The Democratic voter revolt has begun

Plus, a big new campaign in Utah and fights over democracy nationwide

Welcome to a Friday night edition of Progress Report.

Well, it was another rough day in Donald Trump’s America, but I’ve been heartened by the sheer outrage that Democratic voters are directing toward their most pathetic senators. This is real progress.

We’ve got a lot to cover tonight, including a further exploration of the Senate capitulation as well as a deep dive into some important yet little-covered stories across a number of states. There are some very compelling things happening, even in red states.

Announcement: We kick off our live interview series on Sunday night at 9 pm EST with author and labor organizer Eric Blanc, who will talk to us about his critical work with fired federal workers and his new book, We Are the Union. Eric has been right at the center of the fight against DOGE’s mass layoffs as a key part of the new Federal Unionists Network, so he’s got some stories to tell.

Note: Unlike many progressive advocacy journalists, I’ve gone fully independent, with no special advertising deals or close relationships with powerful politicians to temper what I write. My only loyalty is to you, the reader, and to the cause of progress — economic justice, democracy, human rights, and standing up to oligarchs.

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Dick Durbin strikes again.

Longtime readers of this newsletter know how crazy I’m driven by Illinois’s pathetic doormat of a senior senator, who did everything possible to allow the right-wing Supreme Court justices to get away with their vast corruption scheme short of cutting them a check himself. Terminally institutionalist, he took the coward’s way out again, announcing at the last minute that he’d be voting for the GOP continuing resolution to fund the government.

The long-time occupant of one of the safest blue seats in the country, Durbin will be 82 years old in November 2026. While he hasn’t yet announced his plans, potential successors are beginning to make noise in case he decides to retire. There will be no shortage of candidates if that happens, but any Democratic politician willing to jump the gun and push Durbin out would be treated like a hero by a very large segment of the Democratic voter base.

I conveyed most of my thoughts about how rank and file voters must respond to the epic and disastrous capitulation in last night’s newsletter, but it’s worth noting the names of the lawmakers who were most eager or at least willing to defy their supporters and the tens of millions of Americans who are going to suffer for their cowardice. Here’s the list, along with their re-election cycle:

• Dick Durbin (2026)

• Gary Peters (retiring after 2026)

• Jeanne Shaheen (retiring after 2026)

• Catherine Cortez Masto (2028)

• Brian Schatz (2028)

• John Fetterman (2028)

• Maggie Hassan (2028)

• Chuck Schumer (2028)

• Kirsten Gillibrand (2030)

• Angus King (2030)

Other than Durbin and the two retirees, there are no senators on this list who will stand for re-election before 2028. Their votes allowed John Hickenlooper and Mark Warner, old centrist squishes who are up for re-election in 2026, to vote no and avoid the enmity of the Democratic base. I don’t know whether they would have voted for Trump’s bill if Schumer really needed them to do so, but they deserve primary challenges either way. As I’ve written, the party needs generational change, and they’ll be 74 (Warner) and 75 (Hickenlooper) when they stand for re-election.

Look at that ratio!

By surrendering their power, Democrats ensured that so many vital programs across the country will go unfunded, leaving countless communities and vulnerable people in a lurch. Spend a few minutes looking through the endless list of grants that were requested this year by members of the House and Senate and now won’t get funded; in New York alone, you’ll spot programs for survivors of domestic violence, cancer research, community centers, toxic waste cleanup, and more, and that’s just among NY Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s original requests.

Remember: Any single Democratic senator could have moved against unanimous consent. They decided to prioritize their Friday night dinner plans.

The Democratic House leadership took an unprecedented stand against Schumer and the Senate collaborators, and even if some of it was performative to create some distance and rally the public around Hakeem Jeffries, who gave a pointed non-response when asked about his fellow New Yorker, the narrative now is that there is a tidal wave of backlash even within the party.

This is an extraordinary shift in that the media has long portrayed Democrats as divided between left and right, with progressives cast as the extremist dissidents who need to be reined in by the centrists. That moment is over. The gerontocracy is falling, caution is bearing extreme consequences, and Democratic voters are demanding change.

Some members understand this and are seizing the moment — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is stepping into that role, Tim Walz has broken off the shackles and is barnstorming red districts — and others, like Gavin Newsom, are choosing weird right-wing appeasement and writing their political obituaries. The next leaders of the Democratic Party are going to be forged in this fire. It’s up to up to turn up the heat.

It’s not about ideology so much as willingness to fight, and this has to be a turning point if the Democratic Party — and democracy itself — is going to survive.

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Workers strike back in Utah

Public sector unions in Utah are all hands on deck for an intensive signature gathering campaign that they hope will be the first step to regaining their right to collective bargaining.

On Saturday, a coalition called Protect Utah Workers will kick off a 30-day sprint to qualify a ballot initiative that would overturn HB 267, a new law that strips public sector unions of their negotiating ability. They’re facing an uphill battle: Utah gives organizers just 30 days to collect signatures from at least 8% of active voters in the state, which this year equals out roughly 140,000 total valid signatures. Because they want to overturn a law, they need to gather the signatures from at least 15 of the Utah’s 29 state senate districts, as well.

The law also requires very specific signature collating procedures, to the point that the coalition had to spend extra money to have each petition individually stapled together.

It’ll be a formidable task, especially in a solid red state, but organizers tell me that they have a few reasons for optimism.

First, they’ve got support from the police and firefighters’ unions, who were also disqualified from collective bargaining.

Second, there are 11 state senate districts in Salt Lake County, which will be the most fertile territory for signature-gathering. They only need to go heavy in four more exurban or rural districts, and they’re feeling confident that there will be solid support in rural places, where the government tends to be the biggest employer.

And third, volunteers are coming out of the woodwork to help — 1200 already involved in gathering petition signatures before they even start.

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Leopards ate some faces in Arizona

Shelli Boggs, the new school superintendent in Maricopa County, kicked off her time in office by warning schools that she’d be closely monitoring their compliance with President Trump’s ban on DEI in public education.

When she appointed a new member to the county board of education, which oversees schools in one of America’s biggest counties, she praised her nominee as “firmly against DEI-driven policies.”

And now, she’s in a legal dispute with Trump administration after a large federal grant to the county was canceled as part of the White House’s sweeping cuts to DEI and other programs that promote “divisive ideologies.”

The “divisive ideology” being promoted in Maricopa County? A program called the Learning Acceleration Partnership, which assisted students in high-need schools close the learning gap that emerged during Covid. The $11 million grant paid for an additional 20 teachers in 15 different schools, which serve predominantly Hispanic communities.

As such, the grant application submitted to the Biden administration asserted that the program sought to create “equity in student access to educational resources and opportunities,” which likely set off DOGE’s sloppy AI-powered scan of federal grants.

Seeing Boggs scramble to mitigate the damage from the policies she support without angering hardcore bigots is quite entertaining — her deputy superintendent assured the press that "[Boggs] herself would never stand for something that's DEI” — but the damage it could cause to underprivileged students keeps it from being a delicious irony. The program will continue through the end of the school year.

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Republicans vs. Voters

In Arkansas, the League of Women Voters is launching a campaign to save the ballot initiative process from being rendered completely unworkable.

Thanks to a number of restrictions passed over the past decade, the state’s attorney general and secretary of state have broad discretion over when signatures can be collected, what makes the ballot, and how initiatives are worded — see what happened to the pro-public education initiative last year. Lawmakers recently added additional limitations on petition collectors, and are discussing others, adding further urgency to the effort to codify fair rules for direct democracy.

Among the most important provisions are curtailing the attorney general’s ability to delay or modify the initiative’s title and severely limiting the legislature’s ability to change a voter-approved constitutional amendment.

Lawmakers in Arizona are also taking aim at the constitutional amendment process. The state House this week passed a bill that would require a citizen-initiated amendment to earn 60% approval, an overwhelming margin that just prevented abortion and recreational marijuana from becoming legal in Florida. If the state Senate passes the bill, it would go to voters in 2026, who would have to pass it with only 50% of the vote.

Conservatives and businesses in Missouri are doing everything they can to overturn Proposition A, the initiative that raised the minimum wage and mandated paid sick leave for most workers. On Wednesday, the state Supreme Court heard arguments in a challenge to the new law lodged by business groups, and on Thursday, the state House passed a bill that would repeal sick leave and slow the minimum wage hike. The initiative passed with more than 57% of the vote in November.

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Here’s some good news

Why not end on a high note? I’ll run down a few nice items for you!

• Nebraska: Voters in Lincoln will have a chance to vote on a fair housing initiative in May after activists collected over 15,000 signatures to place it on the ballot. If passed, the initiative would prohibit discrimination by landlords against income sources, including Section 8 vouchers and Social Security. One in three voucher recipients in Lincoln return them unused, largely because they cannot find a landlord to accept them (which is illegal).

• The Colorado Worker Protection Act passed through a crucial committee vote in the state House this week, moving it one step forward to getting through the Democratic legislature. If passed, the law would finally end the absurd second election requirement for full union representation, but it faces a showdown with Gov. Jared Polis, who has farcically demanded that business groups support it as well. I’m gearing up for that fight — if Polis wants to run for president, he’d be smart to think twice about his threats.

• Minnesota is working to rein in out-of-control homeowners associations after an investigative report found residents being stuck with outrageous fines and fees for repairs and major conflicts of interests among board members. The reform bill cleared a Senate committee with unanimous support, which is critical in a state with a newly split House.

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