Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.
Thanks to everyone who tuned in to last night’s interview with former New York Assemblyman Michael Blake, who is running for Congress in the Bronx this year. The video from the interview is above and the write-up and clips are below.
Next up, I’ll be chatting live on Thursday evening with Amanda Litman, the co-founder and president of Run for Something. We’ll talk about the organization’s big plans for 2026 and the triumphant special election upset in Texas. Tune in at 8:30 EST — watch out for your invitation.
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It’s not unusual for a Democratic politician to dress themselves up as a progressive to win a contested primary in a deep blue district before shifting to the right once they reach Congress. What’s less common is the district getting a rematch a few cycles later, with the actual progressive rival they defeated in the first go-round back to run a serious and viable primary challenge.
Then again, most lawmakers aren’t nearly as ostentatious and shameless in their turn toward corporate conservatism as Rep. Ritchie Torres (NY-15), so the fact that former Assemblyman Michael Blake is back in the ring this cycle seems almost inevitable. Especially for Blake, who hasn’t been surprised by Torres’ rightward shift and coziness with special interest donors.
“I always knew who he was,” Blake told me in a live conversation on Wednesday evening. “That's why I ran against him the first time.”
Now there’s no ambiguity for voters, either, because Torres has regularly not only taken up reactionary positions, but made headlines with his sometimes comical commitment to increasingly unpopular causes.
Take immigration: Torres sided with Republicans in voting for the Laken Riley Act, which allows immigrants to be deported without ever being convicted of a crime; he voted in favor of a resolution that thanked ICE officers for their hard work; and most recently, he suggested that rogue immigration enforcement agents could be reined in by attaching QR codes to their uniforms. He even filed a bill that put the widely mocked suggestion in writing.
“It's a pretty dumbass idea,” Blake, who spent six years in the legislature and worked closely on criminal justice issues, laughed. “‘Hey, Mr. Agent, can you slow down for a second? Let me take out my phone and try not to shoot me as I scan your QR code.’ It’s just another example of Ritchie not being serious about the work.”
And there are plenty of examples: Blake didn’t just jump into this race over Torres’s position on tormenting immigrants in the United States, it just happens to line up with the congressman’s penchant for making bad political bets. Instead, there were a multitude of issues that led Blake to launch the primary challenge, ranging from foreign to domestic. As a veteran of both of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns and White House, he’s got an aspirational side.
“I'm running because we deserve better in the Bronx. I'm running because we are tired of being seen as the poorest communities,” he said. “We're tired of people looking at us with disrespect. We're tired of immigrants and diverse communities not being empowered the way that we need to be.”
Until last month, when he made the QR code comment, Torres was probably best known for his militant support for Israel and steadfast refusal to acknowledge the genocide in Gaza. His combativeness on the issue has bordered on ostentatious and disturbing; the defense that Torres offered of the wholesale slaughter of Palestinians on Adam Friedland’s comedy talk show was like watching a robot pushing against the outer limits of artificial intelligence.
The issue has been contentious for Blake in other ways, and the complications, from multiple angles, became apparent during our conversation. Midway through the live stream, an anti-Israel activist named Guy Christensen submitted a comment challenging Blake on past support for the country. Christensen had a cameo in Blake’s campaign launch video, for which the candidate later apologized when he learned that the activist had made crude remarks about the employees who were killed at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC.
But how Blake responded was instructive, especially in the context of Torres, who has displayed a constitutional inability to admit that he’s wrong (the $2.6 million he’s received from the pro-Israel lobby may have something to do with that).
“People will ask me, ‘Michael, you went on an AIPAC trip. You did those things before. Where are you at now?’” he acknowledged. “Yeah, I learned. You can’t ignore a genocide that’s happening. I learned. Now even the IDF is acknowledging more than 70,000 people who were killed. I learned. I learned because one of the people that was killed, who worked for World Central Kitchen, he helped us during the Bronx with COVID.”
If there’s any connection between their Bronx district and the state of Israel, it’s that.
Watch the whole interview at the top of the page — we discuss Blake’s time in the Assembly, more about ICE and Israel, his vision for the Bronx, affordability, and other issues.
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