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.

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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 That database is used to verify whether immigrants are eligible for Medicaid and other benefits and is by nature out of date, missing years’ worth of newly enshrined citizens.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.

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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.

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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Thank you to our latest crowd-funding donors: Carl, Savanna, Valerie, Roberta, David, and Anna!

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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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When I was in the hospital in 2024, waking up from a coma, I hallucinated watching an entire documentary about the New York Knicks’ title teams in the 70s. Right now, the Knicks are two wins away from winning their first championship since those teams in the ‘70s, and the whole run is literally a pinch me moment for me. Not to jinx anything, of course.

Our next candidate live stream will be on Thursday evening. Mark your calendars!

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 a friend texted me earlier this week and asked what I thought of Graham Platner in the wake of a rough few news cycles, I responded that “I definitely don’t plan to hire him as a babysitter.”

While technically true, it was really my semi-glib way of saying that I don’t have to be on board with all of a candidate’s personal decisions — or even like them personally — to root for their political success; there are some moral lines that cannot be crossed, of course, but if horny texts, PTSD, and crude internet comments were disqualifying, the Capitol building would probably be close to empty. As for the tattoo, my trepidation over whether Platner is a secret Nazi is alleviated by the sheer number of Jewish people who are running and supporting his campaign. Plus, I’d rather him in office than the party supported by actual Nazis.

If all the skeletons really have been excavated from his closet, my sense is that in this environment, Platner’s progressive-populist politics, righteous anger, and gruff charisma will be enough to carry him over the line against Susan Collins. Naturally, some centrist Democrats disagree and are freaking out over Platner’s candidacy, to the point that some have asked Gov. Janet Mills to campaign again while several groups have even urged voters to back for her in Tuesday’s primary. Take a step back, however, and it should be clear that they only have themselves to blame.

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 Zohran Mamdani-aligned outsiders, much less become the presumptive nominee for Senate.

Mills had every advantage in the world, from name recognition to money to institutional infrastructure, yet she was almost effortlessly toppled by a tatted up shitposter who was willing to make searing yet obvious critiques of a political and economic system that is a total failure for most Americans. And what’s even more damning is that in a must-win race, leadership tried to clear the field for Mills because they thought she was the most electable. Platner’s ascension is the end result of a party apparatus that has lost the pulse of the people it is supposed to represent, of a desperation for authenticity and urgency instead of buzzwords and managed decline.

While Mills was a uniquely bad candidate and Platner is the only contender to come out of literally nowhere, the disconnect between Democratic Party apparatus and primary voters has been evident all across the country.

It’s happening in Michigan, where the DSCC’s handpicked candidate, Rep. Haley Stevens, has flailed under the spotlight and now trails progressive former health commissioner Abdul El-Sayed, a champion for Medicare for All (he literally wrote the book on it), opponent of the genocide in Gaza, and open critic of business as usual in DC. The knives have come out for El-Sayed in recent weeks while establishments endorsements and outside money have poured in for Stevens, but only one of them is drawing huge crowds to rallies and building a steady lead in the polls.

It’s happening in California, where corporate money and a bot army buoyed Xavier Becerra in the gubernatorial primary and Sacramento city council member Mai Vang (watch our interview with her here) fought off a deluge of dark money to make the general election against octogenarian incumbent Rep. Doris Matsui in CA-7.

It’s even happening in Colorado, where the state endorsement conventions produced massive upsets up and down the ballot.

Sen. John Hickenlooper, who previously served as mayor of Denver and governor of the state before gliding to a Senate seat, now faces a very spirited and credible primary from progressive state Sen. Julie Gonzales, who won top billing at last month’s convention.

Activist and lawyer Melat Kiros (who we interviewed) blew the doors off 30-year incumbent Rep. Dianna DeGette when at the Denver convention, taking the top slot on the CO-1 ballot. And Sen. Michael Bennet, who probably figured he’d cruise to the open governorship, is trying to fight off AG Phil Weiser, who is campaigning from the populist left.

Not all of these candidates will win, but it would be a net positive for Democrats if the party leadership took a serious lesson from the broad anger powering them.

A quick catchup on stories and subjects we’ve been following for the long haul:

Lawmakers in New York took a big first step toward amending the constitution and redrawing the state’s Congressional map. It’ll have to be approved by voters, and should that happen, the Democratic majority would be able to draw at least four more blue seats ahead of the 2028 election.

Illinois became the third state to grant gig drivers (as in Uber and Lyft) the right to unionize while remaining independent contractors. It’s an imperfect solution to a widespread problem, but an improvement over the status quo. Illinois joins California and Massachusetts with these unique statewide union rights.

Meanwhile, Gov. JB Pritzker announced that his administration will freeze tax credits for new data centers as it works to enact a longer suspension. It’s a sign of just how much the public sentiment has shifted on data centers that ambitious lawmakers who once courted and showered money on these projects are now actively working to limit or fully curtail their construction. Pritzker has clear presidential aspirations and this move suggests that running on a platform that includes reining in AI is on his mind.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis is going out with a bang. Commuting election denier Tina Peters’ jail sentence drew significant blowback, but it’s two vetoes that have many on the left up in arms: First, Polis for the second straight year nixed the Worker Protection Act, which would have repealed Colorado’s onerous anti-union law. Then, he vetoed the bill that would have protected consumers from surveillance pricing and workers from AI-driven, privacy-violating wage setting (see above).

Activists in Redwood City, CA officially collected enough signatures to have their rent control initiative placed on the November ballot, an enormous triumph in the face of a deluge of spending from the landlord lobby that only figures to intensify. We spoke with the organizers about the campaign last month:

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There’s a political aphorism that says “personnel is policy. For Tram Nguyen, the policy is personal.

Nguyen, a Massachusetts state representative who is running for an open Congressional seat outside Boston, has had her priorities forged by lived experience. You can link every step of her unlikely journey to one stance or another.

Her deep concern for the state of democracy, including voting rights and reforming a corrupt Supreme Court? Nguyen has seen authoritarianism close up, as her father spent eight years in a Vietnamese prison camp for fighting alongside Americans.

Wanting to abolish ICE and create pathways to citizenship? She’s an immigrant herself, having moved to the US after five years of living in “abject poverty” in Vietnam after her father’s long internment, and she served immigrant communities as a nonprofit lawyer.

Writing bills to strengthen workers’ rights and raise wages? Living in public housing, watching her parents hustle between low wage jobs, and years of providing legal assistance to workers.

“My parents were working two to three jobs, barely making minimum wage, and didn’t have access to benefits like healthcare,” Nguyen told Progress Report. “I know what it’s like to wait for my dad to come home from delivering pizza and Chinese food. I know how they had to stretch every dollar. I know what it’s like to stand in the food pantry line, or see how much they had to worry when they couldn’t make rent.”

On the subject of healthcare, Nguyen’s support for Medicare for All? Her mom, who is on a very low fixed income, just had her health insurance premium jacked up from $4 to $235 per month, among other things. Nguyen covers the monthly payment, but knows that millions of Americans don’t have that kind of personal safety net.

More broadly, Nguyen’s focus on making government function for working people is informed by the fact that it worked for her, taking her from poverty in Vietnam to serving in the Massachusetts state legislature and running for Congress.

“That American dream is so far away for so many people now, and I want to give people the same opportunities that my family and I were able to get,” Nguyen said. “Families should not just survive. They should be able to thrive, and policy should be able to help them get there.“

Policy was at the center of the conversation when Nguyen joined me for a live stream on Tuesday night. We went deep on immigration, regulating artificial intelligence, strengthening workers’ rights, and more. She’a thoughtful about all of these questions, and gets specific, an edge in what is a crowded and tight open primary for a seat that has not been open in decades.

Below is an excerpt from our conversation: watch the whole thing at the top or enjoy the clips throughout the piece.

Progress Report We welcomed immigrants when you came to the US very differently than we do now. Seeing what ICE is doing — how does that hit you, and what have you been able to do about it at the state level?

Tram Nguyen: Talk about ruling by fear — I come from an authoritarian regime. I understand what it’s like when they rule by fear. And this fear that permeates throughout our communities not only impacts immigrants, but everyone around us.

I had a host at a recent meet-and-greet who was in tears. She said her daughter is trans and from China — and she’s a citizen — but she’s afraid to leave the house. And there are so many of these stories of citizens afraid to leave their house without a passport, without documentation. What world are we living in? My family moved from across the world, from Vietnam to here, for democracy and freedom. And I just am in disbelief that this is the situation that we’re in right now.

As someone who’s been thinking about comprehensive immigration reform and why we need to abolish ICE — these issues are things I’m so committed to working on. And I think I’m uniquely positioned to go to Congress to contribute to that conversation. This is not sustainable — this world where people are afraid to go to the hospital, to go to school, to go to work, to get access to basic needs.

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Progress Report: Labor and workers’ rights have been a big focus of your legal career and your time as a legislator. Why was that important to you, and what has Massachusetts been able to do?

Tram Nguyen: This is how I got into politics in the first place. I was working at Greater Boston Legal Services, and as part of that work we did some advocacy work. As a union member — UAW Local 2320, part of Region 9A — I have done a lot of work to expand workers’ rights, but particularly benefits like paid family medical leave. We were at the forefront of the fight to increase the minimum wage to $15, and I’ve been the lead to increase it to $20. And I think that should be national. On Medicare for All, to finally untie healthcare from employment and make sure all members get access to healthcare.

Some of the work we’ve been able to do at the state level is around safety, unionization, and protecting workers’ ability to organize. But also some of our tests here to make sure that people are actually categorized as employees and not independent contractors who don’t get access to benefits like unemployment, workers’ compensation, etc. Those things are very important to me. And right now we don’t have the same tests at the federal level. Workers are being exploited. They don’t have the same security.

For me, immigration and employment are hand-in-hand. When you don’t have comprehensive immigration reform and people are constantly living in fear, many of the low-wage workers being exploited are also immigrants. So many of the protections I’ve been able to work on at the state level are things I want to work on at the federal level. I’m very much in favor of the PRO Act to protect workers and supercharge unions; to really aggressively raise wages across the country for everyone to be able to have a livable wage and be able to buy a house, have healthcare, have basic needs.

Progress Report: Massachusetts passed a ballot initiative allowing Uber and Lyft drivers to unionize while staying independent contractors. What did you think of that?

Tram Nguyen: The right to unionize is very important, and for them to be able to get the protections they need — insurance coverage and so many of the other benefits that come from that. The independent contractor piece is more to give them the flexibility so that they don’t have to work full-time hours. I think it’s a good compromise for where we’re at right now. Of course, I would want them to get more protections — unemployment, workers’ compensation. These discussions are not a one-bite-of-the-apple situation.

I think it is important for them to get the right to unionize so that they can get protections now. And many of them have limited English proficiency — they might not know their rights. Being part of a union would help them better understand their rights. That’s why I’m in support of it. And I think it’s exciting for Massachusetts to lead the way yet again on these issues.

Progress Report: The PRO Act has died before, and we’ve seen Democrats like Abigail Spanberger and Jared Polis block labor measures in their states. If you go to Congress, what can you actually do for workers?

Tram Nguyen: Raising the minimum wage is going to be huge. The sub-minimum wage at the federal level is not sustainable for people. And we need so much reform with the Labor Relations Board. I wouldn’t give up on the PRO Act — if we elect enough people who want to put people first, we’ll be able to give workers the protections they need, and also fight against right-to-work in so many of these states. This is outrageous, because we’re seeing movements picking up in all of these red states too. It’s a scary time. And we’re already seeing a decline in unions anyway.

Massachusetts is one of the states where unions have real organized power, and we’re thrilled to have been able to work with them on so many of these measures. But at the end of the day, it’s really about making sure workers are at the table to tell us what they want. And workers’ rights intersects with everything else. When we’re talking about climate, making sure the conversation on transitions to clean, green energy includes unions and making sure they have union jobs with the training and benefits they need. Or when we’re talking about affordable housing — how do we build it? Also union jobs. All of these issues relate back to workers. How do we make sure they can come home, make the money they need, and actually afford to provide for their families.

Progress Report: You’ll be a freshman going into a caucus where you’ll also have to fight battles within the Democratic Party. How do you think about that?

Tram Nguyen: That’s going to be a huge part of my platform — to not only hold Republicans accountable, but also hold Democrats accountable. One of the first bills I’ll file is to end insider stock trading. That’s both a Democratic and Republican issue. Why are public servants going into public service to benefit themselves and get rich? That is not public service.

I also want to make sure we’re working towards ending Citizens United, making sure we’re taking money out of politics, because elected officials should be responding to people, not special interests. And I’m very concerned about the amount of money being poured into CD6. Why do execs of Palantir or Blackstone want to throw all this money into the district rather than letting the people actually elect who they would want to represent them in Congress?

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It’s almost impossible to narrow down, but if push came to shove and I had to choose just a few qualities I dislike most in politicians, disconnection and entitlement would be right at the top.

These traits are endemic in safe blue districts, found most often among well-heeled, corporate-backed lawmakers. In recent years, a new vintage has emerged: those who barely won their first primaries, have values squarely to the right of their constituents, and tend to coast by unchallenged in subsequent elections. Here in New York, Rep. Dan Goldman (NY-10) is the current standard-bearer for this kind of Democrat, and now that he’s on the verge of being successfully primaried by a progressive more aligned with the district’s median voter, it’s worth taking seriously a challenge against the Massachusetts equivalent, Rep. Jake Auchincloss.

The resume and circumstances are startlingly similar: Auchincloss occupied the center-right lane of a crowded primary election in 2020, squeaked out a fluke victory, and has operated with a sense of impunity ever since, imposing a pro-war and pro-corporate agenda on an urban lefty district. He is a magnet for corporate money, with a massive campaign war chest funded by Big Pharma, AIPAC (over $500K this cycle alone), financial institutions ($55K from Bain Capital, for example), and other beneficiaries of the unsustainable status quo, which he dutifully defends at every turn.

It’s no coincidence that he was the first lawmaker to use ChatGPT to write a speech delivered to Congress; the backlash to AI has not discouraged him from urging further investment in ways that will cause mass unemployment.

As the first chair of Majority Democrats, the new billionaire-funded, centrist PAC and spiritual successor to the Democratic Leadership Conference, Auchincloss is now the avatar of billionaires and the worst strain of neoliberals who drove the party into the ground over the past 30 years. His politics is are meant to assuage the rich and force milquetoast candidates on petrified Democratic voters, employing a “blue no matter who” ethos until it no longer benefits that wing of the party.

Last week for seemingly endorsing Maine Sen. Susan Collins for re-election to a seat that Democrats absolutely have to flip to have any chance of winning the Senate. What’s interesting about his ongoing involvement in the Maine primary is that he has a primary challenger of his own: Jason Poulos, a healthcare engineer and AI expert whose agenda fits the populist moment.

Poulos has spent his career striving to understand the systems that both endanger and protect us, and has applied his computer science background to fighting for human-centered policies and solutions.

As Poulos told me in our chat last week, he was initially driven to join this race by Auchincloss’s unyielding support for Israel and its ongoing genocide in Gaza, but also believes in everything that his representative does not: Medicare for All, AI policy designed to put people first, universal basic income, ending corporate money in politics, and seriously tackling the cost of housing.

No, he does not have much campaign money. And no, he is not a bold-faced name or from a wealthy prominent family, as Auchincloss is. But this is the moment to back grassroots candidates, to send a message to Democrats who believe they can work against their constituents without any consequences, to strive for something better while that is still possible.

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The 40% discount was linked to my 40th birthday today, and since there are still a few hours left in the day, I’m linking to it now (see below) and extending the offer for an extra day.

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Thank you to everyone who tuned in to the live stream tonight with Jason Poulos, the progressive running an upstart primary challenge against conservative DINO Rep. Jake Auchincloss in MA-04. It was a great conversation, focused on Democratic politics, corporate money, and AI policy, and I’ll have the whole video and write-up for everyone else later this weekend.

Tonight we’ll run through headlines and data points on some of the week’s biggest — and most ignored — stories.

Also: My friend Tiffany, who featured in this video report I produced a few years ago about the Medicaid unwinding, was illegally evicted from her home by her slumlord. Her young family (she’s got a two-year-old son) has two days to find $1500 for a deposit on a new apartment. If you can spare any change, please consider helping them with a donation — your assistance means the world.

One more thing: Tomorrow (Saturday, May 30th) is my birthday! And to celebrate, in a promotion that has nothing to do with my age, I’m offering 40% off paid subscriptions to Progress Report for the next day. That’s just $3 a month to help keep this journalism going!

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Democracy: On Thursday, a federal judge refused to block President Trump’s latest attack on voting rights, writing that damages could only be speculative before the administration actually enacted the executive order. But U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols may not have to wait much longer to do the right thing: on Friday, the government said that it would move forward with implementing the order, which calls for the US Postal Service to severely limit who receives mail-in ballots.

In short, Trump wants the Department of Homeland Security to create lists of citizens in every state, which would dictate who the USPS could send a mail-in or absentee ballot. There are two problems: first, the federal government has no right to do this, and second, the database that the administration wants to utilize is deeply flawed and will undoubtedly lead to mass disenfranchisement.

Judge Nichols essentially acknowledged that point, but used what I’ll call the Lloyd Christmas Argument — “so you’re saying there’s a chance…” — to justify allowing the order to move forward.

“While it is conceivable these Lists may have some flaws, at least initially, it is impossible to be sure when the agencies have not yet determined what databases they will use or if they can perfect them ahead of use,” Nichols wrote. “And even if the Lists as initially compiled contain some flaws, that would mark only the first step in an attenuated chain of speculation.”

You can learn more about this potential catastrophe in my latest story for More Perfect Union, a deep dive the right’s relentless attack on voting rights and the Trump administration’s plans to federalize elections

As the video notes, these aforementioned lists would be built on something known as the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, which is used to check on the immigration status of noncitizen immigrants who are applying for public benefits like Medicaid and SNAP. It is deeply flawed, incomplete, and frequently gets things wrong, as it is not a database in and of itself but instead a tool for querying other databases.

Intended as a backup tool for states checking Medicaid eligibility, it is in no way designed for use as a primary resource that determines whether somebody can exercise their most precious political right.

Which is why Trump is so eager to use it for that very purpose. According to a poll that we had conducted last month, 53% of Americans say that restricting mail-in voting would make it harder for them to cast ballots. Further, 37% of Americans said they opposed the policy while 33% say they were in favor.

Judge Nichols does allow for the possibility that the harms will reach the threshold that the order should indeed be blocked — the actual illegality of the thing should really render this moot — but every inch you give this administration, the closer it gets to cheating, stealing, or otherwise scamming Americans out of their rights.

Data Centers: The populist uprising against massive, energy-sucking, water-polluting data centers is forcing even the most pro-AI, corporate-friendly politicians to scramble to rethink their support.

In New Jersey, Gov. Mikie Sherrill proposed serious guardrails for new data center construction, seeking to limit their impact on communities and energy bills while forcing developers to deliver on promised impacts:

“The four-pillar plan proposes that data center developers must ‘pay their own way,’ and bring energy to the grid with them,” according to the New Jersey Globe. In addition, the projects must “be transparent and report energy and water use; engage with communities on concerns involving noise and light pollution; and build facilities with union labor and strong wages.”

Municipal governments have been taking action into their own hands, implementing moratoriums and outright bans on their construction. Last week, it was a ban in Millville, NJ, and just last night, the rural town of Andover voted to stop a data center project.

Even more remarkably is the shift happening in the Midwest, where one-time supporters have begun to backtrack. In Pennsylvania, Gov. Josh Shapiro is seeking to thread the needle between the rising populism and his own default pro-corporate stance.

Just last year, Shapiro announced that Amazon would be spending $20 billion to develop AI campuses in the state, then joined Trump and Sen. Dave McCormick to announce a $90 billion investment in AI, energy, and data centers. This week, he made a high-profile announcement about forcing them to pay their own way.

According to WHYY, Shapiro’s plan stipulates that “developers seeking state support would be required to build, bring online or buy incremental electric capacity at their own expense, and by 2035, ensure up to 32% of its energy comes from resources that include nuclear, hydropower, solar, wind and batteries.”

Shapiro is trying to avoid the boondoggle happening in Ohio, where incentives for data centers overshot estimates last year by more than a billion dollars. The $1.5 billion in corporate welfare spent on these massive projects was so egregious that this week, Gov. Mike DeWine — a guy who has never met a tax incentive he doesn’t like — actually suspended the Ohio sales tax break for new data centers until the state can conduct a “study” into the economic and other impacts of their construction.

That said, DeWine may have another motivation: a grassroots coalition is trying to qualify and then pass a ballot initiative that would ban new data centers in Ohio, and hitting the pause button now could lower the urgency for a populist movement driven by outrage.

Corporate money: On the subject of energy and ballot initiatives, there’s good news out of Michigan, where activists have filed a huge number of signatures in support of banning public utility companies and government contractors from making political contributions.

Voters Not Politicians handed in more than 562,000 signed petitions, over 200K more than necessary to qualify their good government initiative. The grassroots campaign has raised over $2 million, and it will need every cent of it to take on energy companies, health insurers, and other contractors that spend huge money on elections every single cycle.

Texas: A few interesting polls in the Lone Star State, which may prove to be the tipping point in the race for control of the Senate this year.

First, the Hispanic shift toward Donald Trump may not be as durable as Republicans thought, as a new poll found that 20% of Texas Latinos who voted for Trump in 2024 regretted their decision. Trump won 55% of Latino voters in Texas, and the assumption that the GOP had permanently shifted the demographic to the right fueled the gerrymandered map that Republicans hope will give them five new Congressional seats.

Now, they may regret their strategy:

Of the 500 voters surveyed, 300 live across five of the state’s top battleground congressional districts, each of which are Hispanic-majority seats: the 15th and 23rd Districts, which Democrats hope to flip from GOP control, and the Democratic-controlled 28th, 34th and 35th Districts, which Republicans are targeting after redrawing their boundaries to make it easier for a GOP candidate to win.

In those districts, a slight majority of respondents — 54% — said they planned to vote for the Democratic candidate for Congress; 27% said they’d support the Republican, while the rest were undecided, according to the poll.

What’s particularly interesting is that Latino voters are one of the only demographics that give sleazebag Attorney General Ken Paxton the edge against state Rep. James Talarico in a new poll of their Senate race. The Texas Public Opinion Research-conducted poll has Talarico, who Republicans have weakly tried to smear as a trans vegan (not that there would be anything wrong with either thing!), outpacing Paxton 47-44%.

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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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First, the New York Knicks are in the NBA Finals.

Second, Texas Republicans just voted to make one of the nation’s biggest scumbags their Senate nominee, a disturbing development with a big silver lining: Democrats have a legitimate chance of winning a US Senate seat in Texas for the first time in several generations.

Third, tonight we’ll dive into a grassroots campaign that’s setting the pace for what the left can accomplish with real planning and long-term strategic vision.

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, 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.

With my birthday coming up later this week, I have a goal of adding 40 new paid subscribers and for a limited time, I’m offering 40% off the paid subscriptions that keep us afloat — that’s just $3!

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There’s a fascinating experiment in democracy and policy underway in Tacoma, Washington.

Three years ago, a grassroots coalition in Washington’s second-biggest city harnessed growing frustration over exploding housing costs and used a ballot initiative to pass expansive tenant protections that it hoped would keep rent down and evictions to a minimum. They won by overcame vehement opposition from lawmakers and the most expensive campaign in city history, staring down the all-powerful real estate lobby and winning by 300 votes.

The upset was just the beginning; victory proved pyrrhic when the city council decided to essentially ignore the Tenants Bill of Rights duly enacted by voters. That part of the story is sadly not unique in an age of pro-business autocracy, but what happened next is what makes this situation highly unusual.

Instead of ruing a legal loophole that has reduced their law into a suggestion, the organizers behind Tacoma for All got to work on a new initiative that would address the structural weakness, bolster other parts of the law, and force their representatives to work on behalf of working people. The surge in rent costs and evictions over the past three years makes them an even more formidable movement, a new strength that will be key in November as the coalition braces for an onslaught of corporate money designed to smear and discredit their populist agenda.

With ballot initiatives popping up all over the country, on housing and data centers and taxing billionaires and public education among other crucial issues, I spoke with Tyron Moore, one of Tacoma For All’s leading organizers, about the campaign, the struggle to overcome decades of ingrained corporate power, and the ins and outs of winning this next election, and how his movement is building people power to fundamentally change the city and its politics.

This Q&A has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Progress Report: This is an ongoing saga. Walk me through how the 2023 campaign came together.

Ty Moore: This was something immediately out of COVID where there was a profound crisis of evictions. All the eviction protections were being progressively dismantled. Rent had gone up 40% in five years in Tacoma. A bad housing crisis was made worse.

Tacoma for All emerged out of Tacoma DSA’s Housing Justice Committee. Our platform was much more expansive than what we eventually ran as an initiative — it included mass affordable housing, social housing, tenant protections. We built a significant coalition around that.

The city council effectively ignored us, so by the end of 2022, we decided run a portion of that platform as an initiative. We ended up formally calling it the Landlord Fairness Code. We were a ragtag coalition. No institutional backing, no paid staff at the beginning. A lot of folks coming out of DSA and other left circles, and early union support from the grocery workers.

And you faced a lot of opposition as you gained momentum?

The city council called us up in the midst of signature gathering, when it was clear we had the momentum to get on the ballot, and asked for negotiations. They said, “If we pass something at the city level that gets close to what you want, would you consider not turning in signatures?” And we said, yeah, okay, we’re open to that.

We had a series of five real negotiations; multiple city council members, staff, the city attorney, the city manager. In the end, what they offered was far from acceptable. They did come significantly our way on other things like limiting late fees, limiting move-in fees, notices for rent increases, but not enough. So we moved forward.

Then the landlord lobby and real estate interests really came in — they’d been holding back publicly, though clearly organizing and raising money in the background. It ended up being the most expensive election campaign in Tacoma history.

What did the Landlord Fairness Code win in the end?

We won some of the strongest eviction protections in the state. A six-month cold-weather eviction moratorium. A school year eviction moratorium for households with children and educators.

We won relocation assistance, so any rent hikes over 5%, landlords had to pay at least two months’ rent in relocation assistance. If it went up to 10%, it was three months’ rent. Landlords cried foul that this was backdoor rent control.

We won six-month notice for all rent hikes. Limiting late fees to $10 a month on back rent. Limiting move-in fees to no more than one month’s rent and fees, whether that’s a security deposit or other fees.

Then the city just didn’t enforce it.

There was no city enforcement. We built in a strong private right of action, but we did not build in city enforcement, and that was a political decision. We knew it was a problem, but we didn’t want to bite off more than we could chew.

From day one, the city said, “We will not enforce the Landlord Fairness Code.” There’s two sets of tenant protections — there’s something called the Rental Housing Code that the city itself passed, and technically they do enforce that, but there’s only been one fine against one landlord in the last three years since they were supposed to be strengthening enforcement. And then for the Landlord Fairness Code, there’s been zero enforcement.

How is enforcement supposed to work?

There’s a hotline tenants can call. The first priority is to attempt to reach a settlement. They call the landlord up and say, “Hey buddy, looks like you’re violating the law here, what’s your side of the story?” If they decide the landlord probably is violating the law, they’ll pressure them to come into compliance with the threat of a fine. And they say in most cases, those do eventually come into compliance.

But tenants don’t even know this resource exists. And it often takes a very long time. Tenants in the worst slumlord places are subject to retaliation. They get no compensation; so maybe in the end an illegal rent hike gets reversed, but the landlord just hikes the rent anyway on a delayed timeline with proper notification.

We’ve talked to many, many tenants who’ve heard that the city doesn’t do shit, it doesn’t really change anything. And they know as soon as they call, it puts their landlord on notice that they’re a problem. In the worst complexes in the city — the ones our bill was designed to help — calling the city is a real deterrent to tenants.

With no fines, there’s no deterrent to landlords. The worst thing that happens is the landlord gets a lecture and has to come into compliance with this one individual tenant. They’re going to bet that most tenants will never file a complaint.

So what does the new initiative do?

First, when a tenant calls the hotline, their job would not be to attempt to find a settlement. Their job is to investigate. If there’s been a violation, it’s to actually cite the landlord, put it on record that there’s been a violation. And then the city shall issue a fine of no less than $500 and up to five times the harm caused to the tenant. And that fine shall go directly to the tenant.

So it changes the incentive structure. It offers a potential for the tenant to have some justice, especially if there’s been harm caused. And hopefully it will act as a more meaningful deterrent to landlords who systematically violate the law.

How do you ensure they actually enforce the new law, given what happened with the old one?

The honest answer is we have no guarantee at all. They will face political pressure, there’ll be a public mandate, we will name and shame and expose examples. That’s the only mechanism.

If this was just a one-off thing, we might even question whether it’s worth it. But this is about building a movement, building political power. The more the city gets on the wrong side of public opinion, the stronger the momentum toward electing city council members who will actually stand up for tenants. That’s part of the longer-term strategy as well.

The city council also tried to roll back what passed in 2023, right?

They made an attempt to severely roll it back. One council member — a landlord herself and the closest to the landlord lobby — had been threatening to do it for a long time. By law they can’t touch initiatives until two years after its implementation date. She began preparing her rollback well in advance of that, and then scheduled a vote.

We mounted a very concerted effort. The policy she dropped publicly in early October was very different from what actually passed on December 8th. We had hundreds of people coming again and again to public comment, thousands of letters being sent.

In the end, the rollback was actually relatively minor. The biggest thing they achieved was exempting non-profits from the law. Most of the core victories were preserved.

Why does the city council keep fighting things that passed with popular support?

Tacoma’s an interesting place. In the popular understanding of Washington state politics, you might call Tacoma more purple than Seattle by a long shot. But things have been changing. The sweep of national politics is absolutely impacting Tacoma. We rode that wave in 2023. There’s a lot of young people moving here.

But the city council is pretty out of step and does reflect a more conservative, business-friendly orientation. And sometimes we think of politicians as overly calculating, but they just believe what they believe. They’re pro-landlord and pro-market. They believe tenant regulations undermine affordable housing by making it more expensive to build here. So I think they were just ideologically opposed.

The initiative also includes the right to form a tenants union. Is there a big tenants union movement unfolding in Tacoma?

That’s a whole other side of the story. Last year we launched a 501(c)(3) whose main mission is organizing tenant unions. The first strike-ready tenant union went public in December. We now have four more that have gone public, representing six buildings. There’s a supermajority of an entire portfolio of a California-based landlord who owns a bunch of properties in Tacoma — they’re now unionized and fighting to get that landlord to the negotiating table.

The initiative would give that real legal footing. It says landlords must come to the table and bargain in good faith when there’s a majority union. And it gives other protections — just like OSHA standards must be posted prominently in every workplace, if our initiative passes, every laundry room, every entryway, every public space in any building will need prominent posters saying, “You have the right to form a tenant union.”

We are trying to combine an organizing strategy that’s been showing some great successes in the first months, alongside a political strategy to strengthen organizing rights. Most tenants are like: “What the hell’s a tenant union?” Never heard of it. But hopefully through the initiative, we can generate a lot of debate about it and point people to the resources to organize one.

It’s an interesting idea to create a legal structure around tenant’s unions, because generally there’s nothing compelling landlords to bargain.

There’s no equivalent of the NLRB or the equivalent state bodies for tenants. We based ourselves on the model of a 2022 law in San Francisco. Similar laws have passed in a couple of different Bay Area cities. It kind of creates a miniature NLRB where the city gets to issue fines and hold landlords accountable if they do not bargain in good faith.

You try to distinguish between small and large landlords in the legislation, put more onus on the corporate landlords. Has that helped politically?

We tried to give some carve-outs, at least in terms of how the policy is paid for — putting more of the licensing fee burden on big landlords. We don’t exempt small landlords from the same laws. Their tenants have the same exact rights as tenants of big landlords. But in terms of the licensing fee structure to pay for it, we try to put that more on big landlords.

To be real, we’ve gotten a few token small landlords to publicly speak out for this initiative and the previous one. Our attempt to split the petty bourgeois from the big capitalists is pretty limited.

What’s the strategy to win the vote this fall?

Our central strategy is appealing to people’s basic sense of decency. Shouldn’t everyone have to follow the law? Isn’t it wrong that just because you’re a big corporate landlord, you can jerk the law with impunity? That’s not fair. And then to lift up the stories of tenants — these slumlords — to talk about what their experience has been.

If people go to the voting booth thinking, “Should landlords have to follow the law? Do I stand with the tenants whose rights have been clearly violated, who are being forced to endure undignified conditions?” — if that’s the narrative, I think we win easily.

Obviously the opposition is going to try to make the narrative: this is punitive, it’s going to drive small landlords out, it’s too much regulation, we’re going to undermine affordable housing. If those are the questions voters are thinking about most when they go to the ballot, I think we will struggle to win. So it’s a battle of the narrative.

We have our work cut out for us on lifting up tenant stories, and we haven’t done that as well as I’d have liked yet. We have some good videos in the pipeline for social media, and I think we’re going to be able to do that in the fall.

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

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

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Lots to discuss tonight, so just one quick note from me:

My birthday is next Saturday and while I’ve never been big on celebration or commemoration, this year I’m genuinely grateful to be alive. I won’t tell you how old I’m turning, but I am offering 40% off paid subscriptions this week in hopes of adding least 40 new paid subscribers before the big day. I’ve got some big interviews and features coming up and your support allows me to focus more on this work.

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The Battle for Democracy

New Jersey: Spurred by the Supreme Court’s further torching of the federal Voting Rights Act, lawmakers in the Garden State are one step away from finally enacting a state-level law designed to protect fair elections and ballot access. The John R. Lewis Voter Empowerment Act passed a Senate panel for the first time since being proposed in 2022, reflecting the sudden urgency of enacting election protections.

The bill “would expand language access requirements beyond those in federal law, afford state courts broad powers to rewrite discriminatory election rules, and require the state attorney general’s approval for any changes to election procedure,” according to New Jersey Monitor.

Redistricting: After several weeks of Southern Republicans rushing to strip people of color of their hard-earned representation, there were rays of hope for Democrats this week… for the most part, anyway.

To be clear, there will be no more Democratic redistricting this year, putting the party at a significant disadvantage heading into the midterm elections. And it could get just a little bit worse, as Republicans in South Carolina are still considering redrawing their map to eliminate Rep. James Clyburn’s seat. But the state Senate in South Carolina won’t consider that proposal until after the start of in-person early voting, which local outlets suggest could damper the enthusiasm for a last-minute gerrymander.

That’s not simply speculation: the lawmaker steering the gerrymandering bill, state Sen. Larry Grooms (incredible name for a Republican), said on Friday that this coming Wednesday morning represents the “drop-dead date” for getting it to the governor’s desk, and that would require forcing an unchanged bill through a cloture vote that is increasingly uncertain.

“My support doesn’t wane, but I believe that support of other Republicans begins to fade as the day progresses on Tuesday,” Grooms told The State.

If nothing else, it’s almost certain that South Carolina will redraw its maps for 2028, by which time more than half a dozen Democratic-controlled states could join the redistricting party. According to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, at least seven Democratic states could redistrict for the next cycle. That includes Virginia, where Jeffries said lawmakers could revive the voter-approved 10-1 map that the state Supreme Court shot down this month, as well as Maryland, where state Senate Majority Leader Bill Ferguson is finally coming to his senses after standing on ceremony like a wuss and nerd and refusing to draw out Rep. Andy Harris’s seat.

Primaries: As if I weren’t already sold on Sacramento City Council member Mai Vang and her primary challenge to 81-year-old Rep. Doris Matsui (CA-7), she won me over all over again by triggering a whole galaxy of right-wing media outlets with her refusal to participate in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Vang explained why she doesn’t participate in the absurd nationalistic ritual in a Facebook post last year, writing that she loves America but believes the pledge is used to numb people to injustices and silence dissent. That post was recently discovered by conservatives, who are always looking for a new outrage to fill column inches and air time. The California Post, the new sibling to the reprehensible Murdoch tabloid here in New York, published an apoplectic editorial that began by calling for “rational debate and discussion” and ultimately devolved into a rant about Vang’s support for abolishing ICE, belief in Medicare for All, and opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

(You can watch my interview with Vang below:)

The folks at the CA Post are new to California and its politics, but you’d think they’d realize that Vang is running in a primary election from the left in a blue district in a very blue year. Vang has been slamming Matsui for voting to fund ICE and taking gobs of corporate money, while Matsui has countered by pointing out that Vang took donations from small businesses during her city council campaigns.

There is no viable Republican in the race, no matter how much Matsui tries to boost a penniless student technically running on the GOP line. Just what these right-wing outlets get from throwing a fit over Vang is unclear, but if they want to boost progressives in close upcoming primaries, they should feel free to continue doing so.

Polling: With Republicans cranking up the racism dial and shifting what could be up to 14 districts to the right this cycle, Democrats are going to need a significant margin in the midterm elections if they’re going to have any real shot of taking back the House.

According to a new poll from Data for Progress, they’re on the right track, with a +8 generic ballot edge over Republican candidates.

Democrat voters report much more enthusiasm about this fall’s elections, while voters across the board indicate that they trust Democrats more than Republicans on virtually every major issue. Notably, the percentage of voters who list immigration as their top issue has shrunk by more than 50% over the past 17 months, slipping from 15% in January 2025 to just 7% today.

Good policy headlines:

New York State: State Dems move to quickly advance upstate rent control bill

Syracuse, NY: Syracuse lawmakers approve law banning facial recognition tech by businesses

Illinois: ‘Junk fee’ ban heads to Pritzker as Senate OKs bill allowing minors to consent to birth control

HAHAHA: Maine transgender sports referendum poised to fall off the 2026 ballot

Supreme Court reform: Ro Khanna calls for ‘term limits’ and ‘expansion’ of the Supreme Court after voting rights ruling

The Trump administration sought to have half of the nation’s voting machines banned last year, according to a new report by Reuters, falling short only when they could not manufacture a reason that they should be considered national security risks.

While this news is shocking, it is not surprising. White House lawyer Kurt Olsen and underlings wanted to disqualify ballot counters from Dominion Voting Systems, the manufacturer at the center of conspiracy theories around the 2020 election that have been widely debunked yet continue to animate the right’s drive to impose mass voter suppression.

Many of the leading conspiracy theorists from the post-2020 fervor had their work funded by billionaire-financed organizations like Cleta Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network and have since migrated into the administration, as I detail in my extensive new report:

Former AG Merrick Garland’s fecklessness meant that there was little accountability for any of these frauds and charlatans, and in further proof that Democratic leaders have dangerously poor political instincts, one of the only scheming election deniers to suffer any consequences was allowed to walk free this week.

Forget the autopsy that Ken Martin finally published, everything you need to know about why Democrats lose on the biggest stage transpired in two solid blue states this week.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis took some time off from vetoing pro-labor bills and weakening tech regulations to grant clemency to Tina Peters, the MAGA former election clerk who was convicted of allowing unauthorized access to voting machines in 2020. It’s hard to understand why Polis made this decision, other than the fact that the ultra-wealthy libertarian’s heterodox tendencies always seem to benefit the right’s biggest kooks (this is the guy who cheered RFK Jr’s nomination to run the HHS). Part of me hopes that Polis issued the clemency because he’s planning to run for president, as doing so would be tantamount to setting a chunk of his personal fortune on fire.

The reason that decision was so problematic isn’t so much that Peters represents a real threat going forward as the fact that it confers legitimacy on the conspiracy-addled far-right’s attempt to gaslight Americans into believing that the law was weaponized against them by a liberal deep state. That it coincided with the Trump administration’s attempt to create a $1.8 billion slush fund for “victims” of such “persecution” makes it even more damaging; JD Vance has already suggested that Peters could benefit from the taxpayer-funded largesse, should the White House force it into the Senate budget.

At least Polis is on his way out after this year; Virginia Democrats are stuck with Gov. Abigail Spanberger for the next three and a half years. Last week, I wrote a bit of a rant about Spanberger’s unexpected but entirely in-character choice to break her promise and veto a bill that would have granted collective bargaining rights to public worker unions, and my only regret about it is not waiting a week so that it could cover even more outrageous betrayals to the Democratic Party’s base.

Spanberger went on an absolute rampage this week: along with her anti-union veto, Spanberger nixed bills that would have limited state law enforcement’s cooperation with ICE, created a legalized cannabis market, and established a Prescription Drug Affordability Board.

If that weren’t enough, Spanberger then went and told the New York Times that Democrats should stop talking about redistricting to keep up with GOP gerrymandering. As the Times noted, Spanberger watched her own approval ratings slip during the Virginia redistricting amendment campaign, an experience that likely motivated both those comments to the paper and her quick surrender to the state Supreme Court when it tossed out the special election. It’s very likely that the decline in support from more right-leaning voters pushed her to veto the slate of high-profile Democratic bills, given Spanberger’s very centrist political instincts.

What she likely didn’t expect was that those vetoes would draw blistering criticism from the Democratic Party base, inspiring a march on the capitol in Richmond by unions that had backed her election last fall.

For someone who wants to run for president as a Democrat, inspiring union protests and vetoing bills that could lower the cost of prescription drugs is a poor way to build political clout.

Polis, too, is suffering backlash for his outrageous decision to cater to some imagined Republican voter willing to vote for Democrats so long as they don’t believe in anything and break their own promises. In fact, it actually fostered rare unity in a fractured party: both of Colorado’s centrist senators condemned the clemency, progressives called for his impeachment, and the state Democratic Party voted overwhelmingly to censure Polis, a harsh rebuke that is likely the culmination of years of frustration with a guy who has regularly foiled popular priorities.

This, to me, is the silver lining: conservative Democrats are no longer being coddled, no longer being deferred to, no longer being treated like they have some great wisdom. Whether it’s Polis, Spanberger, Ken Martin, or entrenched corporate sell-outs like Matsui, the Democratic base is no longer willing to stay quiet and accept scraps and scolding.

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The first thing you’ll notice about the video interview above and the clips below is that my guest is incredibly pixelated throughout each clip. But in this case, that’s a sign of authenticity: Anna Aho Rink lives in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a massive rural stretch of land bordering Lake Superior, where broadband can be sparse and cell phone reception is often spotty.

Rink is running for the state House, vying for one of 12 seats that was decided by 5% or less in 2024. They need to flip four seats to take back the majority, and perhaps a critical trifecta, pending Senate and gubernatorial elections. That makes this one of the most competitive and pivotal elections in the country this November.

Watch above or read below, and know that the pixelation is the point.

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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In a perfect, fair, or even less barbaric world, Anna Aho Rink would not be running for elected office. It’s the first thing she says about herself: “I am not a politician,” which, yes, is something a politician would say, but it doesn’t take long to realize that she means it.

Ideally, Rink would still be working as a physician’s assistant at the Planned Parenthood in Michigan’s upper peninsula. But the organization was forced to shut down dozens of locations in the spring of 2025 after the Trump administration cut off reimbursements to its women’s health clinics, and the Marquette location was among those forced to close its doors.

Rink had worked as the care provider at the clinic for 17 years, so when she saw her final patient, she knew that she was closing a significant chapter of her life. What Rink couldn’t have known then was that the next chapter was waiting for her as soon as she stepped outside.

“We had some supporters that were going to clap us out of the building — I thought it was going to be maybe 10 or 12 people, but it was well over 100 people and absolutely overwhelming,” Rink told Progress Report this week. “I gave a really quick heartfelt speech. I don’t even remember what I said in between sobs of ‘We’re going to continue to be here for you. The work doesn’t stop here. We’re going to keep fighting, I promise.’ And someone was like, ‘Hey! Have you thought about running for office?’”

The answer, obviously, was absolutely not; “I am not schmoozy. I trip up the stairs most days. I’m not particularly polished,” she admitted. More importantly, as the lone abortion provider in the entire Upper Peninsula, Rink was focused on finding a way to restore access to reproductive care to a rural region where hospitals can be hours away and telehealth is only reliable as shoddy broadband.

“Just in the blink of an eye, everyone in this region was left without that care, without a brick and mortar place to go for the services. And it was devastating,” Rink said. “We shouldn’t have to suffer with the rug being pulled out from underneath us repeatedly and not have the resources that we need to quite literally survive. There was not a backup method. There wasn’t a safety net.”

The priority was clear: Spearheading the founding and funding of a new general health clinic — with hospitals closing, shuttering their delivery units, and going to emergency care only, there was an acute need for the entire spectrum of care. But the idea of running for office stuck with Rink enough that she mentioned it to her husband, who surprised her with his level of enthusiasm.

“He said, ‘All this extra hustling that you do and all the extra support systems that you’re trying to build up for folks, you could help so many more people if you ran for office and just helped to change the laws,’” Rink remembered.

The community came together to stand up the new health care clinic, where Rink tends to a broad range of patients. At the same time, she continued to mull over the whole running for elected office idea; like her husband said, all the work it took to get one clinic off the ground could be exponentially more impactful in government.

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What clinched the idea was discovering that there was nobody else in the GOP-controlled House who could do that work, at least with any expertise. There are no health practitioners in the Michigan legislature, much less anybody with experience in reproductive care. And to top it off, the 109th district, where Rink was born, raised, and raised her kids, is currently represented by an anti-choice, anti-vax TV weatherman who doesn’t even believe in climate change.

The rural district, based around the town of Marquette, had been dominated by Democrats for half a century until it flipped red by just over 3% in 2024. To some, it was only a matter of time, an inevitability given the conservatism of the rest of the Upper Peninsula. In a sense, it was collateral damage for the progressive reforms that Democrats passed with the trifecta they won in 2022; Rink acknowledges that the clean energy requirements passed in Lansing provoked backlash in a region where the infrastructure for it simply doesn’t exist. Attacks on mining, one of the region’s historic industries, didn’t help, either.

But there’s also a dire rural housing crisis, an affordability crisis, and of course a health care crisis for Yoopers to contend with, and Rink is banking on a community-oriented populism to help her flip the district back to blue. Universal health care, banning private equity takeovers of medical practices, supporting union workers — those are progressive policies that resonate with a working class region that often goes ignored in a state where people are concentrated on the other side of a five-mile bridge.

“All of these people are working way too hard to care for folks that we care about in our communities, and we shouldn’t have to work this hard to do it,” Rink said. “It should not be this difficult to provide basic health care to people. People struggle to find housing. People struggle to find child care. People struggle to find good paying jobs. I’m proud of how we come together as a community and I’m proud of our ingenuity and the solutions that we come up with to problems. But we pay taxes too! We shouldn’t have to be working this hard.”

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

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Thank you to everyone who tuned in last night for our stream with Anna Aho Rink, the health care hero who is now running to flip a red seat in the Michigan legislature. It was a really great conversation (because she’s very interesting) and I’ll have a write-up of the whole thing in your inboxes tomorrow.

Tonight, I’m excited to present a project that has been months in the making. This new report, just published at More Perfect Union, exposes the billionaires responsible for Trump’s fascistic voter suppression campaign and the real motivation driving 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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We view voting rights mostly through partisan and racial lenses, and for good reason: disenfranchising racial minorities, whether through gerrymandering or laws designed to limit access to the ballot, are now exclusively used by Republicans to elect more Republicans. They are two sides of the same coin: fewer people people of color voting, more Republicans elected.

Even the Supreme Court acknowledged it, in their own slimy way: one of the reasons why the recent Callais decision was so devastating is that it enabled Republicans to claim that districts drawn explicitly to discriminate against people of color were instead motivated by partisan aims, which the Court has deemed beyond the federal judiciary’s purview. Essentially, you can do a racist gerrymander so long as you say it’s strictly for political gain.

I have no doubt that these lawmakers are broadly racist and don’t care about representation for minorities, but the current GOP is not simply motivated by pure bigotry or lust for the trappings of elected office. As always, there is an economic element to this voter suppression push, and thanks to Citizens United and the scourge of dark money, it’s more prominent than ever.

To put it bluntly: the assault on American elections and voting rights is sponsored by a shadowy network of far-right billionaires. The foreign voter myth, the crusade against mail-in voting — it’s all part of a careful, choreographed, richly-funded plan. And as much as anything else, it’s designed to prevent working class people from voting and threatening the elite’s economic hegemony.

And we have the numbers to prove it.

We conducted the first poll designed to measure the impact of Donald Trump’s voter suppression executive orders and the SAVE Act. The results were both what we expected and eye-opening. Watch our big investigation and read an excerpt of our poll below, then click over to More Perfect Union for the whole thing.

President Donald Trump’s executive orders on election administration would create significant — and in many cases, insurmountable — barriers for working- and middle- class Americans to voting, according to a new poll from More Perfect Union and Blue Rose Research.

The poll, which surveyed 3,129 registered voters between April 16 and April 27, found that the proof of citizenship requirements pushed by Trump set a bar for voter registration that most voters would struggle to meet. Just 26% of voters said that they have an up-to-date passport, while nearly a third of voters (32%) said that requiring a passport to register would make it more difficult or prevent them from voting.

Nearly half of voters (46%) said that the $130 fee to purchase a new passport would be a financial burden. Two-thirds of lower-income voters said the $130 cost would be a barrier and nearly half (47%) reported it would prevent or deter them from registering and voting altogether. Among middle-income voters, just over half (53%) said that the price would cause them issues, including just over a third (36%) who said it would make them less likely or unable to vote.

More than a third (35%) of high-income voters also said the $130 fee might cause them problems, including 25% who would be less likely or unable to vote.

Read the whole thing…

More Perfect Union

Poll: Trump’s election orders would mass disenfranchise working-class voters

By Jordan Zakarin, More Perfect Union…

Read more

a month ago · 67 likes · 1 comment · More Perfect Union

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

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My wife has been out of town since I sent the last edition of this newsletter, so it’s been just myself and our three year old son. It’s been a lot of fun, but I’ve had just about zero time to write a newsletter. I’m back tonight with Winners and Losers, and we’ll be live on Tuesday evening with an interview with another great swing seat candidate in a must-flip state. There’s a new ballot initiative feature on the way, too, so there’s lots of great coverage on tap.

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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Thank you to our latest crowd-funding donors: David, Lisa, Theodore, Mary, Branch, Stephen, Larry, and Bruce!

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Georgia Democrats (for the moment): Gov. Brian Kemp’s timing may just cost the GOP two seats on the Georgia Supreme Court.

Early voting in the state’s upcoming election was already underway when Kemp announced that he’d be summoning the legislature back to gerrymander maps for the next session, and from that moment forward, Democratic voters poured out to the polls en masse. More than one million voters cast early ballots, smashing the record set in 2022, with Democrats claiming a 15 point turnout advantage.

Usually, that’s merely a sign of voter enthusiasm, but because voters are also weighing in on two state Supreme Court elections, that huge advantage may be remarkably consequential. Republicans hold every seat on the Georgia high court, and if Democrats flip these two, they’ll have a chance to turn the Supreme Court blue in 2028. And if that happens, the GOP gerrymander may not last very long.

On the topic of Democrats running in this primary, I want to give special mention to state Rep. Nabilah Parkes, who is running for lieutenant governor.

Back in 2023, I was working on a story for More Perfect Union about the Medicaid unwinding, when state governments were kicking millions of low-income people off of state health programs. The story focused in part on a woman named Tiffany Givens, a pregnant woman who was erroneously kicked off Medicaid by the state of Georgia. You can watch that here:

Anyway, Tiffany couldn’t afford to see a doctor, so after our interview, I connected her with Nabilah in hopes that her office might be able to help with the Kafka-esque bureaucracy designed to keep people from re-enrolling. Tiffany wasn’t Nabilah’s constituent — she lived in the western part of the state, right on the border of Alabama, while Nabilah represented a district outside Atlanta — but this was really the only personal connection to anyone in Georgia’s government that I had at the time.

Long story short, Nabilah’s office was able to help Tiffany, who re-enrolled in Medicaid and gave birth to a healthy boy that spring. They kept in touch, too —Nabilah at one point helped her with groceries on Thanksgiving — and last week, I got a text from Nabilah explaining that Tiffany’s family had been evicted from their apartment by a slumlord who got sick of being asked to do things like fixing the sinkhole in their home and taking care of a fly infestation.

Tiffany has a GoFundMe to raise money for her family’s impending move and the security deposit needed to get a new apartment, and Nabilah asked that I put it in the newsletter, in case people would be willing to donate (I gave money myself, too). What was confusing was that I’ve also been getting texts from Nabilah’s campaign for lieutenant governor, so it took me a minute to realize that her message wasn’t a mass SMS. Instead, as the most important campaign of her life was hitting the stretch run, Nabilah was taking time to help a working class mom — who, remember, isn’t even a constituent — who was going through a personal emergency.

I’ll admit that I haven’t followed the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor in Georgia, but if you live in the Peach State and are looking for selfless leaders who actually give a shit about people, check out Nabilah Parkes’s campaign.

I’ll soon be adding legislative races in Georgia to my election tracker over at FlipStates.org, as there is an outside chance that Democrats could win back the statehouse for the first time since 2004.

Nebraska Democrats: Speaking of good primary turnout in states listed in the FlipStates.org tracker, things are looking up right now for Democrats in Omaha.

The primary, held on Tuesday, saw Democratic voters vastly outnumber Republicans at the polls in Douglas County, where the state’s most competitive legislative elections will be taking place. These are jungle primaries in a technically nonpartisan chamber, where the top two vote-getters advance to the general election regardless of personal party affiliation.

In District 4, the Democratic candidate, Cindy Maxwell-Ostdiek, outpolled the sitting Republican incumbent, 52-48. In two other districts, the two Democrats running combined to take a much larger percentage of the vote than the Republican on the ballot, strongly suggesting that in a one-on-one race, the Democrat could come out on top.

All told, Democrats won 10,000 more votes than the GOP-aligned candidates. They only need to flip one seat to break the GOP’s filibuster-proof supermajority, though they’ll want to win a few more because there have been defections on a number of major votes (including a roll back of the citizen-approved minimum wage increase).

Data center protests: Other than an abiding belief that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered to cover up for powerful perverts, there’s not much that unites Americans these days — just look at the vitriolic responses to this tweet of mine about the Supreme Court and redistricting. But a new consensus has quickly emerged: Americans of all political stripes do not want data centers built in their towns.

Check out the results of this new Gallup poll:

There are a variety of reasons why people say they oppose data centers, from their effect on the environment and drain on resources (water and electricity) to noise, traffic, and the sheer amount of money that state and municipal governments have been handing over to the developers that build these parasites. With many local governments eager to seize on temporary construction jobs and land sales, and national leaders terrified of the AI lobby’s largesse, the resistance to data centers has been almost entirely bottom-up, grassroots-led, and transcendent of political parties; rural Americans hate them just as much as anybody, if not more.

These activists began by targeting the construction of individual data centers and have since moved on to seeking broad moratoriums at the state and local level, a strategy that will be far more effective than simply playing public pressure whack-a-mole. And lawmakers are starting to wake up to the festering anger, as evidenced by the growing number of temporary data center construction bans winding through city halls and state capitols.

While Maine Gov. Janet Mills vetoed a data center moratorium passed by the legislature (there’s a reason she failed to catch on as a Senate candidate and lost to a populist oyster farmer), things are looking up elsewhere:

• The city councils of both Seattle and Minneapolis are considering data center moratoriums, with the latter schedule to vote on the proposal on May 21;

• Lawmakers and advocates in New York rallied in Albany this week in support of a three-year moratorium on new data center construction. It’s co-sponsored by Sen. Kristin Gonzalez, the chair of the Senate Internet and Technology Committee, who gave a solid overview of the larger politics in this fight:

  • “I don’t think every New Yorker necessarily is going to live in a community that is going to be sighted by a hyperscale data center,” she said. “This fight is bigger than just individual data centers. It’s literally a fight with big tech because they have been defining and setting the rules for how they operate and how they profit and we have been living with the consequences.”

• In Ohio, grassroots activists are rushing to collect enough signatures to qualify a statewide ballot center moratorium on data center construction.

Abigail Spanberger (and workers in Virginia): A few weeks ago, when I was in DC, I got into a conversation with a few labor union political staffers and asked a question that had been vexing me for the past year: why didn’t unions or their allies speak up or push back with Abigail Spanberger, then the presumptive nominee for governor, said that she would not support the repeal of Virginia’s odious “right to work” law?

The timing was important: Spanberger hadn’t yet clinched the nomination when she disavowed the labor movement’s single-biggest priority. So how come there weren’t even any rumblings about the labor left backing a late primary candidate, if only to remind the former CIA agent not to take their support for granted?

The reply I got back was a pragmatic, if mildly depressing, assessment: Virginia is still a Southern state, unions only have so much political pull there, and there was an understanding that Spanberger would sign a bill that gave collective bargaining rights to more than half a million public sector workers.

Put aside the chicken or the egg nature of giving up on ending “right to work” because unions don’t have enough influence (how are they supposed to build power if they can’t easily add new members?) and you can see the logic of the compromise. As they put it, their advocacy had convinced Spanberger to get on board with authorizing workplace protections and contract negotiating rights to more than half a million workers, a half-loaf that would feed millions of Virginians.

It was a pretty good start — until it all fell apart.

Democrats in the legislature did their part, passing a bill that granted government employees collective bargaining rights, compelled binding arbitration to make sure they got a contract, created a labor board that would help oversee the process. It was the bill that Spanberger said she’d support, but by mid-April, she was suddenly demanding significant changes.

Most notably, she wanted to delay the implementation of the bill, remove arbitration, and and limit its initial reach; Spanberger proposed amendments that would allow state employees to bargain over wages and benefits, then 18 months later, grant the same basic rights to local government employees. Full implementation wouldn’t have happened until sometime in 2030, when a new governor could technically prevent it from taking effect.

Both the unions and the Democratic leaders who crafted the bill were shocked by the sudden shift in position. During a special session of the legislature dedicated to negotiating with Spanberger over her proposed changes to various bills,

“When the session was over, (Spanberger) came up with an entirely new bill,” Senate Majority Leader Scott Surrovell said. “It’s kind of hard to negotiate when the goal post gets put on a different field.”

So why did Spanberger do this? I’d like to know, but the statement she gave to the media was legitimately incomprehensible.

It’s pretty advance politicianese, nearly two minutes of circular gobbledygook that sounds supportive of the policy that she just killed. The best I can tell from reporting in Virginia is that she got pressure from local governments to veto the bill because they were worried that they’d have to pay employees a wage that might reflect their value.

Spanberger is steadfastly committed to presenting herself as a moderate, which in DC means scolding progressives and siding with bosses as the “responsible” thing to do. It’s a classic neoliberal, ‘90s-brained misconception that beating down workers and breaking your promises to your most loyal voters is politically savvy or would be admired as a tough-but-fair decision.

Consider what’s happened in Virginia: Spanberger won her election by nearly 15 points not because she was a particularly popular Congresswoman, but because voters in Northern Virginia — a place where a vast number of public sector workers live — were outraged at the Trump administration and the way it took a buzzsaw to the careers and livelihoods of government employees. Spanberger promised those people an alternative. Instead, they didn’t just get more of the same, they got lied to.

And here’s the thing: those 500,000 people who were going to get life-changing, income-boosting bargaining rights, they’ve now been denied those life-changing, income-boosting bargaining rights. I’m sure some were loyal Democrats, but there were police officers, firefighters, sanitation workers, and other blue collar professionals who will remember this November that Democrats break fundamental promises and are no better than Republicans when it comes to issues that impact them.

The labor movement has been unanimous in its outrage, a chorus of furious statements promising the sort of political consequences that Democrats have been trying to avoid from working people for years.

Here’s part of the statement from Lee Saunders, the president of AFSCME, the leading government employee union:

“For too long, anti-worker extremists have sidelined working people while starving the public services Virginia families rely on, earning the state a reputation as one of the most anti-worker in the country. Governor Spanberger campaigned on the promise to end this historic injustice.

“But she has broken that promise by vetoing legislation that would have finally granted most state and local workers the freedom to collectively bargain… Governor Spanberger made a choice today, and working people will remember it. AFSCME members will continue fighting to ensure every public service worker in Virginia has a real voice on the job. This fight is far from over.” 

It wasn’t a banner week for Democratic governors, who do not seem to understand that politicians are no longer rewarded for partisan heterodoxies and punching down on working people. Watch how Republicans in the South are rushing to gerrymander while Democrats in blue states like Maryland and Illinois have been so reluctant to add safe blue seats.

One misconception about Donald Trump is that he does not win because he treats people like losers, but because he makes many people feel like winners. That fosters loyalty and enthusiasm. Spanberger just dealt a devastating blow to one of Democrats’ most important constituencies and blew a chance to consolidate a huge swath of voters. It’s political and moral malpractice.

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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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Thank you to everyone who tuned in last night for our live conversation with Ben Gruber, a Wisconsin legislative candidate who is a political star in the making precisely because he has no interest in being a political star. He offered so many key insights into how Democrats are perceived in rural America, what voters are truly thinking about, and how to deliver an authentic populism that can rewrite our political reality.

The whole conversation is above and I urge you to watch it. You can also read the write up and watch some clips below. This was the first of our new weekly series with key swing state legislative candidates, with much more to come.

Flip Seats

Note: I need to hire a new contributor to expand our coverage at Progress Report, but paid subscriptions are tumbling and I need to reverse the slide to make it viable. Every new subscription (just $5!) and donation will get us closer to growing our reach and doing more impactful journalism.

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When Ben Gruber knocks doors across the vast, rural expanse of Wisconsin that he’s running to represent in the state Assembly, he doesn’t immediately identify himself as a Democrat. The party affiliation isn’t something he’s trying to hide, per se, he’d just rather be seen as neighbor who understands the everyday challenges that people in his working class community face.

Plus, if he can get people talking about their problems, like how much they pay for health care or the funding gaps facing their public schools, it’s much less likely that loyal Fox News viewers are going to warn him off their porch upon learning about the D next to his name.

There were two such abbreviated exchanges over the course of the 80 or so doors he knocked on Tuesday evening, though Gruber, who grew up and spent most of his life in these small towns, knew how to keep the temperature down.

“I don’t have to change everybody’s mind,” Gruber told Progress Report, “but I tell them on the way out the door, ‘Hey, when I’m in office, this conversation doesn’t mean that I won’t work for you.’ So feel free to reach out.’”

Gruber knows how to talk to Republicans in part because he used to be one. Not that he was particularly engaged or ideological; it was just something he inherited from his parents, the default for his sliver of southwest Wisconsin. Now, he’s running to represent the state’s 51st Assembly district on a pro-worker, pro-freedom progressive platform, aiming to flip a swing seat in a swing state that couldn’t be more essential to Democrats, especially in the ongoing redistricting war.

Democrats have to flip five seats to take control of the Assembly, and if they can flip Gruber’s district, they’ll be on pace to get it done.

Ben Gruber is not a professional politician, has no burning desire to run a campaign, does not feel the pull of the spotlight in any way. Ironically, that also helps make him the sort of candidate that Democratic strategists might wish into existence.

Consider the aesthetics, with the thick salt and pepper beard, and the salt of the earth career journey, from a firefighter to farmer to conservation warden.

Then there’s the role as the local president of his union, a statewide chapter that he revived from the brink of oblivion through aggressive organizing and aggressive grievance filing.

Add in the ideological populism — the loathing of corporate welfare, disdain for corrupt billionaires, belief in public schools and public lands — and ability to inspire “anger and hope,” as he describes it, and you’ve got a prototype for this particular moment and the challenge of winning back voters who abandoned the party generations ago.

Critically — and here’s where he is different from so many Democrats, who obsess over messaging instead of actual policy — Gruber knows that it takes actual investment in people to win them over.

“Rather than asking people to believe in the Democratic Party again, we need Democrats who are going to go get shit done and show people why they should be believed in,” Gruber says. “The Republican Party will use every bit of its power and consolidate all the power it can to make their own lives better. And the Democratic Party seems to be willing to do everything in its power to not make anybody’s life worse.”

It’s hard to shake that perception, but the surge in the cost of living is giving the Democrats a once-in-a-generation opening with rural voters, he says — if they’re willing to stand up to Big Tech corporations that are building data centers, the politicians who offer them subsidies while shutting down schools and police stations, and the utility companies that are transferring the cost to working people.

The first inkling that Gruber wasn’t actually a conservative came in 2011, when Gov. Scott Walker and the new Republican trifecta triggered mass outrage by passing Act 10, the law that stripped public sector workers of their right to collectively bargain.

Working as a firefighter at the time, Gruber’s union was exempt from the devastating attack on organized labor. He wasn’t particularly involved with his local — the one meeting a year he attended happened to involve free beer — but he was gripped by a sudden sense of solidarity and anger over the attack on his brothers and sisters in the union.

As Wisconsinites swarmed Madison in protest, with upwards of 100,00 people occupying the capitol, Gruber found himself experiencing a minor crisis of political faith.

“I went, I don’t know if this is what I want,” Gruber remembered. “I started to question, like, what are my values? What do I actually value instead of what does my dad say?”

The transition was slow — Gruber still wasn’t particularly engaged in politics — and took another big step with Donald Trump’s rise to power in 2016. He knew that he couldn’t align himself with such a crass grifter, but he also wasn’t all that keen on insiders and powerful familial dynasties, so he voted third party that year. In hindsight, he says, he’d have voted for Hillary Clinton, whose surprise loss in Wisconsin doomed her campaign.

For Gruber, it was becoming the president of the state’s AFSCME local for conservation wardens that finally pushed him towards the Democratic Party; along with rebuilding the union, Gruber also filed the lawsuit that has Act 10 on the verge of being struck down by the Wisconsin Supreme Court. His campaign for legislature mirrors the approach he took when rebuilding the union, which always centered on fighting, delivering, and solidarity.

“I didn’t go ask a hundred people to give me their [union] membership dues and join,” Gruber said. “We just went out and picked fights and made their lives better and showed them that we were going to stand up for them and that we’d be there when they needed us. And people went, I think I want to be part of that.”

Donate to Ben Gruber (and others)

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

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Tonight I’ve got a quick piece that follows up on last night’s report. Tomorrow evening, I’ll be going live at 8:30 pm EST with a top-tier legislative candidate in a must-win district in a must-win swing state; keep an eye on your inbox for the invite by tomorrow afternoon.

Note: I need to hire a new contributor to expand our coverage at Progress Report, but paid subscriptions are tumbling and I need to reverse the slide to make it viable. Every new subscription (just $5!) and donation will get us closer to growing our reach and doing more impactful journalism.

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Two late-breaking news stories together epitomize the catastrophic state of American politics, though the word “politics” feels generous now because it implies a spirited competition between two motivated, ideologically disparate actors in a relatively fair environment.

As tonight’s developments make clear, that is not what we have in the United States.

First, the Supreme Court this evening put Alabama on course to eliminate the Black-majority Congressional districts that the court itself upheld just a few years ago. Whereas Samuel Alito’s opinion in Callais claimed to technically uphold Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (while making it functionally useless), this emergency decision ends all pretense of respect for the landmark law and affirms once again this court is nothing more than a raft of corrupt, racist and partisan hacks.

The decision is unprecedented and unprecedentedly hypocritical in several ways.

First, an Alabama district court found in Allen v. Milligan that lawmakers had drawn gerrymandered districts with explicitly racist intent, meeting the ultra-high bar for a VRA violation that Alito set in his Callais opinion. This was an immediate opportunity for the court to prove that it would indeed uphold the Voting Rights Act in the rare occasions that the racist intent was provable beyond a shadow of a doubt, but instead, the far-right majority showed its true colors (white hoods).

Second, no matter how much John Roberts complains and insists his fellow Federalist Society members are not political actors, conservative partisanship and naked bigotry are the court’s central organizing principles, the only coherent throughlines between its decisions. There’s no other way the court could truly justify citing the Purcell Principle to block a challenge to Texas’s gerrymandered map last fall a full 15 weeks before the state’s primary election, the turn around and grant Alabama’s wish to eliminate Black, Democratic districts just one week before the scheduled primary.

Capitulation is collaboration

At the same time that the Supreme Court rushes to flex and build Republican power, Democrats are rushing to render themselves powerless, setting themselves up to fail and surrender what small modicum of power they still hold. Virginia Democrats in particular had a torrid day of chosen helplessness and pitiful excuse-making, exacerbating the devastation of the state Supreme Court’s decision to throw out their newly voter-approved Congressional map.

As a reminder, it emerged this weekend that Democrats could essentially circumvent the decision by lowering the court’s mandatory retirement age and replacing the justices with younger, more liberal judges. Doing so would all but guarantee that the party would win nine of Virginia’s ten Congressional seats, which would mitigate some of the damage being done by the GOP’s gerrymandering spree across the South. With a trifecta in state government, the only thing that could prevent Democrats from pulling off this novel maneuver is their own cowardice, and lo and behold, that’s exactly what’s happening: two of Virginia’s three most powerful Democrats ruled out the judicial switcheroo on Monday.

First up was state Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell, who called the move “too extreme” and said that the “time restrictions at the Department of Elections” make it too impractical. Of course, practical timing issues did not prevent Republicans from moving forward: Louisiana’s Republican Gov. Jeff Landry threw out hundreds of thousands of early votes so that Republicans could implement emergency redistricting.

If there’s one person in Virginia that could overrule Surovell and force through a plan to rescue the map, it’s Gov. Abigail Spanberger, who campaigned across the state to push the constitutional redistricting amendment over the line. But Spanberger, who has almost always hewn to the center and made a habit of shaming the principled progressives in her party, simply told reporters “no” when they asked whether she had any interest in pursuing a new Supreme Court.

Here’s the kicker: Virginia Democrats decided to instead appeal to the US Supreme Court, asking its virulent right-wing judges to reverse or block the state high court’s decision. Liberals, asking Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas to save them and hand them four Congressional seats. It’s almost embarrassing, considering the far-right justices’ brazen partisan decision-making, but there are few things that Democratic leaders like better than taking a loss, feigning anger, and then fundraising to “fight back” against conservatives who their fecklessness conveniently keep in power.

It’s a truly depressing state of affairs. Remember, a majority of Virginians voted for these maps — Republicans in Florida, Ohio, and Utah, among other states, are just simply imposing gerrymanders that violate voter-approved amendments to their state constitutions — after a campaign powered by tens of thousands of volunteers and millions in small dollar donations. Democrats are obligated to fight on behalf of those voters, volunteers, and small donors, and this surrender makes these leaders in many ways even more contemptible than Republicans. That this could be the difference between winning back Congress and condemning the United States to a permanent GOP majority only deepens the shamefulness.

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, in the words of the immortal Hall of Fame slugger and Mets broadcaster Ralph Kiner: “It's Mother's Day, so to all you mothers out there… Happy Birthday!”

I am back in the US and ready to kick swing state midterm coverage off in earnest; the Supreme Court’s recent gutting of the Voting Rights Act makes this year’s legislative elections the most important in several generations. We’ll get started with a LIVE streamed interview with a top-tier, working class candidate in a toss-up seat in a toss-up state this coming Tuesday evening. Keep your eyes peeled for the invite!

Tonight, we’re taking a look at redistricting and what comes next.

Note: I need to hire a new contributor to expand our coverage at Progress Report, but paid subscriptions are tumbling and I need to reverse the slide to make it viable. Every new subscription (just $5!) and donation will get us closer to growing our reach and doing more impactful journalism.

Subscribe now

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I’m not fond of looking at events through the lens of how they’ll be described one day in history books, because that overlooks the suffering of people impacted by them in there and now. But the parallels are too obvious and ominous right now, too damning and dangerous, given the consequences of the history we risk repeating, to ignore:

These past few weeks have felt like the end of Reconstruction and the dawn of Jim Crow, a near-century of terror and subjugation, an era of extreme racial and economic inequality with little to no recourse, a dismal antidemocratic epoch that was set in motion by conservative treachery and liberal acquiescence, the political surrender of feckless, comfortable, and naive leaders who let institutionalism stand in for democracy, which almost ceased to exist.

There is no difference between today’s Supreme Court and the Court that in the 1870s used Slaughterhouse and other decisions to undermine and ultimately shatter civil rights law; both perverted the clear meaning and scope of the 14th and 15th amendments in order to permit states to pass mass voter suppression laws and essentially eliminate Black representation across the South.

The same can be said for the “good government” Democrats who instantly accepted the Virginia Supreme Court decision without even considering circumvention. Their immediate acquiescence, should they remain unwilling to pursue clear solutions would mirror the northern Republicans of the 1870s, who accepted short-term power by agreeing that President Rutherford B. Hayes would withdraw federal troops from the South and turn a blind eye to violence and subjugation.

Whether these are perfect analogies is beside the point, because the intention and impact of the GOP’s schemes could be just as disastrous as what transpired in the late 19th century. The stakes are absolutely that high. Ongoing Republican governance would turn the country into:

• A full-on police state where people of color are legally terrorized by federal foot soldiers with license to kill dissidents on the spot;

• A disease-filled dystopia where medical science has reverted to the dark ages, children die en masse from crackpot disinformation, women have no control of their own bodies, and very few can afford real treatment;

• An even more extreme plutocracy where the wealthiest few build ever-larger fortresses as they extract every last ounce of wealth from helpless workers who they’ve either marginalized or fully replaced with artificial intelligence;

• A broiling, smog-covered environmental wasteland controlled by oil companies and other extractive industries.

I’m not exaggeration, either. This is not hyperbole. these are the stakes. And we’re already en route to this nightmare future. Conservatives are seizing this moment after decades of laying the groundwork for this legal coup, choosing which laws and courts to obey and which to ignore in attempts to rig elections, seize a generational majority, and then make it a permanent hegemony. In each and every case, they are brazenly violating long-held democratic norms and/or receiving help from pliant and corrupt justices:

• Florida Republicans, led by Gov. Ron DeSantis, just gerrymandered themselves an additional four Congressional seats in direct violation of the voter-approved fair redistricting amendment;

• Tennessee Republicans repealed a long-standing law against mid-decade redistricting in order to erase the state’s only Black-majority (and Democratic) Congressional district;

• Louisiana canceled their primaries in the middle of the election, then won an unusual expedited certification of the Callais decision (which relied on faulty data from the Trump DOJ) to blow up one of its two Black districts

• Alabama preemptively eliminated its second Black-majority district with a gerrymander, in hopes that the federal judiciary will release the state from the injunction that prevented it from redistricting until after 2030;

• Utah Republicans, angry that their state’s Supreme Court rejected a gerrymander, decided to blow the whole thing up: they expanded the court, are installing friendly conservatives, and even took away its jurisdiction over voting rights issues to a newly created (and very partisan) judicial body;

• Ohio Republicans spent several election cycles simply ignoring the state Supreme Court when it ruled against the GOP’s gerrymandered districts, then installed an even worse map when they flipped the state Supreme Court.

That last example pre-dates Callais, but it’s most applicable to what’s happening right now in Virginia. A partisan state Supreme Court tossed out the results of a high-profile election on an absurd and hypocritical technicality after Virginians did not produce their preferred outcome. Democrats have a big trifecta after a wipeout general election victory last fall, but their leaders’ first instinct was to say that they “respected” the state Supreme Court’s decision and try to raise more money for elections on the old maps.

Democrats should have immediately looked to follow Ohio’s lead, telling the powerless court to shove it, but now they don’t even have to do that to get their map — the one approved by voters in a high-profile, ultra-expensive election — back in place. It’s since emerged that Democrats could lower the mandatory retirement age of their state Supreme Court, wipe out sitting justices, and then lodge an emergency appeal to a newly appointed and much friendlier court. Easy, right?

Sound extreme? Consider what multiple Republican states have done in recent years. Just this year, Utah Republicans, angry that their state’s Supreme Court rejected a gerrymander, decided to blow the whole thing up: they expanded the court, are installing friendly conservatives, and even took away its jurisdiction over voting rights issues to a newly created (and very partisan) judicial body.

Progress Report

Expand the Supreme Court or watch democracy die

Welcome to a Thursday night edition of Progress Report…

Read more

2 months ago · 27 likes · 9 comments · Jordan Zakarin

Ohio and Utah Republicans concocted these schemes in blatant defiance of fair redistricting amendments that were overwhelmingly approved by voters via ballot initiative. If Virginia Democrats were to pursue their Supreme Court switcheroo, it would be in defense of the explicit wishes of a majority of the state’s voters. That’s far more justifiable, yet reflexive Democratic handwringing and fear of power has already reared its annoying head.

Fighting for voters’ voices to be counted, according Democratic former Rep. James Moran, would be “just a bridge too far,” an assertion based on imaginary standards measured against convenient definitions of vague concepts clung to by out-of-touch liberal pearl clutchers.

“We do have to keep our credibility,” Moran added. “We have to do things that pass the legitimacy test.”

Just who sets the criteria for the “legitimacy test” is unknowable, but shredding their own credibility hasn’t exactly hurt Republicans in the states they’ve actively rigged. Ohio, for example, is more Republican than ever, and conservatives have flipped almost every state Supreme Court seat there since their rulings against gerrymandered maps were ignored. Virginia Democrats’ margin of victory in 2025 is bigger than anything Ohio Republicans have won in recent years, and Gov. Abigail Spanberger can’t even run for re-election, yet the only real noise coming from Richmond is a bunch of whimpering.

Coalition of the unwilling

Unfortunately, Virginia Democrats are not alone in their preemptive surrender, as blue state leaders who might have the power to chip away at the massive GOP gerrymandering advantage are already shooting down any talk of doing so.

Take Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the leading candidate for governor of Minnesota, who shot down retiring Gov. Tim Walz’s suggestion that Democratic lawmakers could redraw a map that better reflects the state’s partisan tendencies than its current 4-4 Congressional stalemate. Klobuchar has been hewing to the center in this race, but that’s more her style than political necessity.

Klobuchar is the best-known politician in Minnesota, and after ICE’s violent invasion of the Twin Cities, the GOP has never been less popular in Minnesota. It’s so bad that in January, one of the leading GOP contenders for governor actually quit the race because he could no longer consider himself a Republican after the feds executed two innocent people on the streets of Minneapolis. A huge legislative blue wave would make for the perfect opportunity to gerrymander Minnesota, isolating its rural areas to the north and turning the 4-4 into a 6-2 or 7-1 map.

In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul’s bullish talk about redistricting in 2028 to create new Democratic districts has been forcefully tamped down by the party’s legislative leaders, who say any updated maps would represent mild changes; a 19-7 map might become a 22-4 or 23-3 advantage, leaving several potential blue districts on the table.

“People were walking across bridges and being mauled, and have lost their lives for these rights,” New York Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, speaking of the Voting Rights Act, told Politico on Friday. “These laws are there because there has been a real effort to disenfranchise certain people, certainly Black people, from being able to vote. So we want to protect that.”

Sen. Stewart-Cousins is a trailblazing leader, and the concern that redrawing districts would reduce or erase minority majorities in several NYC boroughs are very legitimate. But with all due respect, these districts would still have large minority pluralities, and the New York Democratic Party prides itself on its ability to control who runs in which race (and control primaries when necessary). The idea that Hakeem Jeffries or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would lose their seats to white primary challengers because their still-safe Democratic districts added some Republicans from Long Island is patently absurd.

Further, while Stewart-Cousins is absolutely right that people were mauled and murdered in pursuit of voting rights, her statement ignores the current reality: Republicans have already hijacked those voting rights, the Supreme Court has just ushered in a new Jim Crow era, and the only way to undo the damage and restore the freedoms that people fought so valiantly to secure the first time around.

It feels counterintuitive, but the future of American democracy is entirely dependent on liberal leaders finally realizing that virtue itself is not a means to an end and that norms only exist in so far as they can be enforced. Gerrymandering is not an ideal solution, but we face a stark choice: do it temporarily in service of restoring fair boundaries or watch Republicans do it on their own, for long-term election manipulation.

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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I’m writing to you from Liverpool, the natural choice for my first real trip since undergoing my sixth heart surgery more than five months ago. I’m here for soccer, but at the moment, due to the time difference, I’m watching coverage of the local council elections across the UK.

Right now, I’m working on several projects for Progress Report, including setting live interviews with candidates in the most important swing districts in must-win legislatures across the Midwest. Those will kick off next week. I’m also updating our ballot initiative site with lots of new referenda, and will also have a news roundup in the next day.

Tonight, I want to take a quick dive into this British election night, because there’s a lot of lessons that apply to the situation we face in the US.

Note: Want more reporting on progressive grassroots campaigns that you won’t find in any other national publication? Want to help the spotlight on the people doing the hard work to actually fix this country instead of just cashing in on cynicism?

Every paid subscription to Progress Report — just $5 a month! — goes toward making this crucial work sustainable. Every subscription helps!

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Election coverage hits different in places where the media isn’t owned by right-wing billionaire moguls and politicians don’t take tens of millions of dollars corporations.

The BBC’s broadcast tonight eschews all the holograms and massive touch screens that clutter American election newscasts. Even more refreshing: there are no pundits burping up cliched talking points. It’s just reporters all over the country, contextualizing the races and describing the local issues and national dynamics, with some government officials mixed in. I’m learning things, not experiencing enough visual stimulation to give me a seizure.

Americans can learn a lot from their coverage — and even more from the results.

While still early in the count, the Labour party, which controls Parliament, is getting walloped up and down the country. At this very moment, Labour has lost 86 seats, almost all of them going to Reform UK, which has already gained 130 seats. It’s a startling but not shocking rise for Reform, the new party formed by white nationalist demagogue Nigel Farage. If you’re unfamiliar with Reform, just imagine if the MAGA movement broke off from the Republican Party.

To extend the US-UK analogy, tonight’s council elections are a bit like American midterm elections: though they don’t impact the makeup of Parliament, they provide a temperature check on the national mood and act as a de facto referendum on the party in control of the government.

The results so far reflect the breathtaking unpopularity of the Labour Prime Minister Kier Starmer, who has a -45% net approval rating. Starmer has been flattened by scandals (Jeffrey Epstein plays a role, of course), sluggish economic growth, and bone-headed attacks on his own party and voters. Labour swept into power with a mandate to end the Tory austerity, but Starmer instead pushed to further strip the social safety net.

To give you an idea of how feckless these people are: the BBC just hosted the Labour trade minister, who claimed that the party didn’t actually have a mandate when it swept to power in 2024, arguing instead that people were just voting to reject the Tories. I find it hard to believe that they blunted a more progressive agenda because they thought voters actually wanted them to continue the conservative policies that exacerbated income inequality and cratered the economy; Starmer rose to power within the Labour Party by beating on the left and allying himself with the sort of insiders who benefit from the status quo.

Instead, Starmer actively worked to alienate the Labour base (he has a 55% disapproval rating among his own voters) while doing nothing to win over voters from other parties. That voters are fleeing Labour in historic strongholds in the Northeast and Wales (where the party has been in power for a century) and flocking to the noxious populists in Reform is a rebuke to the idea that voters operate on what we understand as the typical political spectrum.

Starmer’s bet was that slow-walking policies designed to help working people — essentially acting as a technocratic centrist Democrat — would win over conservative and Liberal Dem voters. Instead, working Britons are running to the far-right, to a Reform UK that hammers on the cost of living and decline in the quality of life; one of its leaders is on a the moment, rattling off statistics about the long waitlists for healthcare and the plight of futureless young men.

The solutions that Reform offer are reactionary and xenophobic — “why are we paying all these taxes for money to go to [immigrants] who don’t work?” the minister just asked rhetorically — but the party is positioning itself as an alternative to the “uniparty” that has run government for time immemorial.

This is not an newsletter about British politics, but I could have just as easily been writing about the last three Democratic presidential administrations. It’s almost scary how much this mirrors what happened to Democrats a few years ago: Chris Bryant, the trade minister, just said that Labour hadn’t done a good enough job communicating its accomplishments to people.

As Democrats coalesce around an agenda ahead of the midterm elections and 2028 presidential race, they should be watching the catastrophe in Britain and recognizing that it’s time to offer bold solutions that fundamentally remake the economy and reform government — these next two elections may well be the last chance to reverse democratic decline.

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

• Financing new projects and paying new reporters

• Access to upcoming chats and live notes

Subscribe now

You can also make a one-time donation to Progress Report’s GoFundMe campaign!

Donate to Progress Report!

I’m writing to you from Liverpool, the natural choice for my first real trip since undergoing my sixth heart surgery more than five months ago. I’m here for soccer, but at the moment, due to the time difference, I’m watching coverage of the local council elections across the UK.

Right now, I’m working on several projects for Progress Report, including setting live interviews with candidates in the most important swing districts in must-win legislatures across the Midwest. Those will kick off next week. I’m also updating our ballot initiative site with lots of new referenda, and will also have a news roundup in the next day.

Tonight, I want to take a quick dive into this British election night, because there’s a lot of lessons that apply to the situation we face in the US.

Note: Want more reporting on progressive grassroots campaigns that you won’t find in any other national publication? Want to help the spotlight on the people doing the hard work to actually fix this country instead of just cashing in on cynicism?

Every paid subscription to Progress Report — just $5 a month! — goes toward making this crucial work sustainable. Every subscription helps!

Subscribe now

Donate to Progress Report!

Election coverage hits different in places where the media isn’t owned by right-wing billionaire moguls and politicians don’t take tens of millions of dollars corporations.

The BBC’s broadcast tonight eschews all the holograms and massive touch screens that clutter American election newscasts. Even more refreshing: there are no pundits burping up cliched talking points. It’s just reporters all over the country, contextualizing the races and describing the local issues and national dynamics, with some government officials mixed in. I’m learning things, not experiencing enough visual stimulation to give me a seizure.

Americans can learn a lot from their coverage — and even more from the results.

While still early in the count, the Labour party, which controls Parliament, is getting walloped up and down the country. At this very moment, Labour has lost 86 seats, almost all of them going to Reform UK, which has already gained 130 seats. It’s a startling but not shocking rise for Reform, the new party formed by white nationalist demagogue Nigel Farage. If you’re unfamiliar with Reform, just imagine if the MAGA movement broke off from the Republican Party.

To extend the US-UK analogy, tonight’s council elections are a bit like American midterm elections: though they don’t impact the makeup of Parliament, they provide a temperature check on the national mood and act as a de facto referendum on the party in control of the government.

The results so far reflect the breathtaking unpopularity of the Labour Prime Minister Kier Starmer, who has a -45% net approval rating. Starmer has been flattened by scandals (Jeffrey Epstein plays a role, of course), sluggish economic growth, and bone-headed attacks on his own party and voters. Labour swept into power with a mandate to end the Tory austerity, but Starmer instead pushed to further strip the social safety net.

To give you an idea of how feckless these people are: the BBC just hosted the Labour trade minister, who claimed that the party didn’t actually have a mandate when it swept to power in 2024, arguing instead that people were just voting to reject the Tories. I find it hard to believe that they blunted a more progressive agenda because they thought voters actually wanted them to continue the conservative policies that exacerbated income inequality and cratered the economy; Starmer rose to power within the Labour Party by beating on the left and allying himself with the sort of insiders who benefit from the status quo.

Instead, Starmer actively worked to alienate the Labour base (he has a 55% disapproval rating among his own voters) while doing nothing to win over voters from other parties. That voters are fleeing Labour in historic strongholds in the Northeast and Wales (where the party has been in power for a century) and flocking to the noxious populists in Reform is a rebuke to the idea that voters operate on what we understand as the typical political spectrum.

Starmer’s bet was that slow-walking policies designed to help working people — essentially acting as a technocratic centrist Democrat — would win over conservative and Liberal Dem voters. Instead, working Britons are running to the far-right, to a Reform UK that hammers on the cost of living and decline in the quality of life; one of its leaders is on a the moment, rattling off statistics about the long waitlists for healthcare and the plight of futureless young men.

The solutions that Reform offer are reactionary and xenophobic — “why are we paying all these taxes for money to go to [immigrants] who don’t work?” the minister just asked rhetorically — but the party is positioning itself as an alternative to the “uniparty” that has run government for time immemorial.

This is not an newsletter about British politics, but I could have just as easily been writing about the last three Democratic presidential administrations. It’s almost scary how much this mirrors what happened to Democrats a few years ago: Chris Bryant, the trade minister, just said that Labour hadn’t done a good enough job communicating its accomplishments to people.

As Democrats coalesce around an agenda ahead of the midterm elections and 2028 presidential race, they should be watching the catastrophe in Britain and recognizing that it’s time to offer bold solutions that fundamentally remake the economy and reform government — these next two elections may well be the last chance to reverse democratic decline.

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Politics these days demands cynicism, but progress requires the bravery to be inspired. Easier said than done, especially after the past week, but tonight’s featured campaign, a movement of regular working people fighting for one another, should make you believe that a dignified future is still possible.

You can watch the whole conversation above or read on for a written story and pertinent clips.

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Marc Slakey grew up in Redwood City with the sneaking suspicion that he probably would not live there as an adult. It wasn’t that he dreamed of skipping town or living anywhere else in particular, but he was cognizant even from a young age that his small city, which sits nestled on the peninsula in between San Francisco and San Jose, was rapidly transforming. Silicon Valley was minting millionaires and displacing locals in equal measures, with real estate prices bordering on the obscene.

“There was always this understanding that ‘that’s just how it is,’” Slakey remembers. “It was basically either become one of the people who gets lucky and makes unbelievable wages, or get out.”

On the balance, Slakey was correct: the cost of rent in Redwood City sits at 183% of the national average, half of the city’s renters are officially considered rent-burdened, and many of his childhood friends have moved to the East Bay or out of California entirely. Slakey, now in his early 30s, has managed to stick around his hometown, but the precariousness of his situation, with a service industry job and high rent — he’s paying $2,000 a month for a studio, with 8% rent increases every year — pushed him to search for a bigger, more structural solution.

That brought him to Faith In Action Bay Area, a nonprofit coalition leading the campaign to pass a groundbreaking, multi-faceted rent control and tenant protections ballot measure in Redwood City.

The headliner is a rent control provision that caps annual increases at 5% flat or 60% of the Consumer Price Index bump, whichever is lower. The policy would apply to multifamily housing units — so, apartments — built before 1995, a limit dictated by state law. Another law, signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2019, capped rent increases at 5% plus local inflation, up to 10%.

In addition, the Fair and Affordable Housing Ordinance would expand just cause eviction protections, including a ban on harassment from landlords. In the event of no-fault evictions, the measure would require large corporate landlords to pay up relocation fees of up to $12,000 to displaced tenants (or $16,000 for senior citizens), which far exceeds the one month rent that the city now requires.

This is the second attempt to qualify the initiative; Faith in Action collected petition signatures in 2024 but ran into technical issues with the residency requirements of some signers. This time, the organization collected nearly double the required petitions and submitted them to the city just last week, confident that they both blew past the valid signature requirement and that their initiative has broad public support.

“There’s actually been a little bit less tension this time around. People are seeing the writing on the wall,” says Carter Pohl, an organizer with Faith in Action. “From all the door-knocking we’ve done, more people signed this time around. We had a higher rate of people saying yes at the doors. Support for rent control and tenant protections has grown.”

That includes more longtime homeowners, many of whom told canvassers that they would not be able to afford to purchase a house there at current prices. The average home in Redwood City is worth $1.9 million, far exceeding the statewide average of $775,000.

As in 2024, the campaign faces a deep-pocketed opponent in the California Apartment Association, the corporate landlord industry group that has actively fought against the proposal. It’s a powerful organization; according to the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, corporate landlords and real estate trusts own 87% of multifamily homes in Redwood City.

That dominance, though, has earned them some enmity from more local owners, who have helped to defy and correct the misconceptions and flawed talking points injected into the public consciousness by the corporate lobby.

“People repeat things they’ve heard through these powerful messaging channels, even when they don’t make sense or aren’t true,” Slakey says. “One of the clearest examples was hearing people warn that this initiative would hurt small landlords. Then I’d knock on the small landlord’s door, and they would sign the petition. They’d say things like, ‘I only raise rent 2%. I don’t want to cycle tenants every few years.’”

Affordability is now the buzzword in politics, which should give a real boost to the ordinance’s chances of passing in November. But for Pohl and Slakey, the word they go back to over and over again is community. The campaign behind the Fair and Affordable Housing Ordinance is an entirely grassroots operation, powered by locals who have joined by the dozens in an earnest effort to help their neighbors and make life more sustainable for working people.

“When I first got involved, I was honestly a little jaded,” Slakey admits. “I wondered whether this was just another political thing. But once you actually experience a resilient community, it changes how you think about all of it.”

Pohl, an organizer for a number of years now, was similarly inspired.

“When we marched to turn in our signatures, there was this feeling of solidarity I’ve only felt a few times in my life,” he says. “Everyone trusting each other, working toward the same thing. That’s what this movement is.”

You can learn more and donate to the Fair and Affordable Housing Ordinance at Faith in Action Bay Area’s website.

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Well, that was a terrible week. Granted, most weeks these past few years have been terrible, but even by that abysmal standard, this week was especially devastating. It was a whole verse of “We Didn’t Start The Fire” bad.

It feels a little strange to report positive voting rights news this week, but there were a few rays of light worth mentioning, as well as a potential political earthquake with ramifications all the way down the ballot.

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Maryland: Gov. Wes Moore signed the Maryland Voting Rights Act, which will apply to local and county governments. The law, which went into effect on Tuesday, prohibits election policies that “impairs the ability of a protected class to elect candidates of the members’ choice.” The protected classes proscribed in the law include race, color, and minority language speakers.

It’s unclear how the Callais v. Louisiana decision will impact the law, considering that the Supreme Court just made it almost impossible to draw district lines based on race. Still, any legal protection is a good thing, especially given the time that litigation can take its way to work through the courts.

Arizona: Put another L on the scoreboard for the Justice Department, as a federal judge tossed a DOJ lawsuit seeking sensitive voter data from the state of Arizona. This is the sixth state to successfully challenge the DOJ’s unprecedented and unconstitutional efforts to collect voter data.

Notably, the suit was tossed by U.S. District Judge Susan Brnovich, a Trump appointee and longtime member of the Federalist Society. Brnovich is also the widow of the late Arizona Secretary of State Mark Brnovich, who oversaw the quixotic and pointless “forensic recount” after the 2020 election. Mark Brnovich died in January.

I spoke with Arizona’s current Secretary of State Adrian Fontes about the lawsuit in October, when he noted that not only was the request illegal, it was also illogical and stupid.

“They’re saying that they’re using it to, quote-unquote, find a bunch of illegal voters,” Fontes said. “Now, this is a logical conundrum, because if the assertion has been for years that there’s been millions of illegal voters, where’s the evidence that they already have? And why are they just starting to build that case now?”

More recently, I spoke with Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, who is also facing a lawsuit from the DOJ and described the whole process as a farce.

“Originally when we received the letter requesting the data and the information on Nevada’s registered voters, we responded asking why they wanted the information and how that information was gonna be protected,” he said. “But also, who is gonna be responsible for that information? And unfortunately they never responded to that letter. They responded with a lawsuit.”

The rest of the conversation with Aguilar will be featured in an upcoming MPU story on the Trump administration’s effort to seize control over the midterm elections.

Missouri: Secretary of State Denny Hoskins was able to run down the clock and implement the GOP’s gerrymandered map for this fall’s election, but his scheme to trick voters into keeping the map beyond this year has failed spectacularly.

Here’s the background: after the GOP redrew the Congressional map to eliminate a safe Democratic seat last fall, activists hustled to qualify a ballot initiative that would overturn the new gerrymander. That initiative will likely be on the ballot in November, and Hoskins, who loves to cheat and lie, tried to rewrite the ballot language to confuse voters.

Fortunately, a Missouri appeals court agreed with the activists at People Not Politicians and rewrote the language to make it clear that voters were being asked to repeal a gerrymander and reinstate the old, more reasonably drawn map.

Democrats are beginning to wake up.

I’ve covered the demise of the Voting Rights Act and the corruption of the conservatives on the Supreme Court for years now; longtime readers will remember my maniacal focus on Dick Durbin’s chosen fecklessness in a moment begging for bold accountability. The far-right built toward gutting the VRA for nearly 50 years, but it’s no exaggeration to say that old Democrats essentially invited the disaster of Callais v. Louisiana.

Now it’s up to a newer generation in DC and Democratic leaders in state capitols to change the party’s direction — and there are indications that it may be happening.

Whether it’s out of principle or a reaction to an existential threat, the consensus seems like it is suddenly shifting from foolish institutionalism and preemptive surrender to a long overdue willingness to fight back.

Here’s the setup: Just as soon as the Callais decision was announced and explicitly racist gerrymandering was blessed by the Court, Republicans across the South began talking about re-drawing their states’ districts — which in some cases were already gerrymandered — to create even more Republican seats. Florida pulled the trigger the same day, while Louisiana, Tennessee, and Alabama are moving toward white hood maps. Plus, Texas Republicans are already discussing rigging their maps even further next year, and depending on who wins Georgia’s gubernatorial contest, the Peach State may join in as well.

Instead of simply crying foul and promising doomed litigation and legislation, Democrats in blue states and swing states alike are openly talking up their interest in — and some cases commitment to — redrawing to produce more blue seats in 2028.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said Thursday that she’s intent on exploring redistricting that draws out GOP seats upstate; a once-reluctant legislator from Illinois indicated that he’s now convinced that the state should try to produce another blue seat; Colorado Democrats were already exploring ways to create up to three Democratic pickups in an increasingly liberal state, including a potential ballot initiative in November.

New Jersey Democrats are mulling over a way to squeeze out another seat, and even Democrats in California are now chatting about further ratcheting up their new gerrymander. Maryland Democrats tried but failed because their state senate majority leader refused to budge, but he’s now facing a primary challenge and may be forced to think differently in this new environment.

There will be structural challenges: existing independent or bipartisan commissions, required constitutional amendments, and parochial concerns, among other things. Plus, it’s one thing to talk about taking dramatic action and another thing to actually follow through.

What’s certain, however, is that Democrats will have to maximize their wins at the state legislative level: if they can flip a chamber in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin (and keep the governorship in the latter two), they’ll have the trifectas necessary to move forward with whichever process is required by their respective state constitutions.

In the best/worse case scenario, the collective Congressional map might look like this.

A nation of unflippable gerrymanders would produce a Congress of extremists, and frankly, a map like the one above does not feel sustainable.

And yet, this is the reality we face, I’m doubling down on my coverage of state legislative races. I’m tracking flippable seats in swing states where Democrats could either win a trifecta or break a GOP supermajority. I’ll soon be adding flippable seats in states where Democrats could win a supermajority, making redistricting all the more likely. And I’m about to kick off an interview series with many of these candidates, to give them exposure and media clips as well as help them raise money.

If you want to get a head start, here’s an ActBlue page with 45 swing state candidates; your money goes a very long way in these races. This is probably the last chance we have of saving this country’s democracy for at least the next few decades, because otherwise, this is what’s going to happen (via Democratic super-lawyer Marc Elias):

Unconstrained by any requirement to ensure minority voting rights, high-powered computers will generate maps optimized for partisan outcomes. With mid-cycle redistricting the new normal, lines will be adjusted every two years to ensure that population shifts do not undo the gerrymander.

Republican-controlled states will split cities into multiple pieces to prevent them from wielding any electoral power. Minority communities will be dispersed and disempowered simply on the grounds that they are more likely to vote for Democrats. Millions of voters will be silenced by GOP operatives wielding a computer and an algorithm.

To be clear, I hate the idea of gerrymandering and really championed the independent redistricting ballot initiatives in states that Republicans had rigged in 2011. Ideally, a new administration can ban biased redistricting, but until then, as perverse as it sounds, defending democracy might require inverting it.

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

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

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