Democratic primary challenges are piling up
Whether general elections are fair, however, is in doubt
Welcome to a Thursday edition of Progress Report.
Lots to review today, so let’s jump into it. The first story is for everybody, and then the Midweek Review is for paid subscribers. In the latter part, we’ll run through a growing number of primary challenges, fights over voting rights, and civil rights — it’s a busy time!
Note: Unlike many progressive advocacy journalists, I’ve gone fully independent, with no special advertising deals or close relationships with powerful politicians to temper what I write.
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On Monday, Axios ran a listicle of gripes from disgruntled Democratic lawmakers exasperated by their constituents’ demands for them to stand up to the Trump administration. These Democrats, almost all of whom were granted anonymity to complain about their voters, drew a red line at any sort of personal sacrifice in defense of democracy, and one recalled visceral backlash for telling constituents to “channel their frustration into a focus on winning back Congress in 2026.”
That line has been trotted out by conflict-averse, institution-loving Democrats since Trump retook the White House, almost always to the chagrin of voters who want immediate action. And whether or not it’s a reasonable answer considering the party’s dearth of power at the moment, its presupposition that there will be completely free and fair elections across the country in 2026 is becoming increasingly hard to believe.
Late Wednesday afternoon, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott summoned a special session of the legislature and assigned its members a laundry list of major tasks. Among the items: redrawing the state’s Congressional map at the request of Donald Trump and the Department of Justice.
On July 7th, assistant AG Harmeet Dhillon sent a letter to Abbott claiming that the DOJ’s civil rights division was concerned that the state’s Congressional map represented an illegal racial gerrymander — against white people. Dhillon targeted Texas’s 9th, 18th, 29th and 33rd districts, each of which elected a Black or Latino Democrat in November. They’re all safe blue seats, representing a full third of Texas’s Democratic delegation.
The DOJ’s letter gives Texas flimsy pretense to redraw those and other districts so that they’re more likely to elect Republicans to Congress, which Trump and his aides have demanded multiple times already this year. The existing maps were already redrawn after the last census to restore Republicans’ deeper advantage at a time when Texas seemed more likely to turn blue, which sparked an ongoing lawsuit against the state. But Republicans know that with partisan gerrymandering now legal, it would require proving that any redraw was explicitly racially motivated to win relief from the federal judiciary, and even that avenue may be gone by this time next year depending on what the Supreme Court decides in Louisiana v. Callais.
Republican states are also finding new and creative ways to make it increasingly difficult for citizens to pursue ballot initiatives. Today, the state’s ballot board ruled that the Ohio Equal Rights Act, a proposed constitutional amendment that would extend civil rights protections to additional categories, should be broken into two initiatives: one that would guarantee equal rights and another that would invalidate Ohio’s ban on same sex marriage (as if marriage equality isn’t implicit in equal rights).
Accepting the split would require acquiring more than 400,000 valid signatures twice as well as running two separate campaigns, something that Equal Rights Ohio is now mulling over. The organization is one of many that has seen its cut and dry initiatives spiked by complicated state rules and dishonest actors; Oklahoma just added more hurdles to an already difficult ballot initiative process, while activists trying to reform Arkansas’s direct democracy system have been drastically slowed by that state’s new requirements.
The actual electorate is also at risk.
In Georgia, the secretary of state’s office plans to cancel half a million inactive voters this summer, which would be one of the largest single purges in US history. There are 100,000 people on that list who would be removed because they have not voted in recent elections and another 100,000 who simply did not respond to a mailer sent to their listed residence.
The secretary of state’s office is now also looking to audit additional voters who are registered at business addresses or in residences with more than 10 registered voters, even though there are vanishingly few instances of voter fraud.
Shrinking the pool of eligible voters nationwide is also one of the Trump administration’s top priorities, and it’s using both “novel” legal means and blunt force trauma to pursue it.
Rescinding the 14th amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, an absurd concept rendered a distinct possibility by the Supreme Court, would disenfranchise tens of millions of people. So would mass denaturalization, a prime focus of the Department of Justice and Congress that just approved ungodly sums of money for its implementation. There are 24.5 million naturalized citizens in the United States and they make up 10% of eligible voters.
Already, immigrant communities have been terrorized into missing work and avoiding civic involvement, and new state laws creating election crimes could serve to keep some away from the ballot box.
I’ll admit, the above made for grim reading, but it’s not all dire. In fact, there are a number of positive news stories that represent positive inversions of those assaults on democracy.
In the midweek rundown, we’ll cover those new developments along with some exciting election news and several other stories.
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