatures it needed to collect to qualify its school voucher reform initiative. Arkansas has one of the biggest and messiest school voucher program, with no accountability for the schools that take public money. This initiative would have required “identical academic standards and identical standards for accreditation including assessments of students and schools based on such standards” for private and charter schools, which fail students fare more often than public schools.

Arizona: In much better education reform news, Save Our Schools Arizona and the state’s teacher’s union together submitted more than 420,000 signatures for the “Protect Education Act,” which would put significant restrictions on the state’s school voucher program, which has become a billion dollar slush fund for rich families. I’ve reported on the voucher scam in Arizona before, and last week, one of my colleagues at More Perfect Union delivered this report on what’s happening there:

In an ideal world, the activists and teachers behind this campaign would be able to fully eradicate the program, but this is a good start: the initiative would create a $150,000 income cap and a requirement that leftover voucher funds return to the state’s general fund. A rival school-choice group, the DeVos-funded American Federation for Children, has already vowed to challenge the signatures in court. With 150,000 more signatures than necessary, good luck to them.

Idaho: Organizers with a group called Idahoans United for Women and Families turned in nearly 110,000 signatures to qualify a measure ending Idaho’s near-total abortion ban for the November ballot, a proposal that would legalize abortion until fetal viability or in medical emergencies.

Idaho, despite being as dark red as it gets, has seen a number of progressive ballot initiatives pass in recent years, including the landmark 2018 campaign that expanded Medicaid. Unfortunately, the conservative legislature just implemented strict work requirements and reimbursement reductions that will hinder the program, so their threats are not hollow.

Nebraska: The coalition Respect Nebraska Voters submitted more than 186,500 signatures for a constitutional amendment that would raise the threshold for lawmakers to alter voter-passed laws from a 2/3rds vote to 4/5ths.

Sponsors say it’s needed because state legislators have repeatedly moved in 2025 and 2026 to weaken or unwind voter-approved measures like minimum wage increases, paid sick leave, payday-lending caps, and medical marijuana legalization. The rollback minimum wage increase was especially egregious because it was a Democratic-aligned lawmaker who pushed the bill, which lowers the bar for paying teenagers, in service of her family’s supermarket chain.

Maine: Something to look forward to: A coalition called Health Care For All Maine relaunched its campaign for a ballot initiative that would direct lawmakers to finally produce and implement a single payer healthcare system for every resident by 2028. It’s purposely light on specifics, leaving the particulars to lawmakers and experts (probably the best choice with something as complicated as a single payer healthcare system).

Volunteers collected over 20,000 signatures at primary polling sites toward the roughly 67,700 needed for the 2027 ballot.

And in more immediate news, the state Supreme Court heard arguments over whether an anti-trans high school sports referendum can qualify for November after election officials invalidated over 12,000 signatures and left the campaign about 500 signatures short. The disqualification came as something of a surprise, as Secretary of State Shenna Bellows originally said that they would not be tossing the issue off the ballot, but allegations of fraud made it impossible to avoid taking action.

Washington: Conservative activists submitted more than half a million signatures to qualify a ballot initiative that would repeal the state’s new millionaire tax, but passing is going to be a very different story.

Washington has long gone without a state income tax, the result of a conservative state Supreme Court decision nearly a century ago. It took years and years of effort, but progressives were finally able to pass a 9.9% tax on incomes above a million dollars this year, a stunning reversal that reflected the state’s faltering finances and the lack of money coming from the federal government.

One of the state’s richest men, Brian Heywood, finances most of the conservative ballot initiative campaigns in Washington through his group Let’s Go Washington. It is the primary sponsor of the wealth tax repeal, which has a big mountain to climb if it’s going to pass: polling from Democratic firm GBAO shows the repeal losing by 19 points, 38% to 57%. Numbers like these, via The Guardian, help explain why a state that frequently rejected income taxes is now firmly in favor of the wealth tax:

According to the Economic Opportunity Institute, a Seattle-based non-profit, the bottom 20% of state households pay 13.8% of their income in state and local taxes, the middle 20% pay 10.9%, and the wealthiest 1% pay just 4.1%.

The tax doesn’t go into effect until 2028, and it’s hard to see it losing this year given the populist anger and blue wave incoming.

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It was a historic week at the Supreme Court, as the conservative justices took a wrecking ball to some segments of society and (barely) spared a few of Americans’ most basic constitutional rights.

The court handed down eight decisions, some of which invented new standards to bully trans kids, gave the president carte blanche to fire regulators, and unleashed a torrent of dark money on our elections. They also Donald Trump several significant and embarrassing losses, though even those decisions come with intrigue and indications of future trouble.

I’m no lawyer, so to really understand these decisions, their implications, and the broader question of how the hell we are going to get out of this situation, I spoke with , a former senior counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee and the co-founder of Court Accountability and True North Research. She’s also a cohost of and author of Without Precedent, a book that chronicles Chief Justice John Roberts’s rise and how he has quietly defiled and rewritten the constitution again and again during his two decades at the Supreme Court.

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Our conversation touched on all of those decisions and much more beyond; you can watch the whole thing above or excerpts below.

First up, I asked Graves about the court’s decision in NRSC v. Federal Election Commission, which repealed what thin veneer of campaign finance limitations remained. The decision removes the limits on the amount of money that political parties can spend in coordination with a candidate, opening the door for even more billionaire influence on elections. Graves explained the ins and outs of what it means and how it works:

Soon after, we moved on to another decision, where the court upheld birthright citizenship. It was certainly good news, but not unequivocally so, as four justices — one short of a majority! — were willing to accept a manufactured right-wing “theory” claiming that the 14th amendment does not mean what everyone has unanimously accepted it means for the past 150 years.

I wanted to understand how the hell we got to this point and whether these justices — who all attended the best law schools in the country and presumably have closely studied the constitution — were just being cynical opportunists or actually somehow believe the stupidest interpretation of tha amendment possible.

I spent much of the Biden administration campaigning for Senate Democrats to seriously investigate the blatant corruption on the court, particularly the clear bribes taken by many of the right-wing justices. Graves played a large role in breaking those stories with ProPublica

Judiciary Committee chair Dick Durbin did everything he could to avoid taking meaningful action, and over the past few years, I’ve theorized that the lack of consequences — or even a real investigation into the millions of dollars in gifts, trips, and financial help provided to the justices — emboldened them to author even more extreme rulings. Obviously, I asked Graves what she tought about that:

OK, let’s end on a hopeful note. Here, we talk about how we can stop the bleeding and reverse the damage being done to American democracy, civil rights, and human rights all across the world. The easy answer is Supreme Court reform, but what does that mean, exactly?

For Graves, it’s an expansive to-do list, and to give you a bit of hope going into this holiday weekend, she thinks it’s closer than it might seem.

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It’s election night — again — and I’m happy to report that a candidate you probably first heard about here at Progress Report is headed to Congress. More below!

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Another week, another earthquake upset in a Democratic primary.

Several, in fact.

Progressive Attorney General Phil Weiser defeated Sen. Michael Bennet in a hard-fought but not particularly close gubernatorial primary, putting him in position to succeed centrist libertarian Democratic Gov. Jared Polis. Bennet was seen as the favorite in this race, so much so that every other Democrat stepped aside when he announced his candidacy. Weiser decided not to defer and hit Bennet for a perceived softness on the Trump administration, including his votes to confirm several of the president’s cabinet nominees.

“For too many people, the Democratic Party doesn't show up, listen and fight for you. The view across Colorado, particularly rural communities, working class communities is I don't see you maybe other than election time. For me, this has been a challenge since I started running for office. I've gone to every single county in Colorado, all 64 counties, and I've gone there again and again,” Weiser said in a debate with Bennet earlier this month.

Disappointment in the party also shaped its marquee Congressional race.

Melat Kiros ousted 15-term incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in resounding fashion on Tuesday night, completing a once-unlikely upset against a lawmaker who first entered Congress months before the 29-year-old was born. A political newcomer, Kiros becomes the latest democratic socialist to unseat a long-time centrist incumbent in a primary season that shaped by the anger of Democratic voters.

Kiros worked as a lawyer in New York for several years before being fired for writing an op-ed in support of student protests against the genocide in Gaza. After returning to Colorado, where she grew up after her emigrating with her parents from Ethiopia when she was a baby, Kiros threw herself into politics, working for local campaigns. Dissatisfied with DeGette and eager to see her replace, Kiros launched her own campaign in the summer of 2025; the grassroots effort, backed by DSA and Justice Democrats, picked up momentum over the winter (Progress Report hosted her for a live stream in April) and was boosted late in the campaign by an endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders.

I spent most of the weekend working on a piece about her campaign for More Perfect Union, which you can watch below:

American support for Israel’s government has been one of several animating issues in her campaign, which has otherwise focused heavily on affordability, economic populism, and immigrant rights. A democratic socialist, Kiros is a vocal supporter of Medicare for All, universal childcare, and social housing, issues that she says DeGette has been reluctant to support or pursue.

“I have a lot of respect for the work [DeGette] has done on reproductive justice and environmental justice, but that work hasn't really been done in the last decade,” Kiros told us late last week. “And in that time she's also taken millions of dollars from big Pharma, big energy and oil, from defense contractors, and special interests like AIPAC. Denver is a city that voted for publicly financed elections, for term limits, for universal pre-K. So we deserve to have representatives that are fighting for that on the federal level.”

DeGette benefited from millions of dollars in late Super PAC spending from a bevy of special interests, including $2 million from AIPAC and Big Tech. More than $1.3 million was spent last week on ads that attacked Kiros as “divisive” and making misleading statements about her residency. Money poorly spent.

You can watch my longform interview with Kiros from April below:

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It seems like every few months, we’re treated to another cycle of pitiful tantrums thrown by establishment centrists angry over the left’s habit of participating in politics and government. This past week’s romp by progressives and leftists in New York’s Democratic primary elections has triggered a particularly bitter chorus from the corporate class, including sulking tweet threads, whiny appearances on cable news, anonymous complaints to Axios, and statements from newly formed astroturf groups that we’ll never hear from again — all the pissy, insular tactics that put them in this position in the first place.

The complaints all amount to some version of “this is our party, stop competing against us” and “the left is going to take down the Democrats and cost us elections.” The latter is particularly rich coming from the same people who have spent the last 16 years losing elections to the biggest bozos alive and making the Democratic Party less popular than Gonorrhea, failings that should render any opinion they have irrelevant.

Before NJ Rep. Josh Gottheimer insists that democratic socialists aren’t actually Democrats, he should recall that he got leveled in the state’s gubernatorial primary last year, finishing a distant fourth, so his understanding of what a majority of the party wants isn’t exactly authoritative or even coherent.

Ditto Jaime Harrison, the former DNC chair, who complained that people critical of Democratic leaders were running in the party’s primaries. Harrison oversaw one of the most disastrous four-year tenures in modern party history, culminating in a second loss to Donald Trump, so if anybody should have zero say over the mechanisms of the party, it’s him.

But instead of easy insults, I’d actually like to extend some advice to the bereaved centrists in the party: if you’re so concerned about the left winning so many primaries, they should try harder to win them!

They have far more money, more institutional support, more allies in the media (see below), and generally more name recognition, but they continuously blow it on lame old candidates and cautious, corporate-approved platforms designed to appeal to theoretical voters but nobody with an actual pulse. Janet Mills in Maine, Haley Stevens in Michigan, Adriano Espaillat in New York, Diana DeGette in Colorado (see the section below)?

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Nobody is mandating that they get behind tired voids of charisma who are bereft of political imagination and run campaigns stuffed to the gills with corporate PAC money; supporting incumbents until the end of time and recruiting bizarre, passionless functionaries is a choice, and yelling at voters for not backing them sends a very different message than intended. If these Democrats are so concerned about winning elections, they should try to do it themselves.

However, I’m not actually sure that these bitter centrist establishment Democrats actually care all that much about winning, because the only way to explain their behavior is that it’s pure sabotage. Trashing the left is meant to be a self-fulfilling prophesy, as they know that the media relishes this in-fighting and will turn it into the main event.

There’s nothing that DC reporters and editors savor more than concern-trolling the left and red-baiting. You’ll never see the political media asking whether nominating ultra-reactionary homophobes, Nazis, and Islamophobes in red districts will hurt Republicans in the general election. But that part’s baked in and not all that interesting to me; complaining about that double standard is just pissing in the wind.

The Headline: The next Democratic primary upset?

The Lede: A series of heated primary races will reach the finish line on Tuesday in Colorado, where long-time incumbents and establishment Democrats face challenges from the left in a number of top races.

The Details: After Zohran Mamdani’s democratic socialist endorsees swept through Congressional and legislative primaries in New York last week, hype is building for another dynamic young DSA member, Melat Kiros. The attorney and barista — she was fired from her firm for publishing a letter defending student protestors against the Gaza genocide — is running against Rep. Diana DeGette (CO-1), a 30-year incumbent who has been in office since 1997, the year that Kiros was born.

It’s not just hype: Kiros led by five in the most recent public poll, which was conducted for her campaign but not disputed by DeGette’s camp. But the incumbent has spent decades building up a campaign war chest from donations from pharmaceutical companies ($500k since 2010), health insurers, and military contractors; some of them are now trying to save her career with a late flurry of millions of dollars in independent expenditures.

If Kiros’s name sounds familiar to you, it may be because she came on the Progress Report live stream for an interview in April, before all the national attention began. Watch that here:

Elsewhere: Just about every major seat is being contested by progressives: state Sen. Julie Gonzales is challenging US Sen. John Hickenlooper in his re-election bid, Attorney General Phil Weiser is running for governor against Sen. Michael Bennet, and antitrust attorney Davey Seligman is taking on Secretary of State Jena Griswold in the contest to succeed Weiser as AG.

All of these races are a product of national anger among Democrats as well as the shifting politics of Colorado, once a purple state that has advanced from solidly blue to verging on progressive bastion. I’m working on a story about Kiros at More Perfect Union, which will publish on Tuesday.

The Headline: Trump’s voter suppression regime is crumbling

The Lede: Multiple federal judges struck down or blocked several aspects of President Trump’s anti-voter executive orders, dealing a blow to the administration’s attempts to “take over the voting” ahead of the midterm elections.

The Details: We’ll work backwards, starting with a ruling on Thursday by a district court judge in Massachusetts who placed an injunction on the March executive order in which . Earlier in the week, the Postmaster General said that the postal service planned to refuse to send mail ballots to people in states that did not comply with the order. That would be catastrophic, as I explored in this report:

That report also explores how Trump’s executive order requiring proof of citizenship in order to register to vote would impact the electorate; even if you haven’t watched, you probably could guess that it would also be catastrophic. Fortunately, that requirement, part of a March 2025 executive order, was permanently blocked by a federal judge on Wednesday. The judge also blocked the provision of Trump’s order that mandated mail-in ballots be received by election day.

Finally, on Monday, another federal judge blocked the other half of the most recent executive order, which would have created a federal database of citizens against which states would be asked to compare their voter rolls. The government admitted that the database, which would be derived from various social safety net eligibility rosters, would have been flawed and risked disenfranchising voters.

Elsewhere: Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed a bill that would have required voters to provide photo ID to cast their ballot by mail.

"While there may be disagreement whether these are large or small burdens, they are burdens, nonetheless, and when layered upon the existing steps already required to vote absentee and vote by mail, there would certainly be voters discouraged from exercising their right to vote," DeWine said in his veto statement.

State law already requires Ohioans to provide a full driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number in order to obtain a mail-in ballot. The new law would have necessitated that Ohio create a new online portal for the photo ID uploads, an extra expense that made Secretary of State Frank LaRose less than bullish on the bill, too.

The Future: It was good news that the federal judge blocked the aspect of the executive order that required mail-in ballots to arrive by election day, but that may not be the end of the line for that particular attempt to disenfranchise what could be millions of Americans.

The Supreme Court is due to issue a ruling this week in Watson v. RNC, a GOP challenge to a law in 14 states that allow absentee ballots to arrive at some point after election day.

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What a crazy week! And we’ll review the most important headlines — both the ones you’ve heard about and the ones you haven’t — in a paid-subscriber only edition of the newsletter. We’ll be doing that every Sunday going forward, so it’s a great time to upgrade.

Tonight’s newsletter features my conversation with Alejandra Gomez, the executive director of Living United for Change in Arizona. Better known as LUCHA, the organization has since 2010 led the way in pushing back against right-wing fascism in Arizona, initially against Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s reign of terror against the state’s Latino community.

Their work has expanded to touch on a variety of issues, including the fight against data centers, which produced one of the nation’s largest victories: a three-year moratorium on the state’s generous tax breaks for building data centers, signed into the budget by Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs earlier this month.

You can’t overstate the size of this accomplishment: Arizona was the first state to offer tax breaks for data centers in 2013, expanded the incentive in 2016, and has become one of their leading destinations for this behemoths. As I discussed with Gomez, they were able to defeat the Big Tech lobby and pass the moratorium through a Republican-run legislature filled with extremists.

You can watch our conversation above to hear Gomez explain how they organized to pull it off, how the data center blowback points to a sea change in politics and the potential for a new coalition, and how they’re fighting ICE. If you’d rather read the transcript, it’s available for paid subscribers below.

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It was a hell of a night in New York City last night — which is becoming a pretty common refrain. I stayed up late to write about what it all means both here and for the party nationwide, and now I’m scheduling it for you to receive at lunchtime.

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 Headline: Leftist candidates run rampant in Democratic primaries

The Lede: All three of NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s endorsees won their Congressional primaries while candidates backed by Democratic Socialists of America all but swept down ballot races, too. Establishment Democrat-backed candidates struggle elsewhere, as well.

The Details: New York City experienced another political earthquake on Tuesday night, as Congressional incumbents and lawmakers with deep ties to their districts were toppled in Democratic primaries by an energetic and insurgent left.

NYC Comptroller Brad Lander blew out wealthy Rep. Dan Goldman in NY-10; one-term Assemblywoman Claire Valdez bested Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso in NY-7; and anti-war activist Darializa Avila Chevalier shocked powerful Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, in NY-13.

They were joined in the winners’ circle by half a dozen other leftist candidates in state legislative races, most of whom were DSA-backed socialists and all of whom ran on populist promises and dissatisfaction with an out-of-touch Democratic establishment.

Many of the ousted incumbents were backed by deep-pocketed special interest groups, including AIPAC, which poured major resources into the NY-13 race on behalf of Espaillat and historically backed Goldman in NY-10.

Assemblyman Micah Lasher, the one establishment-backed candidate to barely squeak by in their Congressional primary, was assisted by millions from the AI lobby as well as $10 million from former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and campaign appearances from nearly every elected official in Manhattan.

There are a few ways to interpret this landslide, but they all start with the indisputable fact that Mamdani — agree with his policies or not — is a generational political talent who has only grown more powerful and popular since taking office. He poured himself into these elections over the last month, appearing in ads and at countless rallies with his endorsees, bouncing across four boroughs and urging his young coalition to push Valdez and Chevalier in particular over the line (the mayor also backed Lander, but as a popular fixture of Brooklyn politics, he needed little help).

A few other inarguable points:

1. Democratic voters are pissed at an establishment that lost touch with its base

2. The base of the Democratic Party is changing demographically

3. Party leaders, at least as of last night, still don’t really understand either shift

In much of the country, the Democratic primary challenges and upsets have been driven by exhaustion and outrage over growing income inequality and economic predatory, issues that Mamdani leaned heavily into during his groundbreaking run for mayor last year. All three of his endorsees also spoke to those injustices and frustrations — Valdez was a union organizer, and while Lander isn’t a DSA candidate but ran against Goldman, a scion of the Levi’s fortune who has received gobs of money from the crypto industry, among others. But you can also trace this earthquake to the student encampments that went up at Columbia University to protest Israel’s genocide in Gaza back in 2024.

Taking their cues from the party’s entrenched support for Israel and the Biden administration’s refusal to condemn or rein in Benjamin Netanyahu, many Democrats rushed to condemn the students and label them — even the many Jewish protestors — antisemitic. They backed police action and harsh punishment for peaceful protestors, siding with Republicans who used the moment to introduce resolutions policing language and thought. Goldman visited Columbia and repeatedly condemned the student protestors, while Espaillat, whose district includes Columbia, made TV appearances and spoke on the House floor to condemn the students.

What’s so frustrating is that it’s obviously a good instinct to defend Jewish people; as a Jew myself, I know there’s plenty of scary antisemitism in the world. There should be nothing objectionable about telling Jewish students they are not alone, as Espaillat did in April 2024. But the context was everything.

Democrats like Espaillat and Goldman took the AIPAC argument hook, line, and sinker (read my coverage at the time) and turned protests over human rights on a college campus into Kristallnacht, and as the politics of Israel and Gaza have shifted dramatically over the past two years, they became implicitly aligned with Trump’s thuggish tactics against students.

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That includes the kidnapping and ongoing attempts to deport Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian grad student who became a face of the protests. Chevalier, also a grad student at the time, was another one of the protests’ leaders, and she took notice when Espaillat did little to try to help Khalil as he was transferred from prison camp to prison camp across the country. Her run was inspired in no small part by that indifference to injustice, and the larger issue became an animating issue for her campaign, which mixed populism with demands for cutting off material aid to Israel under a “babies not bombs” slogan.

A little over a decade ago, Espaillat was the insurgent reformer candidate, running against Rep. Charlie Rangel, the dean of Harlem politics. He didn’t win his primary challenge, but he eventually displaced Rangel on the strength of changing demographics in the district, which encompasses upper Manhattan and parts of the Bronx. Espaillat is the king of the Dominican political scene in New York, which powered him past the traditional Black political machine in Harlem, which Rangel commanded. After five terms, Epsaillat fell to yet another shift in demographics, as the cost of living has driven a mass gentrification of Harlem and Washington Heights.

Much of the last week of the race was animated by Espaillat’s surrogates spreading rumors that Chevalier, who is Dominican, is instead of Haitian heritage, an attempt to rile up his base. And Espaillat wound up winning the Bronx neighborhoods handily, but the district mostly consists of Manhattan, which Chevalier won by more than 5,000 votes. The district’s Manhattan neighborhoods have wealthier, whiter residents than ever before, which fueled accusations that the challenger was a product of transplant gentrifiers and, in the hours since Chevalier’s victory, created questions about this new left’s potential alienation of working class ethnic communities, once the core of the Democratic base.

Well, amplified those questions, really; this is an ongoing debate, driven by the younger, whiter, more middle class base of groups like DSA and Justice Democrats and the frequency with which their candidates — who are often people of color — run against longtime fixtures of minority community politics.

Similarly, in NY-7, Claire Valdez, the UAW organizer and Assemblywoman, dominated in particular in the Queens portions of the district, with Astoria and other more gentrified neighborhoods. Antonio Reynoso, once a rising star who had the support of the trailblazing retiring Rep. Nydia Velazquez, and won both the Black and lower income vote:

Mamdani was seen as the avatar of this movement last year, and it’s unquestionable that his early base in the Commie Corridor of Brooklyn and Queens. But Mamdani also wound up winning Latino and Black voters in the end, despite Andrew Cuomo’s long-held dominance with those communities. I can’t speak to the inner thoughts of any other voters, much less Black and Latino voters, but the results over the past few years suggest that there is without question a divide — within Democratic circles, where longtime pros are outrage, as well as among voters — but that they can also be bridged with good governance.

Democratic leaders should look in the mirror, as should pundits who suggest that voters are pearl-clutchers looking for orderly transitions of power within the party and institutions. Espaillat and his allies tried to make a big deal of the fact that Chevalier tweeted “Fuck Kamala Harris” back in 2024, and they carpet-bombed the district with flyers quoting the since-deleted tweet, but voters did not seem to care. I’m not saying that would have been in the case in every district — it probably wouldn’t have helped a candidate in NY-12, for example — but there is a complete disconnect with regard to what people are demanding and what they care about, even after Trump won a second term.

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There will be warnings that Democrats can’t lean too much into this lefty socialist stuff, that other parts of the country won’t opt for candidates that are so stridently pro-Palestine and happy to withhold their support for the Democratic presidential nominee. That’s undoubtedly true, but it misses the point. This is less about ideology than the staid establishment that allowed voters to get this angry, inviting one humiliation after another. Voters clearly want authenticity, change, and urgency, and until Democrats do more about it than sling slogans about affordability and go on MS NOW, upsets like this will continue

The Trend: New York got all the headlines, but it was not the only place where these sort of upsets happened. There were two massive grassroots victories in Maryland, including progressive newcomer Amar Mukunda’s triumph over long-serving state Senate Majority Leader Nancy King. I’ll be covering that one more in depth in the weeks to come, but it’s notable that it happened in Montgomery County, not Baltimore, giving the uprising a bit of a suburban element.

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It’s Election Day here in New York — again — and I find myself in the center of the storm. Here’s what that looks like.

Also, I’ll write about it more later, but a judge today blocked Donald Trump’s plan to allow states to use a deeply flawed federal database to purge and disenfranchise voters, a key component of his recent executive order.

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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Over the past few months, my three-year-old son has gotten hardcore into kaiju and tokusatsu cinema, delving ever deeper into the more than half a century of Japanese monster suit movies and TV shows. I’ve got all the Godzilla blu-rays dubbed in English, but some stuff is only available in Japanese, including the Ultraman TV app, which is all-Nihongo — except for the ads.

At some point, the pitter-patter of indecipherable conversation becomes background noise, so it took a few seconds for it to really register when I heard Mayor Zohran Mamdani and a confident Nuyorican voice hype up “Darializa for Congress.”

Now that the Knicks have finished their magical playoff run, Democratic primaries have a monopoly on New York’s TV and streaming ad slots, mailboxes, and street corners. Ubiquity is putting it mildly, and though being inundated by political ads is hardly unique to NYC, the cost of buying time and space in this media market means that incomparable sums are being spent on the noise and detritus that have become ubiquitous.

These last few weeks have seen PACs pour tens of millions of dollars into four Congressional primaries. And as much as I’d like to ignore them, it’s a close examination of the paid media — and who is paying for it — that’s been most informative indicator of who’s worth supporting.

Enemies of my enemies, allies of my allies

Admittedly, that doesn’t necessarily apply most to the race that’s become forever connected to Tsuburaya Productions‘ most iconic property. That race, for NY-13, encompasses parts of upper Manhattan and the Bronx, and features Darializa Avila Chevalier’s spirited challenge to sitting Rep. Adriano Espaillat, the powerful chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.

Still, it’s worth discussing because of what it represents here in New York. It’s a full circle moment for Espaillat; once the political outsider with the audacity to challenge Harlem icon Rep. Charlie Rangel, Espaillat, the 71-year-old incumbent is now the avatar of the establishment, enraged that he’s being pushed by a 32-year-old leftist newcomer who has the support of the mayor. She’s backed by Mamdani and the Democratic Socialists of America, who are banking on significant demographic shifts to usher in generational change.

Chevalier is an avowed critic of Israel who has spent much of her career focused on the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, which helps explain the fine print on the attack ads against her; many of them have been financed by a front group for AIPAC, which has long been on of Espaillat’s most enthusiastic patrons. He’s hardly the most conservative Democrat, but there is a real ideological gulf between the two candidates, one much more pronounced than the race that has rendered my mailbox all but unusable since mid-May.

I live right along the border between NY-13 and NY-12, the district immediately to the south. Geo-targeting on the internet is rough enough that I see endless ads from both races online, but my exact address has kept the mailer deluge to the NY-12 race, which consists of most of Manhattan and is frankly one of the most vexing contests I’ve ever witnessed.

There’s no real viable leftist candidate here — I did work for Cameron Kasky, who sought that lane before dropping out this winter — and the frontrunners are all pretty ideologically similar. You won’t find many conflicting beliefs between the two front runners, Assemblymen Alex Bores, who represents the Upper East Side, and Micah Lasher, who was sent to Albany by people on the other side of Central Park. For what it’s worth, they both seem like smart and decent guys.

If not clones, their issue pages at least share DNA: both Bores and Lasher, at least while competing in a Democratic primary in a super-blue district, say they support Medicare for All, want to abolish ICE, stand with labor unions, will always back LGBTQ+ New Yorkers, have plans to rein in inflation and jumpstart new housing, and hold really every other good liberal position you can think of. They also both have taken half a step back from the absolute support of Israel that you’d expect from Jewish uptown Democrats, crafting careful rebukes of the genocide of Palestinians while maintaining preference for a two-state solution. But neither have gone as far to condemn it as the man they are trying to trying to replace, Rep. Jerry Nadler, either.

And if there isn’t much daylight between what the two lawmakers believe, you have to then look at their enemies and allies, and that is where the contrast really emerges.

There have been a few ads in this race that really stick out to me. Bores has been the target of a nasty character assassination campaign, packed with digs about his career and insinuations about his personal conduct. It has been relentless and ubiquitous, and you can get a feel for the vibe and extensiveness of the effort from the cover wrap of this local free newspaper.

Pretty explicit for a print ad in a newspaper mostly read by seniors, but take a look at the disclosure at the bottom and you’ll understand why: this thing was paid for by Think Big PAC, an arm of Leading the Future, a dark money group fueled by a founder of Open AI and other titans of Big Tech, including the Trump supporters at Andreessen Horowitz.

The group has dropped over $8 million against Bores because he had the audacity to sponsor some very basic and unremarkable AI regulations. This issue has utterly dominated the race locally and attention nationally, and you can tell the direction of travel by the fact that these ads have mostly accused Bores, a computer engineer before becoming a legislator, of being a tool of Big Tech and too soft on AI and firms like Palantir, where he once worked.

Bores has sought to use the attacks themselves as proof of his anti-establishment streak and progressive credentials, backed by just as much money from a Super PAC funded by Anthropic and tech founder Chris Larsen. Those two tend to come down on the side of stronger oversight of AI, and it’s really this fight — again, sponsoring a modest regulation bill that Kathy Hochul weakened — that has most earned Bores the support of most of the progressive organizations (like Our Revolution), much of organized labor, and left-leaning lawmakers.

Lasher has presented himself as a tough nerd, a gentle mensch and legislator with a nasty technocratic left hook, who has taken on Trump from Albany. It’s an interesting duality; he boasts of his legal acumen and wonkiness while simultaneously trying to project a sort of rumbler persona, with an expertise honed by working for the most establishment Democrats. As a recent mailer details, he went to Minneapolis during the ICE occupation in January, which apparently licensed him to send mailers with featuring Renee Good and Alex Pretti, promising to avenge their deaths.

If I sound cynical, it’s more likely a product of exhaustion than anything else. Pro-Lasher (and anti-Bores) commercials have been playing on a loop, flyers and mailers are piling up across the district and on my dining table (I try to read them and there is a significant backlog). The campaign’s closing ad features Hochul, his former boss, and other local establishment Democrats repeating the line “Get me Micah Lasher” like he’s some kind of PI in a ‘70s detective film. Another former boss and top patron, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, has also been front and center: Bloomberg has publicly disclosed giving $10 million to get Lasher elected.

Those ads and endorsements had a big impact, at least on me: in a year in which Democratic voters are demanding radical change, a break with old and out of touch leaders, and a turn away from an oligarch-dominated society, such a stark contrast in the allies and enemies of these two candidates made the decision relatively easy: I’ll be voting for Alex Bores.

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I’ve got a very deep dive on policy tonight, the first in what will hopefully be a substantial series looking at the necessary solutions to our most urgent problems. So let’s get into it!

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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With Donald Trump’s failures piling up and poll numbers sinking to record lows, the battle for the Democratic Party’s ideological future has taken on new urgency.

It’s happening on parallel tracks: as upstart progressive populists and established moderates compete in ultra-expensive and frequently nasty midterm primaries, there is a more civil but no less high-stakes conversation happening between the party’s ideologically disparate policy factories. There’s broad agreement that the party needs fresh ideas and new directions; the question is whether those will entail mostly rhetorical and technocratic tweaks or involve tectonic shifts in purpose and policy.

When I opened The Good Life Agenda, the significant new proposal from Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank in New York, I expected to find a long list of policies in the realm of what you might hear from Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders (and in some cases, already have). That was only further encouraged by the early declaration that “we need a policy toolbox that can overcome what decades of deregulation and trickle-down economics have done to our markets and our lives.”

And yes, the 60+ pages of the agenda do include a substantial number of policies — corporate regulation enforcement, a national infrastructure bank for housing, universal childcare, portable retirement benefits, breaking up vertically integrated medical monopolies, wealth taxes among them — but not in the hyper-specific, white paper, legislative language-ready form that can preoccupy wonks and ideologues alike. Instead, the report takes a more holistic view, seeking to reframe the mission of the Democratic Party’s domestic agenda around new political directions and economic realities.

“I think fundamentally we worry that the political ecosystem will miss the depth and level of change that people are looking for and the level of anti-institutionalism that people are feeling in this moment,” Elizabeth Wilkins, the president and CEO of Roosevelt Forward, told me this week. “We wanted to be able to demonstrate how do you respond to this ‘affordability moment’ in a way that will reshape government to be capable of redistributing power in the economy. That’s a little bit different than ‘here’s the five-point plan that some candidate should put out there.’”

The report is framed as a response to the populist anger that is coursing through the American public, including their broad distrust of both political parties and institutions. Instead of prescribing just how much to twist a knob to restore the country to a pre-Trump “normalcy,” it envisions a top-down shift in priorities and how they are delivered.

The Good Life is an aspirational title, with an overarching goal of delivering to every American the building blocks to pursue a rewarding existence, including free time and means to enjoy it. Broadly, the report seeks to address four overarching issues: trust, costs, income, and time. And The Good Life emphasizes five key tools: public options, taxes, industrial policy, monetary policy, and countervailing power.

Wilkins, who heads up both the Roosevelt Institute and Roosevelt Forward, previously worked as the chief of staff and director of policy and planning at Lina Khan’s FTC; before that, she was a senior advisor at the Biden White House. Working for the department most aggressive and innovative in reclaiming and asserting power in the previous administration gave Wilkins a unique perspective on what worked, where previous generations of policymakers fell short, and what must come next.

Below are excerpts of our conversation, attached to different elements of the agenda, exploring the depths of the societal and political change that Democrats must pursue in the years to come. This is the first part in what will be a series about the policy debates that will shape the Democratic Party, its agenda, and the future of American democracy.

A fundamental restructuring

During the Biden administration, experts and observers would often so extensively debate the specifics of a proposal that the broader purpose would almost seems beside the point. The Good Life eschews specific numbers for a focus on power and agency: who has it, who needs it, and how do we restructure society to achieve those fundamental outcomes.

One quote in particular, from a Roosevelt Institute fellow, stood out to me, because it underlined the fact that every decision should have a broader purpose, not simply to balance a spreadsheet or achieve arbitrary macroeconomic goals: “Congress should prioritize instituting a minimum tax on ultra-wealthy that reduces the outside's power to shape the rules of our economy in their favor in ways that undermine America's working middle class.”

I asked Wilkins about making policy with deeper structural outcomes and how Democrats need to think about ideas going forward. Here’s what she said:

I led the team [at the Biden FTC] that initiated our rule-making to ban non-compete clauses. And the discourse had changed enormously because there had been new economic research; people were really trying to question what are these things good for? But there was still a real instinct towards technocracy.

And It’s not that there isn’t earnestness in those efforts to help people. There really is a massive forest for the trees kind of orientation. If we remember that the ultimate goal is to really radically change people’s life possibilities, given where they are now, you have to do policy from the beginning with an eye towards how does it shift power.

It was, “Guys, if we don’t do a big, clear thing like banning them, we’re just succumbing to the same unequal bargaining power that employers and employees are always subject to.” Complexity goes to the power holder. If we think about it in a line-drawing technocratic sort of way, we will miss the fact that actually that plays into the hands of people who want to keep the status quo. We have to think much bigger.

We need to have a baseline of values and what are we doing this for, especially in economic policy where we’re going from an era of focusing on aggregate GDP, number of aggregate jobs, blah blah blah, which we know is totally missing the mark on how people are actually feeling and what people want for themselves.

How do you reframe the project around truly delivering for people? And not just in terms of some kind of technocratic exercise about “the poverty line is here and we want to move people above that” or whatever it is, but actually, what people are demanding is an end to the feeling of coercion and a support for their feeling of agency.

Public options

When you hear the term “public option,” you most likely think about the vague promise Democrats have made to allow people to buy into Medicare instead of carrying private health insurance. But that’s just one small example of a much more extensive approach to building societal infrastructure and providing services.

The Roosevelt agenda recommends all manner of low-cost, publicly available institutions and services, including:

• Universal healthcare,

• More federally qualified health centers

• Universal childcare (free or a nominal charge of $10/day),

• Public financing of affordable housing with a national construction financing fund

• Public asset managers and portable benefits

• A nationally funded public university and technical school system.

The overriding principle is about not relying solely on the private market, refusing to outsource all essentials to profiteers, and moving in the opposite direction of the submerged state, which makes people forget that government is involved in the first place.

This quote from The Good Life lays it out:

“The narrow, indirect tools policymakers have relied on since the ’70s have proven they’re not up to the job. Funneling subsidies to consumers through the tax code hasn’t maintained an adequate housing supply. Awarding incentives to private companies to deliver what should be public goods has empowered corporations but failed to make medical care affordable.”

Democrats have spent the past year or so raging against the GOP’s decision to allow ACA tax credits expire, a cruel abandonment of millions of Americans — and something that was ultimately inevitable when healthcare becomes a line item in a budget. The Good Life doesn’t make a choice between a public healthcare option or Medicare for All, but instead looks at what it would mean for government to deliver the services instead of just financing.

For so long, Democrats have centered their ideas on tax credits, and so I asked what inspired the pivot away in this agenda.

I think Democrats who are interested in social policy have been interested in tax credits for a long time for a particular reason, which was that it was a place where you could hide good social policy and kind of get it through as a sort of sausage-making kind of way. But the thing that we totally missed was it also hid from real human beings anything that the government was doing for them. Tax credits don’t build power for people. They aren’t visible. They don’t create agency.

And they also don’t create a constituency of people who are dedicated to keeping it because they understand what it is and they want it. Social Security, people love, they interact — well until the last year and a half — they interact with the Social Security Administration, it works pretty well, they get something important out of it.

Yes, that’s a money transfer but it’s also a power-building mechanism to create a constituency that has argued for and maintained the biggest piece of our social safety net for almost 100 years. Because it’s a visible, tangible way in which the government is working for you in the way that you want it to, in a way that tax credits or corporate subsidies or all these other submerged state ideas that are very that can be very corporate-forward just don’t do.

The submerged state refers to indirect policies — tax credits, building incentives, privatized contractors delivering benefits — and how they obscure the role of government in people’s lives. It’s the reason why there wasn’t all that much outrage over the ACA subsidies’ axing until people began to see the new costs on the ACA markets or from their existing insurers. It’s critical for people to understand what the public sector delivers to rebuild faith and trust in government.

We connected over one growing public benefit: universal 3K and pre-K in NYC (me) and Washington DC (Wilkins).

My kid was in daycare and it turned out that the daycare turned into free pre-K-3 and pre-K-4. When he went to pre-K-4 and I was asking, ‘Wait, I don’t have to pay for child care anymore?” it was the best day. I had never felt so good about the DC government in my life. The DMV does not make me happy. Free pre-K-4, it made me extraordinarily happy. It was a huge relief. And it really felt like somebody was on my side. The government saw me, it saw my problems. It was there to make my life easier. It was a hugely positive experience.

Ending the macroeconomic disconnect

The agenda does not read like a direct response to the Biden administration’s successes or failures, but does suggest a desire to go farther, push harder, and learn from the shortcomings of a presidency often caught between progressive instincts and corporate influence over the party, especially in Congress.

There is a focus on making policy that reflects the reality of people’s lived experiences, which today often differ from what the traditional economic indicators would suggest. That brought to mind the administration’s attempt to brand “Bidenomics” as a positive thing, given the remarkable job recovery numbers in the aftermath of Covid, as well as the Kamala Harris campaign’s efforts to run on an economy that did not match voter perceptions.

So I asked Wilkins, who had a front row seat, whether she had thought about that dynamic in hindsight and how it may have influenced this vision for the future:

I think we did some extraordinary things in the Biden administration. We were governing through an extraordinarily tumultuous and uncertain time for people. And that tumult and uncertainty was coming on top of people feeling like the sands had been shifting underneath them for a very long time. The instinct to say, “But look, GDP is growing or we’re adding jobs or in the aggregate the economy is doing well” really missed this point that there was a growing disconnect for a very long time between whatever we thought of as aggregate growth and a huge swath of people’s actual experience of the economy. And also, I suspect, a larger sense of the loss of agency and control, increase of anxiety and uncertainty.

I think we got a lot of things right in terms of policy in the Biden administration. We should have gone faster. I wish we had been more prepared because it turned out that the policy window and opportunity was huge.

We can fix those things. But I think [we have] to be relentlessly focused on not the fear of taking a risk and something going wrong, but the fear of the risk of under-delivery, the risk of not showing people that government is in a fighting stance for them and is going to use all of its tools to their benefit, visibly in a way that makes them feel like they have more agency in their lives, then I think we will repeat the same mistakes.

A new poll from Gallup underscores the slipping sense of optimism for the future: only 46% of respondents said that they think everyone in the country had the opportunity to achieve the “American Dream,” compared to 51% who did not think that was possible.

A life worth living

Economic analysis has been wide of the mark because it focuses on top-level indicators that are no longer applicable to most people, who have to scratch and claw and work their tails off to achieve anywhere near the security that was once seen as a birthright of Americans. The chart below attaches dismal numbers to this phenomenon; essentially, Americans now work far more for far less than they had in the past.

The Good Life agenda’s name derives not from any threshold of material wealth that qualifies as a good life, but for the far more human ideal of having enough time and resources to enjoy friends, family, and whatever financial or material gains they do achieve. If making rent and paying for groceries were the overarching goals, the anger that has seized this country wouldn’t be nearly as intense.

Here’s how the plan puts it: “Our agenda for affordable essentials establishes the foundation we need to have agency in our lives. We should be able to live near the people we love, not struggling to secure an apartment a hefty commute away, at rents that leave little left for saving. We should have more time to consider what makes our place feel most like home, rather than whether we can afford to heat it.”

A few years ago, I wrote an essay that essentially said that Americans hate being made the asshole, or being fooled and taken advantage of. Wilkins described it to me as “removing coercion” from people’s lives:

If you actually gave time back to people, how could you support the flourishing of other civic institutions which may or may not be the sites of power, but are the sites of people feeling connected and having a different kind of collective potential in their lives? If everything is politics and everything is interest politics, we need people power to be able to confront corporate power. But there is something just about what does it mean to love, to live a meaningful human life? And our economic policy should not forget that that’s ultimately the goal here: remove all that coercion and create all this enabling so that people can actually flourish and be happy, they have the tools to build that kind of life for themselves.

Things like the four-day work week and fair scheduling and stuff that puts rules around how you can exploit labor such that we actually take time back for workers and working people. And that we just say, “no, you cannot extract money from people and you also cannot extract their time.”

Then, our hope is that’s the kind of thing that then creates the space for us to come together again. If we’re just all little capitalist grains in the machine working however many hours, when are we ever going to be human and create those human connections?

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Countervailing power

Coming together is both a means and an end. In addition to ending the atomization that has so poisoned politics, it provides an opportunity to rebuild public institutions and what the agenda refers to as countervailing power.

The coercion that Wilkins describes is a product of economic scarcity, which is itself the product of an imbalance of power between corporations and working and middle class Americans. In every overarching issue that the agenda seeks to address, the plan includes ways for the public to hold power to account and rebalance the scales. From unions and sectoral bargaining to tenants unions and beyond, the agenda argues for federal policies that foster mass membership organizations as a way to empower citizens.

The mass surveillance and free spaces are especially important and represent a total shift from Trump administration policies, which have cracked down on organizing and created a chill on speech.

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I’m working on the first story in what will be a series on policy and reshaping the Democratic Party agenda leading up to 2028 election. It’ll be ready later this week, so tonight I want to share a few other projects. Tomorrow, I’ll be back with a news round-up. June will be pretty prolific, so if you have $5, buying a paid subscription would mean the world and help me keep doing this work.

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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When I started this newsletter back in 2017, my goal was to use journalism to spotlight and assist progressive down ballot candidates across the country. Over the past few years, that has evolved into opportunities to work more closely with candidates and lawmakers, both on policy and campaigns.

I’m pretty picky and only really work with people I admire, who in one way or another feel like insurgents fighting to displace the tired old political establishment and reorient government toward progressive populism. Over the past couple months, a few candidates have fit the bill, and I’m excited to introduce them and the videos we did together.

First up is former New York Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou, who is running for state Senate. In a more just world, she’d actually be mounting another Congressional re-election campaign in NY-10, but former Rep. Mondaire Jones’ selfish decision to run there despite living several hours away from the lower Manhattan and northern Brooklyn district wound up splitting the progressive vote three ways, allowing Rep. Dan Goldman to sneak in by two points.

That messy primary took place back in 2022. After a brief interlude from government to give birth and spend time with her daughter, Niou is back running for an open seat in Albany, and once again in a heated primary. This time she faces Assemblywoman Grace Lee, who won the seat that Niou vacated to run for higher office. They’ve already dueled once, when Lee unsuccessfully challenged her in 2020, but Lee is now the de facto establishment candidate, with endorsements from most officeholders in the local Manhattan political machine.

I think this actually suits Yuh-Line just fine, as she’s never really toed the company line. She came into office as a reformer and was one of the first lawmakers to call for Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s resignation over his fatal mishandling of the nursing home patients and subsequent coverup during the COVID pandemic. Her constituent services were vital during that time, as she helped to feed the working class neighborhoods in the Lower East Side and Chinatown during the most dire months.

Unlike Lee, a wealthy technocrat, Yuh-Line is a big ideas progressive who wants to pass the single payer New York Health Act and has the endorsement of both the Working Families Party and Bernie Sanders. It took all day to shoot her video, mostly because she was stopped by someone — an old constituent, a colleague, a friend, whoever — almost every other block. She also wanted to pet as many dogs as possible, not for any political reason, but simply because she loves dogs.

There’s no polling that I’ve seen, but Yuh-Line is probably a slight underdog, just due to the establishment backing Lee. But she has a phenomenal field game and volunteer base, and as we saw during last year’s mayoral election, that goes a long way in NYC.

Donate to Yuh-Line Niou!

We also got the chance to work with Christian Urrutia, a first-time candidate running for Congress in New Hampshire. I’d never heard of him before a friend mentioned his campaign this spring, and it didn’t take much convincing for me to get psyched about it.

There are some people who just seem born to do this, and to be honest, I tend to recoil at the idea of a polished natural with a great resume. And this guy is undeniable on paper: he’s the son of immigrants, an accomplished lawyer, Army National Guard officer, and former senior Pentagon official. But most important — and this is what convinced me — is that he seems himself as an agent of change and is running as an outsider against a political dynasty.

Running in the crowded NH-1 Democratic primary, Christian’s two biggest opponents are products of nepotism and PAC money. Stefany Shaheen is the daughter of Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and has the milquetoast politics to prove it, while Maura Sullivan, a veteran, has benefitted greatly from AIPAC’s largesse and been reluctant to call Israel’s operations in Gaza a genocide.

Shaheen is probably the frontrunner, given her name recognition, but Christian has been aggressive and has the backing of New Hampshire’s progressives. His campaign has released a comprehensive platform called A Fair Shake for All and he’s been explicit about how simply making vague promises to stand up to Trump isn’t enough in this moment.

We didn’t put together your typical campaign video for Christian. Instead, we told a story that makes clear the lengths he’ll go to achieve justice and accountability. You can watch the piece above, but briefly, he led the way in finally bringing justice for the Pinochet regime’s murder of beloved revolutionary folk singer Victor Jara. That may not mean much to you — I honestly didn’t know much about the guy myself — but it’s actually quite remarkable.

Donate to Christian Urrutia!

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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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If you missed it, the New York Knicks are the NBA champions. I wrote about experiencing the city’s spiritual rapture last night.

One dream at a time, so tonight it’s back to the business of trying to save American democracy. I’ll also have an important new policy story 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.

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

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It’s been seen on banners and posters, star-spangled streamers and decals, an accidental gravestone: America 1776-2026.

As people prepare to celebrate the 250th anniversary of American democracy, they are inadvertently commemorating its death, which would be funny if it weren’t bleakly appropriate. Or, at risk of becoming so.

These past few weeks were illustrative of that fact, while also offering some hope that irreversible disaster can be averted.

This past few weeks were particularly chaotic with regard to Trump’s most recent voting-related executive order, the federal commandeering of elections that he signed at the end of March.

As a refresher, Trump ordered each state to submit a list of voters to the US Postal Service and instructed the Department of Homeland Security to construct a state-by-state list of “eligible” voters based on shoddy and very incomplete federal databases like the SAVE system. That database is used to verify whether immigrants are eligible for Medicaid and other benefits and is by nature out of date, missing years’ worth of newly enshrined citizens.

The order was purposely vague, but the idea was that DHS would check the lists submitted by states to USPS against its own lists, and the postal service would only send mail ballots to people who made it through that flawed system.

The order would be catastrophic and unequivocally illegal, disenfranchising untold numbers of eligible voters and making it very difficult for many more to cast their ballots. If it’s helpful, I wrote, reported, and produced this piece explaining the how and why:

We released that video in mid-May, and already, the situation has shifted several times over. Let’s review.

1. Earlier this month, the USPS submitted a proposed rule that would cut off mail voting for everyone in states that did not provide voter lists to the federal government. This is the latest attempt to extort states into surrendering their confidential voter data; the Justice Department has sued over half a dozen (mostly Democratic states) over their failure to hand over voting rolls, an effort that has only yielded embarrassing smackdowns from federal judges. On the other hand, it was revealed last week that ICE has been directly haranguing local governments for voter lists, and obtained them in Webb County in Texas and Forsyth County in North Carolina.

2. Undeterred by those losses, the Department of Homeland Security submitted a memo that detailed how it would work with USPS to “integrate” their lists and monitor for “election fraud.” It also said it would give states access to a portal with “citizenship-related data” from various other departments, presumably to inspire voter purges.

3. But last week, DHS walked that back a bit, saying that it had only begun “preliminary conversations” with USPS about integrating their systems and would only follow through should the postal service get approval for its plan to limit mail ballots.

This was less a surrender than a tactical feint. A federal judge ruled late last month that because the administration had not yet implemented Trump’s executive order, and thus had not actually caused any harm, he could not issue an injunction. DHS’s explicitly announcing that it was set to collaborate with another federal agency to implement the order could have amounted to crossing a dumb, arbitrary line that should have never been drawn in the first place, triggering an injunction.

Imagine somebody announcing their intention to punch you in the face, cocking their fist back, and a cop saying they couldn’t do anything until actual damage was done. (Okay, maybe not the best example in this country, depending on what you and your assailant look like, but you get the point.)

Fortunately, late last week, an appeals court agreed to expedite the plaintiffs’ appeal of that decision, with final briefs due in early July. Another federal judge is also weighing a challenge, this one from Democratic states. Time is of the essence.

Not that the administration will let that discourage it from federalizing elections and suppressing the vote. In the latest entry into the DOJ’s campaign of intimidation and law-fare against progressive organizations, the FBI last week raided the offices of Ohio Organizing Collaborative, a pro-democracy group in the Buckeye State.

The raid, paired with intense questioning of employees and volunteers at the progressive organization, was said to be related to an investigation into so-called voter registration fraud, a thin pretext that organizers weren’t buying.

"The OOC is not going to stop its work," a board member, Prentiss Haney, told the Columbus Dispatch. "If anything, it's going to continue to build upon this work and make sure that our faith leaders and our community leaders and working class folks know that we're going to stand with them and not let them be intimidated by forces who want to use political forces to stop them from engaging in fair elections."

What’s become clear from all of this is that state governments can either be willing collaborators or key bulwarks against these attacks on democracy, so long-term, the best approach to preserving the republic may well be fortifying majorities and winning new ones at the state legislative level.

It was for this reason, among several others, that I decided to dedicate countless hours to creating FlipSeats.org, a public database of key swing seats in swing states where Democrats could either win new majorities or break GOP supermajorities. Over the past few months, as primaries have taken place and races have sorted themselves, I’ve worked to complete the lists of nominated (or de facto nominated) candidates in key races in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Minnesota, North Carolina, Kansas, and Nebraska.

Over the weekend, I decided to expand the list to three more states that the DLCC says it is targeting for supermajorities: Colorado, Nevada, and Washington. All three have been added to the site, with races and candidates all filled out and ready for perusal.

They don’t get as much attention, but Democrats only have to flip one seat in each chamber — so, one in the House and one in the Senate — in both Nevada and Colorado to win supermajorities. Washington is a bit of a longer shot, but the more seats that Democrats can flip there, the more likely it is that they’ll be able to move forward with a redistricting plan for 2028. The same goes for Nevada, where supermajorities would allow Democrats to override a veto from GOP Gov. Joe Lombardo should he win re-election.

Check it out, find a candidate to support, and help fortify democracy: FlipSeats.org.

Wait, Before You Leave!

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:

• Premium member-only newsletters with original reporting

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First, I’m plugging away at a big update to our state legislative election site, expanding it to include details on critical races in the states mentioned in a mostly vague, redistricting-focused DLCC memo. The list and site are almost done, but I’d rather not send a rushed or incomplete version.

Second, after nearly 24 hours of living off pure adrenaline as a result of the Knicks winning their first NBA title in 53 years, I’m very tired.

I watched the game last night with my brother and some friends in a bar on Bleecker Street, where we showed up four hours early to make sure that we could get in. That probably seems absurd, but it’s a testament to how absolutely bonkers the city has become over this basketball team. Or, really, how bonkers it’s always been.

The bar exploded when OG Anunoby pulled down the final rebound and launched the ball into the air; champagne popped and fizzed, people I’ve never met hugged me, and my brother’s friends congratulated me like I was the longest tenured coach at the end of the bench. I’ve been rooting for the Knicks since I can remember, which until last night has almost entirely resulted in disappointment, frustration, and befuddlement. It was worth it.

As I left the bar to meet up with friends, one guy on the sidewalk, smiling and earnestly concerned on my behalf, told me to cheer up, that I should be smiling and enjoying the moment. I half-wanted to tell him that I just have a natural scowl, but I also was genuinely stunned by the occasion. I didn’t know how to react, wasn’t sure what to do; I hadn’t seen one of my lifelong New York teams win a title since I was a naive 7-year-old, and I could not identify the new emotions that were bubbling up.

So I walked. West to Washington Square Park, where hundreds of New Yorkers crowded around the empty fountain and cheered as people raced around in dizzying circles, screaming and hugging (yes, two guys beat each other with scooters, but I think they were drunk and their friends broke it up).

I watched as revelers sat out on a West Village fire escape, pouring alcohol into the open mouths of strangers.

Stopped dead in my tracks as fireworks burst just a few stories overhead in the middle of 7th avenue.

High-fived with lines of people I did not and will never know, with no idea of where they’re from or who they love or how they lived.

Bemusedly observed visitors from Morocco, Brazil, and Scotland, whose nations played in World Cup games earlier that night, watch in some mix of confusion and delight, joining in the celebrations as New Yorkers treated them like their own.

We made our way up to Madison Square Garden, which was blocked off like a holy site. The last time I’d seen the city like this, with everyone just instinctively rushing toward the same location because you just had to be there, was when people rushed toward Trump Tower to mock the president when he officially lost the 2020 election.

New Yorkers were prepared for Trump this week, too, greeting and humiliating him at MSG with deafening, defiant boos. Last time, he’d been responsible for the medical massacre of our neighbors during the Covid pandemic; this time, he was the man behind the police state kidnappings of longstanding community members and loved ones.

What does booing do? Well, it proves that we won’t acquiesce. And while it can feel silly to celebrate in such grim times, I think we need these moments of unity and unbridled glee now more than ever. We were euphoric because yes, we love our basketball team, but more than that, New Yorkers care about New Yorkers, about the shared struggle and triumphs, and we were now sharing the triumph.

It’s easy to feel cynical and atomized these days, but then a random guy will earnestly tell you to cheer up and celebrate, that life is worth living and the fight can and does pay off. The far-right might try to co-opt sports, hijack culture, and make despair seem inevitable, but they’ll never be able to stamp out the instinct to come together and exorcise misery, no matter how long and hard the struggle has been.

I’ll be back tomorrow with political news and updates.

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The New York Knicks are one win away from winning their first NBA title in 53 years. The vibes are so good that they not only survived, but authored the greatest comeback in history after a disastrous visit from Donald Trump. May we all find inspiration in that.

Thanks to everyone who tuned in for our live stream last night. It was a great conversation; you can watch the whole thing above (it’s occasionally pixelated due to tech error) and read my write up below. I’ve been plugging away at some projects, both brand new and regularly updated, so stay tuned.

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Earlier this week, Katrina Manetta hit an important milestone in her nascent political career: she was targeted by an attack ad for the very first time. And it wasn’t just any attack ad; this maiden hit piece was paid for by Michigan Forward Network, a right-wing dark money PAC funded by the billionaire DeVos family.

It was a bit of a shock at first; as the Democratic nominee in her Macomb County district, she expected attack ads, just not this early, five months before the election. But the person who told her about it also said that she should consider it a positive sign, an indication of how seriously the GOP and its allies were taking her campaign for state House.

As well they should be: Manetta, an organizer and waitress, is running to flip District 58, one of the swingiest in Michigan and a must-win for Democrats as they aim to recapture the legislature. If they retake the trifecta, they’ll be able to begin passing progressive legislation once again, including a voting rights act that would protect against federal incursions and meddling from future GOP leaders.

Manetta wasn’t one of those kids who dreamed of running for office or serving in government, but when she did begin to engage with politics, she had enough scars to make it personal. Terrified by Project 2025 and frustrated by a Democratic Party that blew the 2024 election in Michigan, Manetta began a grassroots organization called Macomb Defenders Rising, which has rapidly grown as local and national outrages intensify. It exists outside the party system, which goes a long way in a community that feels politically left behind.

“We had to start a movement here, we had to start shifting the culture in Macomb County, and that’s exactly what we did,” Manetta says. “We started with five women, basically, that I found at going to another meeting, another organizer’s group. We met at a coffee shop. And then the next week, we had 11 people in my basement. And the week after that, there was 100 people on our list. And now we’re at over 1,500 people a year and a half later.”

That the ad accused her of increasing gas prices — how? Manetta has never held elected office, owned a gas station, or started an international conflict — was an absurd enough claim that she decided to share the ad on social media. Congratulations poured in from supporters, while Manetta focused on using the ad as a point of contrast: while her opponent, GOP Rep. Ron Robinson, benefits from the largesse of the billionaire family that made its fortune with a massive pyramid scheme, she doesn’t take corporate PAC money.

Not that corporate PACs would be lining up to fund her, anyway: Manetta is a committed economic populist, a working class candidate who grew up in Metro Detroit and watched the manufacturing industry fade and autoworkers turn to right-wing voices and politicians who are experts at exploiting that feeling of being left behind. She understands the feeling, too, as a 32-year-old who grew up and remains working class, with a college degree that hasn’t provided much in the way of professional opportunity.

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As is appropriate for a statehouse candidate and local organizer, Manetta is focused on local issues, including the soaring utility rates that are manhandling the budgets of working and middle class Michiganders. The problem, she says, are the monopolies that control the state’s energy supply, who use the vast spoils of that lucrative business to cut checks to politicians who will never oppose them.

Manetta always brings it back to corruption and greed, class and political-economic disenfranchisement. It’s impossible to do otherwise. Again, it’s personal: her sister died of cancer after struggling to hold on to health insurance, which delayed her diagnosis and care; her mom works as a caretaker for a disabled aunt and can barely get by each month; and Manetta has worked for years serving tables, trying to figure out a career in a time and place where opportunity is scarce.

“Now that I’m running for office, I’m like, Wow, I understand why so many older folks run and why so many rich people run, because this takes a lot of time and a lot of effort,’” she says, responding to a question about the lack of working class candidates and Democratic politicians who do things like roll back the long-awaited minimum wage increase. “You start to understand why politics is the way it is, because most of the people that are representing us don’t actually represent us. They represent a class that can actually afford to take off months at a time.”

Manetta wants to change that. She just has to get past a few lying billionaires first.

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Watch my conversation with Katrina Manetta at the top of the newsletter.

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