Welcome to a Friday night edition of Progress Report.
Thanks to everyone who tuned into our interview last night; you can watch the whole thing above or read about it and watch clips below. It’s the latest in our series featuring progressive activists and down ballot lawmakers running in tough primaries, aiming to remake the Democratic Party and Congress altogether.
In exciting news, Denver activist and soon-to-be Congresswoman Melat Kiros will be joining us again on July 21st for a discussion about her triumphant campaign, how she pulled it off, and where she goes from here. Watch our first conversation, from back in April.
Note: Think of Progress Report as the news before you read the news, bringing you conversations with up-and-coming candidates, behind the scenes with activists running critical campaigns, and perspectives you don’t hear on cable news. It’s a one-man publication and a second full-time job, so if you value this work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for just $2.50 a month — it’s the only way I can keep the work going.
The shift left could be shifting west.
Longtime activist and organizer Kai Newkirk is challenging former Phoenix mayor and four-term incumbent Rep. Greg Stanton in Arizona’s fourth Congressional district, betting that the grassroots uprising against corporate-friendly, right-leaning Democrats can flourish in the desert, too.
After major wins for progressives and democratic socialists in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Denver, the next big opportunity — and the only primary in July — has presented itself in the suburbs of Phoenix. Newkirk is a peace activist who has worked for years on immigrant issues and pivoted to become an early voice against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. His campaign video was produced by the same team that made NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign spots, and he’s working with the campaign manager who led democratic socialist Chris Rabb to victory in a Philadelphia Congressional primary in May.
Stanton, meanwhile, has voted in recent years to support the right-wing Laken Riley Act and has unceasingly supported Israel, even speaking out against President Joe Biden when he sough to temporarily block the sale of 2000-pound bombs used to devastate Palestinian cities. AIPAC is his single-biggest campaign contributor.
A supporter of Medicare for All and opponent of big data centers, Newkirk is generating enough heat that Think Big, the PAC funded by pro-AI group Anthropic and Marc Andreesen, just dropped $227K on ads intended to stymy his campaign.
Word of those ads first reached the internet just before Progress Report’s interview with Newkirk last night, but I was focused on another piece of breaking news: the AZ Young Democrats issued a statement Thursday evening rescinding their endorsement of Newkirk due to rumors of “concerning patterns of behaviors,” without offering any specifics or hints.
The Arizona Republic reported today that there still have been no specific or substantiated allegations made against Newkirk, only vague insinuations; much of the noise seems to be based on an essay about his time organizing in his native West Virginia, which said he’d had consensual relationships with other organizers. One of the authors of that essay has since renounced it and endorsed Newkirk, which the campaign pointed out on social media.
As a reporter, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask Newkirk about it. So early in our interview, I put it to him point blank, which you can watch below:
The left is obviously skittish right now after the controversy in Maine with Graham Platner, but it’s important to note that these situations, as of now, are nothing alike. The campaign alleges that the Stanton camp is playing dirty, dredging up old rumors.
Newkirk has been an activist for the better part of 25 years, going back to the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. He is running an uphill campaign, and the allegations makes the challenge steeper, but 11 days out from the election deadline, internal polls have him tied with Greg Stanton while the big spend from the AI super PAC indicates that there is real concern that this will be the next big upset.
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