Flip seats, win power, do good

A new resource and guide

Welcome to a Wednesday night edition of Progress Report.

It’s opening day of Major League Baseball (good!), Mo Salah is leaving Liverpool (bad!), and I’ve got a big new project to share with you. Let’s get to it!

Note: The far-right’s fascist takeover of this country is being aided by the media’s total capitulation to Trump’s extortion. It’s never been more critical to have a bold independent media willing to speak up against the powerful. That’s what I’m trying to do here at Progress Report.

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Earlier this month, I launched a spreadsheet designed to track state legislative elections. The goal was to keep up with the most flippable districts (along with some hopeful reaches) in the most flippable legislatures as well as legislatures where Democrats stand a chance of breaking GOP supermajorities.

It was useful, I thought, but between its long URL and wonky format, not particularly accessible. And if the point of the spreadsheet was to provide the information to as many people as possible, it had to be far more available and useable. And so, over the past few days, I’ve been putting together Flip Seats, a new dedicated website meant to be a one-stop depot for district, candidate, and election dynamics.

There’s still much work to be done, beyond the inevitable little tech glitches I need to fix: there will be new candidates to track, new states to watch, more primaries to follow, links to fill, and as time goes on, interviews to conduct and post. I’ll be updating and linking to the site frequently, and by tomorrow, it’ll be synced with my new ActBlue for the swing legislative candidates it features.

For now, you can donate here — there are a lot of candidates on there, so feel free to pick just a few:

I’ve grown reticent to raise money for many candidates or focus too heavily on elections as a means to an end without really examining the larger context beyond partisan scorekeeping — it’s critical to know who these candidates are, what they stand for, and how likely it is that they’ll wind up being big disappointments.

But in the face of federal tyranny, legitimate designs on dictatorship, the military occupation of cities and small towns alike, along with the collapse of any real hope of improving the national social welfare for the next few years minimum, securing state legislatures could not be more important.

So, I will strive to make sure every candidate we promote and support fit our ideals, but also see this as an all-hands-on-deck moment where, in certain states, we first fight for power, and then over how to wield it. Just look what’s happening in Virginia, where Democrats won a trifecta in November, are moving towards codifying abortion rights in the constitution, and just passed the first paid leave program in the South.

Please, bookmark the new website, spread the word, and return to it often. It’ll continue to be updated.

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