Political progress in 2025? These wins prove it wasn't all bad
Trump was a disaster. But that's not the end of the story.
Welcome to a New Year’s Eve edition of Progress Report.
We’re now in the final hours of what was a very rotten year, both politically and personally. But we’re all here, having survived what seemed like what might be an endless gauntlet of chaos and cruelty, and if nothing else, we know that we can emerge from darkness together, counting down to collective renewal.
The next year will be one existential battle after another, and it remains to be seen whether the Democratic Party, even bolstered by a new wave of primary challengers eager to take on oligarchs and fascists, will be up for the challenge. Before we enter that arena, however, let’s look back on some good things that happened this year, which was marked by a resilience and, yes, resistance, that didn’t necessarily seem possible 365 days ago.
Note: The far-right’s fascist takeover of this country is being aided by the media’s total capitulation to Trump’s extortion. It’s never been more critical to have a bold independent media willing to speak up against the powerful. That’s what I’m trying to do here at Progress Report.
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For all the gloom and doom that hung in the air as the calendar turned to 2025, Donald Trump’s first year back in the White House managed to be even worse than anticipated.
Take a broad view of the nation’s sociopolitical landscape and you’ll see only carnage and despair: secret police stalking and deporting innocent people, military occupations of major cities, the dismantling of the national health care system, illegal wars launched on a whim, and seemingly limitless power granted to malicious (and frequently stupid) oligarchs, all readily evident.
And yet, look a bit closer, and you’ll find glimmers of hope, and with a bit of foresight, real reasons for hope.
This was a disastrous year, no doubt, but there were real victories to celebrate, politically, electorally, and legislatively. There were vibe shifts, public awakenings, and material improvements. And more importantly, each of them portend well for what will be, once again, the most important election cycle of our lifetimes.
If you’re looking for hope going into the New Year, this list of positive developments is for you:
Mayoral triumphs
A year after blue states and big cities swung to the right, the left came roaring back with huge upset wins in marquee mayoral elections in New York City and Seattle.
As millennial democratic socialists with no pre-existing media presence or establishment allies, Zohran Mamdani and Katie Wilson represented the polar opposite of what pundits, politicos, and donors look for when anointing candidates, and that was actually a strength this year.
Democratic voters, outraged by the party’s losses in 2024 and ongoing submissiveness to Trump, finally rejected the flaccid incrementalism, consultant curation, and conventional wisdom that had delivered such a legacy of failure. Both Mamdani and Wilson were primed to capitalize, given their histories and dispositions: while unheralded, they had deep roots in existing grassroots organizations and owed nothing to their cities’ power brokers, freeing them to speak truth to power and set up deep contrasts with unpopular, ultra-establishment, billionaire-backed politicians.
Critically, this was more than a contrast in rhetoric and style. Both candidates ran populist, policy-heavy campaigns that focused intently on affordability and promised a dramatic reimagining of what government can do for regular people. Their platforms had a lot in common: Mamdani ran on freezing the rent on a million city-regulated apartments, building tens of thousands of affordable units, and making buses fast and free, while Wilson committed to prioritizing the nation’s most ambitious experiment in social housing after spending much of her career fighting for free public transit.
Mamdani and Wilson, who will each be sworn in on Thursday, will be under immense pressure to deliver on their promises, both from constituents and progressives nationwide; their administrations represent the left’s best chance of proving that broader government intervention can work both practically and politically. Yet the fact that they managed to get elected at all must be seen as a triumph in an era of dark money, oligarchical influence, and media consolidation.
Neither candidate hurt for grassroots support or small dollar donors, which helped them maximize from their cities’ respective public election financing programs: NYC provides 8x match for qualifying small dollar donations, a boost that allowed Mamdani to keep up Andrew Cuomo’s outside allies, and Seattle’s democracy vouchers sent Wilson small donations on behalf of engaged residents.
These novel programs functioned exactly as intended, creating much more competitive elections, providing proof of concept for other cities interested in preserving their democracies.
Special election triumphs and legislative flips
Donald Trump’s second reign of terror got off to a fast start last winter, producing countless nightmares and one thin silver lining: Americans very quickly remembered how much they hated this moron and began organizing to neutralize Trump and his GOP supplicants before the calendar flipped to spring.
The uprising didn’t just happen in urban centers like New York and Seattle, either. Pissed off citizens signed up by the thousands to run for office all over the country in next year’s elections, and throughout 2025, Democratic candidates way over-performed past results in the jurisdictions where they ran in special and off-year elections, in both swing districts and red, rural territories where the party hadn’t competed in years.
Energetic young candidates won previously red seats in big upsets with outsized impacts; in Iowa, Catelin Drey’s summer victory ended the GOP’s supermajority in the state senate, after even bigger upsets in that state earlier in the year — and reinvigorated Democratic apparatus through bottom-up organizing.
You can find our coverage here.
All told, Democratic candidates flipped 21% of GOP-held legislative seats, mostly through upset special elections and better-than-expected results in New Jersey and Virginia in November. That’s simply huge in a year with few elections, and while some caveats apply — Democrats in many places now have the more educated, politically aware base that can more easily turn out of lower-publicity elections — it’s a sign that the public still believes that the country is still salvageable.
It’s also a sign that while the Democratic Party brand is in the gutter, people are still willing, for the moment at least, to vote for its individual candidates over lunatic conservatives. That will only last so long as Democrats prove that they can keep their promises (hence the importance of the new mayors succeeding) instead of folding on command (primaries, explained below, will be helpful in that regard).
Republicans will point out that they always underperform when Trump isn’t on the ballot, but that’s not a very helpful excuse now that the party has to figure out its post-Trump future (assuming, of course, the Supreme Court doesn’t just let him run again). So it’s a temporary reprieve, with the potential to be something bigger, if Democrats can get their act together (ideally via wholesale generational changes in the party).
Local school boards also flipped en masse, as parents grew exasperated at the right-wing extremist playbook of shifting education policy to mean, irrelevant culture war battles.
More election wins here:
The redistricting wars reach a stalemate
There’s plenty of blame to go around, but four years later, it doesn’t really matter who is most responsible for the failure to enact a new and improved Voting Rights Act when Democrats had a trifecta in 2021-22. It was obvious from the jump that fumbling a new VRA would be a historic blunder, one that insulted and endangered the party’s most loyal voters, not to mention democracy itself, and has proven even more disastrous than anticipated, with Trump leaning on Republican states to gerrymander their Congressional maps to rig the upcoming elections for the GOP.
I’m a firm believer in independent redistricting processes that strip all partisanship out of mapmaking, but preserving democracy is messy business, which in this case means temporarily sidelining procedural ideals. Fortunately Democrats outside of DC weren’t nearly as willfully impotent or inept as those in the nation’s capital, and a combination of aggressive lawmakers and well-informed voters lushed back in a real and meaningful way.
California Democrats redrew their map to neutralize the Texas GOP’s attempt to squeeze out five more seats (which will be dependent on questionable demographic shifts, anyway), which voters approved in November. Voters also seemed to give the thumbs up to Virginia Democrats’ significant redraw of that state’s Congressional districts when they handed the party a huge trifecta on Election Day (they’ll have to weigh in again this spring).
Progressives in Maryland have also agitated to the point that a very reluctant Democratic leadership is now accepting proposals for a new map, as well. And in Utah, Republican attempts to gerrymander got caught up in the buzzsaw of the state courts, thanks to activists who rose up in defense of their 2018 constitutional amendment demanding fair redistricting. Here’s our coverage of the fight.
Just as significantly, a bipartisan majority of voters in red states have fought tooth and nail against GOP gerrymandering. Activists in Missouri, seeking to pause the state’s new gerrymander, have collected hundreds of thousands of ballot initiative petition signatures and battled relentless illegal bureaucratic efforts to waylay their efforts. Voters in Indiana flooded the statehouse and prevented Republicans from complying with Trump and JD Vance’s demands. Ohioans forced a compromise that preserved several Democratic seats.
Ballot initiatives rejecting GOP incursions surge
Before we get to the big progressive wins in blue states, we should take a minute to acknowledge the hard work by activists simply seeking to maintain functioning democracy and basic rights in red states.
In Utah, the GOP’s law to strip public sector unions of collective bargaining rights catalyzed a grassroots mobilization that was so overwhelming that the legislature wound up repealing the ban instead of facing a tidal wave at the ballot box.
We covered it early on, of course.
Meanwhile, activists in Missouri, Arkansas, and Montana are all fighting to save the integrity of their direct democracy processes, which have been repeatedly violated by legislatures that reverse publicly-approved policies and limited going forward by new, anti-voter laws and conservative courts. These battles will drag into next year, and ultimately be decided at the ballot box, but the public momentum is on the side of activists.
Populist policies for workers and children break through
Where as Republicans repeatedly threw working people under the bus in DC this year, Democrats made efforts to reassert their populist bonafides after losing working class voters in catastrophic fashion last year. The fact that affordability continued to be the biggest concern in polls helped convince moderates to lean into economic populism, as did Mamdani’s win in the NYC Democratic primary.
Here are some of the policy victories worth celebrating this year, earned via both state legislature and ballot initiative:
New York fully funded and permanently launched its universal free school meal program, taking over after federal funding dried up. The state’s public schools had served up more than 150 million meals to students by mid-December.
Colorado voters enthusiastically passed Propositions LL and MM, which will fund universal free meals for public school students, raise the pay for cafeteria workers, and provide money for fresh ingredients so that all kids can eat healthy food throughout the school year.
Speaking of Colorado, the state cut child poverty by a jaw-dropping 41% this year with a new set of tax credits for low-income families. State budget-tightening means that there will be a fight to extend these credits past 2027, but the numbers show just how far a bit of cash can go for so many families:
When Coloradans filed their taxes in 2025, nearly 300,000 filers across every county qualified for the Family Affordability credit, for an average of $2,700 per filer. More than 330,000 qualified for the state’s expanded EITC, for which state tax dollars add 50% to the federal credit, for an average of $1,191. And 127,500 qualified for the Child Tax Credit, for about $900 per filer, according to the Department of Revenue.
With a gubernatorial primary this coming year, unions and progressives would be smart to make a pledge to keep these credits (and enhance them when the budget is viable) a minimum requirement for support.
Maryland also made big moves on the progressive taxation front, passing a change to the income tax that has helped to narrow the state’s deep income inequality. Here’s a good estimate of the impact:
Altogether, we estimate these personal income tax changes will result in $623 million in net new revenue for the state to help fund K-12 schools, higher education, health care, and other services that are essential to expanding economic opportunity for all Marylanders. This new revenue is coming entirely from the highest-income 20 percent of Maryland taxpayers, while on average Marylanders in other income groups are receiving a small income tax cut, our analysis shows.
Cities and states very often get bamboozled into hosting major sporting and entertainment events by false promises of shared prosperity. In Los Angeles, lawmakers ensured that the locals working the hardest during the 2028 Olympics will actually benefit from the boom in tourism, with a minimum wage for hospitality workers that will hit $30/hour by the time athletes march in the opening ceremonies.
There will be a fight over this in the coming year, thanks to the LA city council president being a snake, and it’s a fight we’ll be eagerly covering.
On the subject of snakes stealing from workers: California, Colorado, Minnesota, New York, and Rhode Island have all passed laws that make wage theft an actual crime, with criminal penalties and everything. Enforcement is also growing on the local level, as cities like Fresno, CA receive state funding to combat the problem.
Wage theft, an umbrella term for underpaying or refusing to pay workers, is a rampant problem in this country, and plagues low-income workers who cannot afford to fight their employers, much less sue them. Without states enhancing their policing of paychecks and beefing up the penalties for cheapskate and crooked bosses, there is essentially no recourse for impacted workers, especially those who do not have a union.
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Always worth reading. May we all have a peace and joy with liberty and justice for all in the new year.
Lovely update Jordan, and great work throughout 2025 despite the hardships!
I also wanted to call out the fantastic EO in New Mexico this year to enact universal childcare. We'll need to follow it and fight for the legislature to ensure it's codified, but with it in place I'm really hoping it can be the exact kind of threat of a good example that, along with Zohran pushing for it in NYC, topples the opposition to universal programs nationwide from 2026.