Good news: Democrats might be learning to fight

We're seeing signs of what everyone's demanded

Welcome to a Thursday night edition of Progress Report.

A few quick notes for you:

1. If you missed it, you should check out my interview with Florida Rep. Anna Eskamani, who talked about her visit to Alligator Alcatraz, broke down the legal scams being run by Gov. Ron DeSantis, and discussed her run for Mayor of Orlando. She’s a good time even when discussing human rights violations — a rare talent.

2. Starting next Wednesday night, I’ll be holding weekly live streams with the author and activist (and my friend) Corey Hill. We’ll analyze the big headlines, discuss the latest protests against American fascism, and keep things fun with some pop culture talk. It’ll stream live every Wednesday night at 8:30 pm EST. The live interviews with lawmakers, activists, and experts will continue, too.

3. Paid subscriptions are dropping and it’s making it very hard to continue doing this work, because I have to do more freelancing as a result. If you appreciate the writing or learn something from it, please consider supporting Progress Report with a paid subscription. It’s just $5 a month, and each new paid subscriber means I can give away a subscription to anyone who can’t afford it (just email me if you’d like a free one!).

OK, let’s get to a very big news night.

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😤 Try again: The city council in Olympia, WA voted 4-3 against adopting a ballot initiative that would have established a Workers’ Bill of Rights in the capital city. The council instead voted unanimously to send to the ballot in November, subjecting the decision to raise the minimum wage to $20/hour, among other things, to what might be a pretty heated campaign. It wouldn’t be the highest minimum wage in the state, so there’s a solid chance it would pass.

🌲 Another Washington vote: Over in Bellingham, housing activists have qualified a ballot initiative that would prevent landlords from interfering or retaliating against tenants who engage in tenant organizing or report problems with a building. It’d also prohibit landlords from requiring that tenants sign NDAs to get their lease. A new law that bans landlords from charging tenants junk fees will take effect in August.

This is how you build last power: block by block, in every kind of town and city, providing tangible benefits and protections for regular people.

⚖️ Court victories: The Supreme Court has been an irresponsible disaster, but just as even a broken clock is right twice a day, it wound up making the right choice on a shadow docket case. Specifically, the high court issued an unsigned order that extended the stay on a circuit court decision that would kill off the private right of action on the Voting Rights Act, preventing citizens for suing over racial discrimination in redistricting.

The pause will result in North Dakota retaining its legislative map, which created three distinct districts represented by Native American lawmakers, during the 2026 election. Justices Alito, Thomas, and (surprisingly) Gorsuch dissented from the decision.

Another good bit of news from the courts came from a Trump appointee in Texas of all people: an appeals court judge blocked the White House’s attempt to strip union rights from most federal workers. This comes after the Supreme Court blessed mass firings by the White House, but this is still a huge and hopeful ruling.

What was an applause line then has since become an apocryphal one: Michelle Obama, at her DNC speech in 2016, insisted that “when they go low, we go high,” providing the perfect excuse for Democrats to refrain from responding in kind to the sort of dirty GOP attacks that have defined the Trump era.

It was a noble suggestion that assumed too much of the news media and thus the American public, and while there have been occasional attempts to move beyond the ethos — remember when Democrats called JD Vance “weird” for a few weeks? — Democrats have always defaulted back to the safer higher ground.

Until now, it seems.

You can see the shift happening in real-time, the lights in individual lawmakers’ eyes growing several watts brighter as the system update spreads through the party’s intranet. It’s happening on several issues, most prominently the Jeffrey Epstein catastrophe that has been eating MAGA alive from the inside. And as I’ve been insisting it would for the past four years, including when I took out billboards mocking Ron DeSantis back in 2022, it’s working.

Consider the rapid evolution of Nancy Pelosi’s rhetoric last Thursday, starting with her comments to NBC about the dominant news of the day:

"Whether it's Jeffrey Epstein or Alcatraz, it's all off the subject of what they're doing with this budget that is harmful to the kitchen table, meeting the kitchen-table needs of the American people."

It was the same exact thing that Hakeem Jeffries had been repeating ad nauseam since Trump was elected (from his cabinet nominees a distraction up through the attempted military occupation of Los Angeles) and Chuck Schumer has called everything from a government shutdown to the rights of trans kids. A flaccid and useless response in a media environment that prioritizes salaciousness and spice, it signaled that Democrats were disinterested in national discourse and unwilling to truly fight for power.

And then hours later, Pelosi changed course with a tweet that opened the floodgates:

Some Democrats had already pounced on the Epstein fracas, but it was Pelosi who essentially authorized a party-wide pile-on, which was helped along by that night’s revelation that Trump sent Epstein a card that might as well have said “we’re both guilty of sex crimes” for his 50th birthday. It’s been a blitz ever since: concern-troll cable news hits, outright trolling social posts, and clever legislative maneuvers that forced Speaker Mike Johnson to look complicit in a cover-up and several other Republicans to join in on the pile-on.

Even Politico, which regularly uses Democrats as punching bags, ran a story today suggesting that the party has found its footing on the issue after yesterday’s Oversight subcommittee vote to subpoena Epstein-related files.

“People are going to move on this regardless,” said a Republican with direct knowledge of the internal talks this week. “The bill is going to come due.”

There’s also intense frustration among rank-and-file members that Democrats successfully used the Epstein case to attack House Republicans, who struggled through the crisis this week.

“Democrats smelled blood in the water,” the Republican added. “And they caught us flat-footed.”

White House officials know they have a problem.

The natural tendency for Democrats — as rational people — is to follow Occam’s Razor and wave away conspiracy theories, which (along with perhaps links to Bill Clinton and donors) led to their prior disinterest in the case. But you don’t have to wear a tinfoil hat to see the utility of devoting real time to pushing this issue, both in the halls of Congress and in the media.

First, it ground work to a halt, preventing Republicans from moving on some of their priorities. Presumably the Senate will also participate in this parade of Epstein-related amendments when it is back in session, putting vulnerable Republican senators on the defensive. Second, even if you don’t believe the right-wing conspiracies around Epstein, the reality is that there is without question a lot being hidden from the public because it would be embarrassing to Trump and other people close to the administration.

There have already been a number of significant revelations unearthed by the media — including the dirty birthday card and the book’s present location, the fact that Trump knew he was named in the files, and video of Epstein pleading the fifth when asked about his history with Trump — that certainly wouldn’t have seen the light of day had Democrats just dropped the issue. How do I know? Both the letter and video footage were already part of the evidence held by the Justice Department, it’s just that nobody cared enough to unearth them until now, when there’s incentive to dig and dig into the matter again.

For too long, Democrats have either ceded the narrative or pushed stories that had little resonance in a news environment that is always focused on the new and salacious. They undoubtedly have to hammer Republicans for the draconian cuts and resultant suffering that will be a product of their Big Beautiful tax bill, but the effects simply haven’t been felt yet and prospective harms do not resonate with the news media. I can tell you this from loads of personal experience — those stories work during a fight over a policy, but once it passes, editors and readers lose interest until they start to impact the community.

For better or worse, Democrats have to understand that they can no longer dictate the national conversation with policy and press conferences, and without the ability to connect directly with the public, they need to seize on the media’s preoccupations and make them work to their advantage. In a sense, the same thing is happening with the growing fight over redistricting and the GOP’s plan to further gerrymander Texas and other states to enhance the party’s chances of holding on to Congress.

Voting rights have long been one of the focuses of this newsletter, and I’ve always been in favor of independent redistricting committees. Much of my 2022 was spent campaigning for the passage of a new Voting Rights Act, and I believe that having fairly drawn districts across the country is the path towards a truly representative democracy. But I also understand that Republicans have no interest in fairness, representation, or anything other than pure power, so the only real way of protecting democracy is matching their threats and even surpassing them.

So far, it looks as if the governors of both California and New York are considering how they could go about circumventing their redistricting process and fixing their own maps, while states like New Jersey and Connecticut mull smaller changes given their lower number of Congressional seats.

Here’s Kathy Hochul, who has shown some more spunk lately as she looks at re-election in 2026, at an event earlier today:

“All’s fair in love and war. We’re following the rules. We do redistricting every 10 years,” Hochul said. “But if there’s other states violating the rules and are trying to give themselves an advantage, all I’ll say is, I’m going to look at it closely with Hakeem Jeffries.”

All of this comes as Democratic state-level officials were already talking about the next post-census redistricting, which will happen nationwide after 2030. They know they have to go hard at the next two rounds of legislative elections in order to prevent full GOP gerrymanders in a number of states that should be more purple than red.

The DLCC’s memo proposed a year-by-year plan to increase Democratic seats, beginning with Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin in 2026. Four-year state senate terms beginning in 2027 are key, the memo points out, as are state house and assembly races in 2028, 2029 and 2030.

Democrats have room to make gains in Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma over the next five years, Begala says. North Carolina, Michigan and Pennsylvania are also key targets for Democrats, though they each come with hurdles, like a hostile state supreme court in North Carolina.

I’m glad they’re focusing on this — we’ve only been ringing the alarm and trying to shift races in anyway possible since 2018.

Heard it here first: Last month, I held a live interview with Iowa state Rep. JD Scholten about his run for Senate against Joni Ernst. This week, he is featured in Vanity Fair. This happens a lot.

Relentless: Business lobbyists in Los Angeles are launching an effort to repeal an gross receipt tax in the city after failing to prevent or repeal the new minimum wage for tourism industry workers. Starting in 2028, hospitality and tourism workers will make a minimum of $30 per hour, ensuring that working people can benefit from the public outlay being made to host the Summer Olympics that year. The gross receipt tax charges a levy on businesses based on their revenues.

It’s a bit of an arms race: Unite Here Local 11, which represents the hospitality workers, just filed a ballot initiative that would raise the city’s overall minimum wage to $30 by 2028.

Sticky to it: Activists in Oklahoma are mounting another effort to legalize recreational marijuana in the Sooner State, and will be collecting signatures for a new ballot initiative in early August. The organization is proceeding as if Oklahoma’s new hurdles on qualifying initiatives will remain the law, even though they’re being challenged at the state Supreme Court. Voters approved medical marijuana in 2018 by roundly rejected recreational weed in 2022.

Slow but steady: The ACLU filed new motions in a lawsuit against Virginia that argues that the state’s practice of permanently disenfranchising voters for felony convictions is unconstitutional.

The lawsuit, filed on behalf of around 300,000 disenfranchised Virginians, points to an 1870 law that forbids the state from stripping voting rights away from people for anything except convictions for “felonies at common law.” The idea is that so many of the things considered felonies today — like drug offenses — were not part of common law back in 1870. The lawsuit was allowed to move ahead by a judge back in March of 2024, and with the state’s gubernatorial election this fall, the clocks ticking.

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