The most embarrassing thing a governor has said this year
And more swing districts to flip in a transformative year
Welcome to a Thursday night edition of Progress Report.
I started cardiac rehab this week, a little over three months since undergoing my sixth open-heart surgery. The initial recovery took longer than anticipated, and now that I’m back on my feet, it’s time for the more structured phase. I bring this up because the sessions really kicked my ass this week, which slowed down this edition of the newsletter. So, thank you for your patience.
As I’ll detail this evening, the work continues on the swing district tracker, with a brand new state and new seats on the board.
Also, you heard it here first, three years ago: Randy Fine is the worst person in the United States and should be kicked out of Congress. Just imagine if he’d written this about Jewish people or a racial minority. Go to hell, Randy.
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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I don’t have very high expectations for Republican elected officials when it comes to simple things like coherent thought or respecting the public, and there’s very little they can do or say to surprise me. And yet, I still find myself somewhat astounded by the unique combination of cynicism and ignorance recently displayed by Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, a man who quite appropriately spent much of his life as a swine doctor.
“I believe the ballot initiative process today does not represent the people speaking,” Pillen recently told the Nebraska Examiner, staking out a position that rejects reality in service of deeply unpopular ideology.
Some context would help: Back in 2024, Nebraskans voted overwhelmingly to repeal the legislature’s decision to fund private school vouchers, making for the fourth time that voters in the state rejected providing taxpayer dollars to subsidize wealthy families.
All the Betsy DeVos dark money in the world couldn’t even make it a close contest; despite heavy spending and universal support from the Republican Party for a conservative referendum on the same ballot as the presidential election, repealing the vouchers won by 14% of the vote. That’s a lot of Trump voters who crossed over to defend public education — a story that I covered as it unfolded back in 2024.
And yet! Pillen, who spent eight years on the University of Nebraska Board of Regents, is still committed to pilfering public money for private schools. First, this fall, Pillen opted the state into the national program, created by the GOP reconciliation bill, that gives tax credits to individuals who donate to private school scholarship funds. And now, the swine doctor is pushing his legislature to defy the will of their constituents by rerouting millions of dollars to private school vouchers — a decision that he’s justifying with a patronizing, nonsensical, and insulting explanation.
“Somebody has enough money, you can pass anything because you buy the signatures,” he said, accusing activists of hoodwinking voters into signing petitions to place a referendum on the ballot. “Buy the signatures and you get it on the ballot. Something gets on the ballot, very rarely does ‘Nebraska Nice’ say, ‘No.’ It’s fascinating.”
Pillen also claimed that most people don’t actually read the initiatives before voting on them, which he based on his own admitted tendency to check boxes without considering the proposals in question. It’s not a particularly confidence-inspiring habit for a governor, but perhaps projecting his own personal disinterest in major policy debates helped Pillen justify signing last month’s rollback of a referendum that had increased the minimum wage and provided workers with paid time off.
Directly disrespecting the will of voters is becoming an increasingly common occurrence in the Nebraska legislature, which is officially nonpartisan but has become just as divided as any other capitol. Whereas lawmakers used to cross over ideologically and support what amounted to pretty middle-of-the-road policies, their personal registration is now shorthand for how they’ll vote in office.
Filibusters have long been a hallmark of the unicameral legislature in Nebraska, and we’ve seen some epic ones over the past few years, including the months-long protest by Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh in 2023, over a ban on gender-affirming care, as well as a four-day filibuster by Sen. Megan Hunt last month that prevented a bill that would have restricted abortion rights.
But it takes 33 votes to bypass the filibuster and achieve cloture in the legislature, and at the moment, conservatives hold exactly that number of seats. As such, conservatives have been increasingly able to scrape up enough votes to pass controversial, often corrosive legislation, including that rollback of the minimum wage initiative that was so overwhelmingly approved by voters.
Similarly, the legislature this week moved forward with a budget that includes $3.5 million for the voucher scheme, to create a funding bridge for rich families until they can start receiving the federal voucher money. An amendment to remove the funding from the budget failed by just two votes. With several swing districts decided by just a few hundred votes, it’s no exaggeration to say that a half-day of GOTV work could have legitimately changed the course of government and education funding for all of Nebraska.
Which is where we come in.
Over the weekend, I launched a swing district tracker focused on the most flippable legislatures in the country. The tracker also included opportunities to break GOP supermajorities, initially in North Carolina and Kansas. With so much on the line in Nebraska and voters’ wishes being regularly ignored by their representatives, I’ve made Nebraska the first new state in the tracker.
The small populations in these districts allowed me to expand the definition of flippable seats, too, which should in turn give more candidates an opportunity to get discovered and receive contributions from all over the country. It also helps that there will be heavy turnover, with a number of incumbents in reach districts hanging it up or moving on to another office. This is a year where progressives have to think big and expand the map, because the vast unpopularity of the Trump administration has presented another generational opportunity that may not come again.
This week offered a number of headlines that further underscored the importance of the upcoming legislative elections and the difference that a few votes in ultra-tight districts can make. That includes Arizona, where democracy itself is on the line: the Republican state Senate just advanced a bill that would make it much harder for citizens to gather the signatures necessary to qualify ballot initiatives — while, at the same time, circumventing Gov. Katie Hobbs’ veto pen by putting a litany of their own proposals directly before voters.
The difference in ballot access is already stark: lawmakers only need a simple majority to put a question before voters, while residents need to collect up to nearly 400,000 signatures just to qualify. That it required just a simple majority of lawmakers to advance a bill that would further restrict the ability to qualify an initiative by forcing signature collectors to read an awkward script, disclose where they live and explaining that they are being paid by a campaign. It’s an easy way to discourage anybody from participating in the process, especially in an age of spiking political violence, and very clearly violates the First Amendment.
Republicans are also trying to use their slim majority to force every local precinct to open its own polling location, an expensive and arduous undertaking that confuses voters and leads to many votes being disqualified. The effort is being sponsored by Sen. Jake Hoffman, a far-right election-denier, and is similar to another bill that was passed by the legislature last year, only to be vetoed by Hobbes.
As mentioned, Republicans have a very small majority in both houses of the Arizona legislature, and there are enough swing seats, especially this year, that could flip with the right candidates and investments. I’ve highlighted those races in the tracker, and I’ll continue expanding the list as more seats come into play.
And now some important — and in some cases, absolutely wild — stories you may have missed during this chaotic week.
