A new generation of Dem leaders emerges

And some of them have real convictions

Welcome to a Tuesday evening edition of Progress Report.

I’ve got some important election news for you tonight (include some that I’m directly involved in!) and other things to discuss, so let’s get right to it!

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New York: Political activist and commentator Cameron Kasky officially launched his campaign for Congress in New York’s 12th district on Tuesday, becoming the 10th candidate to declare for the seat being vacated by retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler.

Kasky first rose to prominence in 2018, when he survived the mass school shooting in Parkland, FL and co-founded the gun control group March for Our Lives with some of his classmates. He now works as an activist and co-hosts a popular political podcast on the Bulwark network. The ninth Democrat to officially declare in the safe blue Manhattan district, Kasky is staking out the progressive lane in a race largely occupied by competing moderates.

Among his priorities: Medicare for All, ending US support for genocide in Gaza, reining in big tech and AI run amok, ending ICE and mass domestic surveillance, and social housing. Many of those positions were highlighted in Kasky’s launch video, which I wrote, directed, and produced:

I’m pretty picky about working with candidates, especially when I’d be their constituent, as is the case here. The race is stocked with state legislators, a city council member, and a Kennedy, all of whom will have no problem raising money (or just plowing their own cash into a campaign), so it’s rather noteworthy that Cameron is the only one to have produced a full policy platform; most other candidates have relied on “fight Trump” and biography.

That’s not to say that some of them wouldn’t be good representatives! But we’re in a critical moment that demands fierce commitment and cohesive new visions, not conventional politics or poll-testing. Democrats are reaping the consequences of decades of tepid incrementalism and preemptive surrender, of mistaking boring for electable. In New York, we’ve seen what not being afraid of fresh new faces and ideas can produce.

Cam is young, but he’s been aged and hardened by what he’s experienced since high school. He’s a serious candidate, has a viable path to victory, and in a district as blue as this one, there’s no reason not to support the bold, paradigm-changing candidate. You can read an interview with him today in Vanity Fair and donate to his campaign here.

Redistricting: A panel of federal judges struck down Texas’s newly gerrymandered Congressional map on Tuesday, dealing a blow to Donald Trump’s hope of rigging next fall’s midterm elections.

The judges ruled in a 2-to-1 decision that the map was an intentional racial gerrymander, drawn to manipulate the racial distribution of Hispanic voters, citing letters from the Department of Justice and public statements by Gov. Greg Abbott as evidence.

The irony is that Republicans very clearly wanted to redraw Texas’s maps for purely partisan purposes, which has been perfectly legal since 2019. But instead of simply admitting that the goal was to produce more GOP seats, the Department of Justice made a big show of alleging that the old map had been improperly drawn based on racial characteristics and required rectification. Abbott went along with that charade, quite explicitly (via Law Dork):

The judges ordered that the state continue to use its current Congressional map, which would put Republicans behind Democrats in net seats in the redistricting war that Texas triggered in the first place. Without Texas, Democrats have a +3 lead in seats, with Virginia, Florida, Maryland, Illinois, and Louisiana still pending.

But don’t celebrate yet: Abbott plans to appeal to the Supreme Court, which has bent over backwards to accommodate GOP voter suppression.

And even more concerning: the high court is already weighing the re-arguments in a case out of Louisiana that could just about fully dismantle the VRA. Should the Supreme Court decide that states are not permitted to draw districts designed to provide representation to racial minorities, it will likely trigger an explosion in gerrymandering across the South before the midterm elections.

On the bright side, it still probably wouldn’t include Indiana or Kansas, where some Republican legislature continue to defy leadership that wants to heed Trump’s call for new district lines — much to his chagrin.

Shifting left: This month’s Democratic election sweep has prompted some soul-searching among the election handicapper set. The folks at Cook Political Report, the best damn weathervanes in the business, have shifted four races away from the GOP, including two newly minted toss-ups: NJ-07 and VA-02.

New Jersey’s 7th Congressional district — where I went to high school — has been represented by Rep. Tom Kean Jr. since 2023. Kean is the son of a popular former governor and one of the least impressive Republicans in Congress. He’s squeaked through in two consecutive elections, having defeated incumbent Rep. Tom Malinowski in 2022 (after losing to him in 2020) and NJ Working Families Party chair Sue Altman.

The district voted for Kamala Harris last year and a slew of Democratic contenders have already jumped into the primary, with former Navy helicopter pilot Rebecca Bennett leading the way in fundraising thus far. Democrats are very encouraged by Sherrill’s surprisingly strong victory in NJ’s gubernatorial election this month, but the NJ-07 race is still going to be a tough slog, as Sherrill won the district by less than half a percentage point.

Democrats should find friendlier territory in VA-02, where candidates are lining up for the chance to take on Rep. Jen Kiggans. Also elected when Republicans took over the House in 2022, Kiggans won re-election last year by just under five points. Her district voted for Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger by eight points, and Kiggans she faces a potential rematch from former Rep. Elaine Luria, who she defeated by 3.5 points in 2022.

Both Kiggans and Luria are Navy veterans, as is Sherrill. It’s very specific recruiting, but it seems to be successful.

AI-pocalypse: Republicans in Congress are trying once again to pass a national moratorium on statewide regulations on artificial intelligence, having failed to get the policy into this summer’s budget bill.

House Major Leader Steve Scalise said that he hopes to slip the provision into the crucial National Defense Authorization Act, a must-pass bill that Democrats have little influence over now that they caved on the government shutdown. Donald Trump, awash in money from the Silicon Valley’s AI cabal, is now vocally backing the proposal with language ripped straight from lobbyists’ mouths.

Those billionaires, like OpenAI founder Sam Altman, have mused publicly about being owed a government bailout if their heavy investments in AI infrastructure cannot turn a profit. In a hearing on AI on Tuesday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez railed against the outrageous amount of money being poured into the AI bubble and the danger it presents to the economy, an outspokenness that is both morally and politically essential at this point in the distortion cycle.

Here’s the money quote for me: “We’re talking about a massive economic bubble. And we’ve seen the - depending on the exposure of that bubble, we could see 2008 style threats to economic stability.”

OK, one more: “Should this bubble pop, we should not be entertaining a bailout. We should not entertain a bailout of these corporations, as health care is being denied to everyday Americans, as SNAP and food assistance is being denied to everyday Americans, precipitating some of the very mental crises that people are turning to AI chat bots to try to resolve in themselves.”

As I wrote on Sunday evening, this is going to be one of the defining issues and battles of our times, and Democrats need to make it very clear that they are on the side of workers and regular people, not the big tech companies that are trying to fundamentally rewrite the rules of society and remodel the economy.

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