New polls offer political promise and societal breakdown

Key court decisions, too

Welcome to a Sunday night edition of Progress Report.

There’s a ton to cover tonight, including some huge new national and abortion polls, voting rights, wild health care numbers, and much more. But first, a word about the newsletter.

The constant churn of the news cycle means that there’s always something new for writers like me to investigate and report, which generally means that even great stories wash away with the tide on a near-daily basis. I’ve been tackling a wide array of topics of late, so I want to take a moment to reflect on the breadth of coverage on offer here at Progress Report.

Over the past month or so alone, we’ve featured:

• An interview with a leading Arizona legislator about the issues roiling the nation’s most high stakes swing state

• An interview with the executive director of LULAC on Texas AG Ken Paxton’s assault on Latino activists as well as a follow-up report

• A conversation with Dakota Adams, the estranged son of Oathkeepers founder Stewart Rhodes, about far-right cults and his run as a Democrat

• A hidden camera look at a labor action inside the US’s only union Amazon site

• Stories about the legal war over labor rights, coverage of ballot initiatives and voting rights, debate analysis, polling, policy discussion, and more.

• Later this week, I’ll have two big stories that you won’t want to miss.

What happens after the election will demand even detailed coverage, so I want to build up progressive media infrastructure to compete with the far-right.

Unfortunately, we slipped a spot to #117 on the Substack charts — directly beneath Roger Stone’s newsletter. This won’t do.

So, if you can subscribe, now is the time. In fact, I’ll even give you a 20% discount for today only in honor of my son’s second birthday. That’s just $4 a month!

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🗽 🚕 New York City: In the city that never sleeps, it’s only fitting that the feds have been raiding and subpoenaing the mayor’s staff, appointees, and associates at all hours of the day and night. Mayor Eric Adams, the former police officer who campaigned on being tough on crime, has surrounded himself with alleged grifters, scammers, and blackmail artists, to the point that even the guy he hired to clean up the NYPD had his homes raided last night.

The almost unfathomable breadth of corruption touches the police department, fire department, public schools, libraries the migrant crisis, housing, and virtually every other aspect of city life. As a result of his sins, the guy who insists that he was chosen by God to be the mayor is going to face a very competitive primary next year.

Instead of covering that primary, I’m helping one of the candidates.

I met state Sen. Jessica Ramos while working on a few stories — one on raising the minimum wage, another on rights for nail tech workers — and admired her empathetic politics and hard-charging style. She’s the daughter of immigrants, the chair of the Senate Labor Committee, and a lifelong New Yorker. I’d say more, but I’d rather you check out her launch video, which I co-wrote and produced:

My role will largely be doing pieces like the one above. Given my day job as a journalist, I’m eschewing pay and recusing myself from covering New York politics for as long as I am volunteering for the campaign. If you want to make a contribution — and if you’re in NYC, any donation unlocks 8:1 matching funds — click right here.

Race for the White House: VP Kamala Harris has opened up leads on Donald Trump in two major new national polls, holding a 49%-44% advantage in the new NBC poll and a 52%-48% lead in the latest CBS/YouGov survey.

Neither poll offered swing state cross tabs, but there were a few data points I think are worth discussing, largely from the more detailed CBS/YouGov survey.

First, the demographic breakdowns look quite positive for Harris, who only trails by four points among male voters. That’s a marked improvement from August, when she trailed by nine points among men. Her lead among women fell by just one point, within the margin of error. The age breakdowns largely remained the same, though Harris did improve three points among voters ages 45-64.

The vice president trails by ten points among white voters, a two-point improvement from the August poll, while she gained three points among Black voters to give her an 85%-13% lead.

YouGov asked a load of questions about current events and specific news stories, and the most dismal results by far came in response to the horrible lie that Trump, JD Vance, and the far-right media has spread about Haitians in Springfield, OH.

All told, 37% of respondents said that they thought it was at least likely true that Haitian immigrants are eating people’s pet dogs and cats in Springfield.

If this poll is a good representation of public opinion, and there’s no reason to think it isn’t, it means that more than 1/3 of Americans believe that Haitians are eating cats and dogs despite the many media reports that have debunked the claim and the fact that everybody from that town, from the Republican mayor on down to the people who started the rumors, say it isn’t true.

That is beyond depressing — it’s a borderline national emergency.

The question is just why those 37% of Americans believe such a heinous lie. While two-thirds of Republicans believe believe the claim, it has to go beyond simple partisanship.

My guess is that for some people, it’s a stark symptom of a life spent inside the far-right disinformation echo chamber, with surround sound bullshit emanating from cable news, white nationalist influencers, conspiracy-peddling YouTube channels, and message boards in the darkest corners of the forbidden zone of the internet. The idea of Black Haitian migrants acting like savages and eating the beloved pets of hardworking white folk in the heartland of America, probably while also taking their jobs and mooching off their tax dollars, is a titillating validation of a worldview that they have either been fooled into adopting or felt freed to finally embrace.