Greetings from the grassroots uprising

As people watch Trump on TV, the real action is happening at the local level

Welcome to a Saturday edition of Progress Report.

Hello from Chicago, where I’m spending the weekend attending the Democratic Socialists of America’s annual convention. I’m here to represent More Perfect Union, meet grassroots and labor activists, and hopefully find a lot of interesting new story leads. After a rough few years plagued by in-fighting and budget issues, DSA’s critical role in helping Zohran Mamdani sweep through the NYC mayoral primary has given the organization a new energy and public relevance.

You may not be a leftist, and that’s fine. What interests me is the work being done on the local, grassroots level, which is essential for preserving democracy and ensuring that even modest progressivism can thrive. Today we’re talking about that grassroots activism, ballot initiatives, the redistricting wars, and more.

Also, we’ve now raised $5,621 for some of the Texas lawmakers who left the state to prevent Donald Trump’s extreme gerrymander. Thank you to everyone who has contributed!

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Local stories, big impact

Congress is out of session right now, but they don’t make laws these days anyway. The real action (and hope for the future) happens on the state and local level, so here are some important local policy and election stories that have flown beneath the radar:

Massachusetts: Activists and business groups filed paperwork for a host of potential ballot initiatives this week, setting the stage for what could be several expensive and hard-fought campaigns.

The list is highlighted by a proposal to tie rent increases to the cost of living, with an overall cap of 5% year-over-year. Units in newly constructed buildings would be exempt for the first 10 years after they hit the market, and owner-occupied buildings with four or fewer units would score a permanent exemption.

The initiative, backed by the local Homes for All coalition, would be a long time coming: voters in Massachusetts agreed to ban rent control in 1994. Only Boston had an active rent control law at the time, and that year’s midterm elections were marked by conservatives’ successful demonization of cities and liberal policy.

But the housing crisis has hit new heights in Massachusetts in recent years; soaring prices have limited ownership opportunities and led to more than half of renters being cost-burdened, meaning that they spend more than 30% of their income on housing costs. More than a quarter of Massachusetts renters are severely cost burdened, spending at least half their income on housing.

The real estate industry backed a new law passed last year that will invest up to $5 billion in the construction, but advocates say that’s not nearly enough to address the issue. The industry spent big to defeat legislation backed by Boston Mayor Michelle Wu that would have allowed cities to cap annual rent increases at 10%, and three years later, it’ll have to spend even more to stop a far more restrictive cap.

Real estate also did not like a new rule, enacted in the state budget, that ends brokers’ fees for renters, shifting the onus to the landlord or property manager who rented out the property.

Other potential ballot initiatives for 2026 include a reduction in the state income tax, a voter ID requirement, and same-day voter registration.

Seattle: The populist left is enjoying a resurgence in the perpetual battle between middle class communities and the major tech companies and real estate interests that have transformed the city over the past 30 years.

Progressive transit and housing organizer Katie Wilson broke the 50% barrier in the first round of the city’s mayoral election, topping the centrist incumbent, Bruce Harrell. She jumped into the race in February and is riding a wave of anti-Trump energy that has metastasized into a broader rejection of centrist incumbents. I’ll be interviewing her this coming week, so keep your eye out for that one.

Wilson decided to run for mayor after voters in Seattle approved a ballot initiative that places a small tax on the city’s highest-earning businesses — think gigantic tech companies — to fund the social housing program currently in development. Harrell opposed that initiative, though he’s now backing one that would shift more tax burden on the top 10% of businesses in the city to give relief to the other 90% of them.

Rounding out the progressive wins: Seattle residents agreed to re-up the “democracy vouchers” program that gives voters $100 to donate to candidates for local office. The unique public financing scheme will carry on for at least another decade.

California: State and local governments are beginning to reckon with the massive budget shortfalls created by DOGE and Trump’s big beautiful bill with a mix of spending cuts and less-than-ideal measures to boost income. Santa Clara County is one of the first municipalities to move in a definitive direction, as the board of commissioners voted to place a sales tax increase on the ballot in November.

The proposed 0.625% bump would generate around $330 million per year, which would be directed at plugging the Medicaid gap. The county is going to lose around $1 billion from Medicaid funding in the coming years, making this proposal just one of several actions that need to be taken. A regressive tax, sales tax is already high in the region, topping 9.8% in some areas.

Arkansas: It took a while due to trouble with the Secretary of State, but the League of Women Voters plans to launch its campaign to save direct democracy in the Razorback State. On August 26th, the group will kick off its signature-gathering efforts for a constitutional amendment that would prevent lawmakers from changing the Arkansas state constitution without the approval of voters, including changes made to the ballot initiative process. Arkansas legislators recently passed new laws that make that process far more difficult to navigate.

From the ground up

Even if your personal politics don’t lean as far to the left as the typical DSA platform, the organization and its allies play a critical role in the Democratic Party and democratic process. For years portrayed as outliers who hurt “mainstream” Democrats’ chances of winning elections, DSA has been one of the few organized counters to the worst instincts of the corporatist forces that run the party. This is true ideologically — the public shares the emphasis economic justice and opposition to Israel’s genocide in Gaza — as well as structurally.

There really is no other national leftist umbrella organization that has invested in grassroots politics in such a comprehensive way; issue groups are important, but inherently limited and fractured, restricting their broader impact.

For all the talk about Democrats having to invest and rebuild down ballot, the party is still hyper-focused on national politics and operates from a top-down orientation; that’s what gets people’s attention and draws their dollars, after all. The party’s candidate recruitment and big actions are generally geared toward winning federal elections and policy battles, wins that become more elusive when you fail to build the infrastructure, popular support, and power from the ground up. And even the regular days of protest since Donald Trump returned to power have largely been organized by unions, Indivisible, local groups, and regular people who met on Reddit.

DSA weighs in on national politics, but its best work is done in hundreds of communities around the country, uniting activists of different stripes and affiliations.

Everybody here is up to something big back home. A delegate from Northern California told me about an effort to qualify a mansion tax ballot initiative in a county with a lot of mansions. An activist from Florida pointed to a fight against a powerful slumlord with properties across the South. Chapters in New Jersey are pooling resources to build a rapid reaction network to resist local ICE raids. A city council member from a suburb of Minneapolis recalled a recent fight to expand a light rail line that ran through his town. A housing activist from Montana told me about the fight for social housing. The list — and there’s literally a list I’m keeping — goes on.

Democratic politics have become almost entirely built around email fundraising and exorbitant outlays on TV advertisements written and placed by consultants, with ever-diminishing returns. Politicians do not deliver lasting change; it has to come from the grassroots, driven and fortified by mass movements of people who have been empowered to fight and others who have been convinced that someone is fighting for them.

Behind enemy lines

I don’t anticipate any of them stopping by the DSA convention, but there’s an element of congruence to fact that most of the runaway Democrats who bolted Texas to prevent a new gerrymander are also spending the weekend here in Chicago.

It’s ultimately very unlikely that the Texas Democrats will be able to prevent Gov. Greg Abbott from doing Donald Trump’s bidding and carving what could be five new GOP seats. The math and mechanics of the state’s legislative rules just don’t make it feasible: Democrats plan to stay here until at least the end of this special session, on August 19th, but Abbott can and will just call a new 30-day session once they return. If they refuse to show up for the next special session, Abbott and biblical divorcé AG Ken Paxton will see to it that they’re arrested and potentially removed from office.

It would require staying through at least Thanksgiving to scuttle the redistricting plan, which would impose a significant financial burden on lawmakers who work full-time jobs while serving in the part-time legislature. Some of them — including Rep. Trey Martinez-Fischer, who led a similar exodus in 2021 — are already framing the sojourn as a call to arms for other Democrats, not a viable long-term plan.

“It takes an act of defiance like this to wake up the country and let them know that our democracy is being stolen right in front of our eyes,” Rep. Martinez-Fischer told the Texas Tribune. “If we’re going to be the spark that lights that fire, then we’re doing our jobs.”

It’s essential that Democrats start fighting fire with fire, but after years of unilateral disarmament, the structural factors that make GOP gerrymandering so potent will take years to reverse. Republicans dominate school boards and city councils, legislatures and courts. They control public projects, hold enormous geographic advantages, and command armies of supporters whose numbers can overpower significant shifts in public polling.

Three of the five potential new GOP districts are located in southern Texas, where Hispanic communities have veered hard right over several election cycles. Florida Republicans are also looking to redraw their own already gerrymandered Congressional map, to take advantage of a similar realignment and gain as many as three new seats. Ohio Republicans are going to squeeze out another seat, as will Missouri’s GOP. And if the Supreme Court throws out what remains of the Voting Rights Act, all bets are off.

In both Texas and Florida, these shifts have occurred because conservatives have assiduously courted Hispanic communities, building local party infrastructure, buying up media outlets, and emphasizing cultural affinities. They took over local government and then state legislative seats, creating the momentum and infrastructure necessary to then win federal elections.

The one factor that’s largely been ignored in all the redistricting talk is that these lines are based on 2024 presidential election results, which may prove to be a high water mark for the GOP. Trump has the ability to draw infrequent voters to the polls, so Republican numbers are always higher when he’s on the ballot. The midterm elections will instead be a referendum on his policies, and his tanking job performance numbers, especially among minorities and young people, do not portend well for the politicians who have to defend his record.

All of this creates a serious crisis of legitimacy for the upcoming elections, a problem that may only get worse with Trump already signaling his intent to double down on rigging the maps. On Thursday, he announced that he’s asking the Commerce Department to conduct a mid-decade census — one that excludes undocumented immigrants.

Of course, Trump has no legal authority to do this, as the Constitution explicitly states that the census must occur once per decade and include every person in the country regardless of legal status, but the Supreme Court has shown a willingness — enthusiasm, even — to ignore the Constitution when politically convenient. There still has yet to be a ruling on birthright citizenship, which should be as clear a slam dunk case as any.

Rigging the census in this way might ding a few red states, including Texas and Florida, but it would ultimately serve to steal more Congressional seats and presidential electoral votes from blue states. At that point, what’s left of American democracy would cease to exist, the legitimacy of federal authority would evaporate, and it’d be hard to justify a state paying taxes to the feds in the absence of fair representation. It’s ironic that it’s the party of so-called “state’s rights” pushing federal supremacy, but the ideology was always about subjugation, not confederation.

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