Do these people know that they're allowed to try to win elections?
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Welcome to a Sunday evening edition of Progress Report.
I’ve got three big news stories to discuss, all of them focused on elections, powerful establishment figures, and democracy.
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It seems like every few months, we’re treated to another cycle of pitiful tantrums thrown by establishment centrists angry over the left’s habit of participating in politics and government. This past week’s romp by progressives and leftists in New York’s Democratic primary elections has triggered a particularly bitter chorus from the corporate class, including sulking tweet threads, whiny appearances on cable news, anonymous complaints to Axios, and statements from newly formed astroturf groups that we’ll never hear from again — all the pissy, insular tactics that put them in this position in the first place.
The complaints all amount to some version of “this is our party, stop competing against us” and “the left is going to take down the Democrats and cost us elections.” The latter is particularly rich coming from the same people who have spent the last 16 years losing elections to the biggest bozos alive and making the Democratic Party less popular than Gonorrhea, failings that should render any opinion they have irrelevant.
Before NJ Rep. Josh Gottheimer insists that democratic socialists aren’t actually Democrats, he should recall that he got leveled in the state’s gubernatorial primary last year, finishing a distant fourth, so his understanding of what a majority of the party wants isn’t exactly authoritative or even coherent.
Ditto Jaime Harrison, the former DNC chair, who complained that people critical of Democratic leaders were running in the party’s primaries. Harrison oversaw one of the most disastrous four-year tenures in modern party history, culminating in a second loss to Donald Trump, so if anybody should have zero say over the mechanisms of the party, it’s him.
But instead of easy insults, I’d actually like to extend some advice to the bereaved centrists in the party: if you’re so concerned about the left winning so many primaries, they should try harder to win them!
They have far more money, more institutional support, more allies in the media (see below), and generally more name recognition, but they continuously blow it on lame old candidates and cautious, corporate-approved platforms designed to appeal to theoretical voters but nobody with an actual pulse. Janet Mills in Maine, Haley Stevens in Michigan, Adriano Espaillat in New York, Diana DeGette in Colorado (see the section below)?
Nobody is mandating that they get behind tired voids of charisma who are bereft of political imagination and run campaigns stuffed to the gills with corporate PAC money; supporting incumbents until the end of time and recruiting bizarre, passionless functionaries is a choice, and yelling at voters for not backing them sends a very different message than intended. If these Democrats are so concerned about winning elections, they should try to do it themselves.
However, I’m not actually sure that these bitter centrist establishment Democrats actually care all that much about winning, because the only way to explain their behavior is that it’s pure sabotage. Trashing the left is meant to be a self-fulfilling prophesy, as they know that the media relishes this in-fighting and will turn it into the main event.
There’s nothing that DC reporters and editors savor more than concern-trolling the left and red-baiting. You’ll never see the political media asking whether nominating ultra-reactionary homophobes, Nazis, and Islamophobes in red districts will hurt Republicans in the general election. But that part’s baked in and not all that interesting to me; complaining about that double standard is just pissing in the wind.
The Headline: The next Democratic primary upset?
The Lede: A series of heated primary races will reach the finish line on Tuesday in Colorado, where long-time incumbents and establishment Democrats face challenges from the left in a number of top races.
The Details: After Zohran Mamdani’s democratic socialist endorsees swept through Congressional and legislative primaries in New York last week, hype is building for another dynamic young DSA member, Melat Kiros. The attorney and barista — she was fired from her firm for publishing a letter defending student protestors against the Gaza genocide — is running against Rep. Diana DeGette (CO-1), a 30-year incumbent who has been in office since 1997, the year that Kiros was born.
It’s not just hype: Kiros led by five in the most recent public poll, which was conducted for her campaign but not disputed by DeGette’s camp. But the incumbent has spent decades building up a campaign war chest from donations from pharmaceutical companies ($500k since 2010), health insurers, and military contractors; some of them are now trying to save her career with a late flurry of millions of dollars in independent expenditures.
If Kiros’s name sounds familiar to you, it may be because she came on the Progress Report live stream for an interview in April, before all the national attention began. Watch that here:
Elsewhere: Just about every major seat is being contested by progressives: state Sen. Julie Gonzales is challenging US Sen. John Hickenlooper in his re-election bid, Attorney General Phil Weiser is running for governor against Sen. Michael Bennet, and antitrust attorney Davey Seligman is taking on Secretary of State Jena Griswold in the contest to succeed Weiser as AG.
All of these races are a product of national anger among Democrats as well as the shifting politics of Colorado, once a purple state that has advanced from solidly blue to verging on progressive bastion. I’m working on a story about Kiros at More Perfect Union, which will publish on Tuesday.
The Headline: Trump’s voter suppression regime is crumbling
The Lede: Multiple federal judges struck down or blocked several aspects of President Trump’s anti-voter executive orders, dealing a blow to the administration’s attempts to “take over the voting” ahead of the midterm elections.
The Details: We’ll work backwards, starting with a ruling on Thursday by a district court judge in Massachusetts who placed an injunction on the March executive order in which . Earlier in the week, the Postmaster General said that the postal service planned to refuse to send mail ballots to people in states that did not comply with the order. That would be catastrophic, as I explored in this report:
That report also explores how Trump’s executive order requiring proof of citizenship in order to register to vote would impact the electorate; even if you haven’t watched, you probably could guess that it would also be catastrophic. Fortunately, that requirement, part of a March 2025 executive order, was permanently blocked by a federal judge on Wednesday. The judge also blocked the provision of Trump’s order that mandated mail-in ballots be received by election day.
Finally, on Monday, another federal judge blocked the other half of the most recent executive order, which would have created a federal database of citizens against which states would be asked to compare their voter rolls. The government admitted that the database, which would be derived from various social safety net eligibility rosters, would have been flawed and risked disenfranchising voters.
Elsewhere: Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed a bill that would have required voters to provide photo ID to cast their ballot by mail.
"While there may be disagreement whether these are large or small burdens, they are burdens, nonetheless, and when layered upon the existing steps already required to vote absentee and vote by mail, there would certainly be voters discouraged from exercising their right to vote," DeWine said in his veto statement.
State law already requires Ohioans to provide a full driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number in order to obtain a mail-in ballot. The new law would have necessitated that Ohio create a new online portal for the photo ID uploads, an extra expense that made Secretary of State Frank LaRose less than bullish on the bill, too.
The Future: It was good news that the federal judge blocked the aspect of the executive order that required mail-in ballots to arrive by election day, but that may not be the end of the line for that particular attempt to disenfranchise what could be millions of Americans.
The Supreme Court is due to issue a ruling this week in Watson v. RNC, a GOP challenge to a law in 14 states that allow absentee ballots to arrive at some point after election day.
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