The search for bold Democrats begins
Examining the 2026 primary battlegrounds. Plus, an unfolding tragedy
Welcome to a Friday night edition of Progress Report.
This week’s good news: Mo Salah will remain a Liverpool player for another two seasons after signing a long-awaited contract extension. Long live the real king.
This week’s bad news: Everything else that happened.
To be a bit more specific: The economy is still in shambles, the White House is now defying the Supreme Court, and the administration is one step closer to seizing permission to kidnap and deport permanent residents based purely on non-criminal political speech. Among other things.
But I also spent time this week interviewing important labor leaders on how to fight back, talking with health care professionals and activists to get the inside track on ongoing battles with the administration, and communicating with brave whistleblowers from across different agencies. The public workers in Utah continue the campaign for their bargaining rights and dignity. And protests, rallies, and other actions will be held all across the country this weekend. The future isn’t entirely doomed just yet; if we can find the leaders and lawmakers willing and capable of stepping up to the moment, we have a fighting chance.
Also: The stock market crash has taken a real bite out of paid subscribers, who are what makes this work possible. If you can, this would be a great moment to sign up — it’s just $5 a month! We’re building out more extensive live video and subscriber-only chat threads, creating community and bringing more newsmakers, inspirational activists, and insightful experts to the table. More posts will be tailored to premium subscribers, too.
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Checking in on the Opposition Party
It sometimes feels strange to focus on Democrats when it’s Donald Trump and his Republican Party that are deliberately causing an economic collapse and setting fire to what’s left of the constitutional order, but right now we don’t have the competent opposition party required to stop the worst excesses of the administration, much less the true movement needed to rebuild something better.
In fact, we don’t even have an opposition party willing to oppose the most fundamental assault on democracy.
Four Democrats in the House voted with Republicans to pass the SAVE Act, which would make it harder — and in many cases, impossible — for tens of millions of Americans to vote in federal elections. Among other provisions, the bill would make casting a ballot contingent on proving one’s citizenship with a birth certificate, passport, or other form of approved ID.
Millions of Americans have no valid government ID whatsoever, and because the SAVE Act would require an exact name match, it would create potential barriers for the 75 million married people who have adopted their spouse’s surname.
It is a dangerous voter suppression bill, plain and simple, driven by the GOP’s lies about illegal voters and 2020 election denial. A messaging bill last year, it now has far more momentum making votes by Reps. Jared Golden (ME-2) and Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez (WA-3), conservative enablers posing as heterodox Democrats, particularly galling. That they represent swing districts is no justification for the vote, because it’s an issue that only motivates the most delirious right-wing voters.
Here’s what Gluesenkamp-Perez said:
“I do not support noncitizens voting in American elections – and that’s common sense to folks in Southwest Washington. Voting in our nation’s elections is a sacred right belonging only to American citizens, and my vote for the SAVE Act reflects that principle. I also understand the SAVE Act stands no chance of passage in the Senate due to the filibuster, as well as several deeply flawed provisions.”
For somebody so self-serious, it’s a deeply unserious statement. She gives legitimacy to the provably false conspiracy theory that non-citizens are voting, which is central to the Republican war on democracy. It may not be a threat in Washington State, but Republicans elsewhere are imposing increasingly draconian voter suppression laws based on that very lie. Legitimizing it also gives cover to efforts to overturn elections; the battle playing out in North Carolina right now didn’t come out of nowhere.
Further, the idea that she voted for the bill because it isn’t going to overcome a Senate filibuster is absurd. Putting aside the fact that there’s no reason to believe that Republicans will honor the filibuster, it’s still just a lame attempt to talk out of both sides of her mouth, which certainly calls into question her supposed genius political instincts.
As for Golden, he got ratioed into the sun on liberal Twitter clone Bluesky for his explanation, which was simply that it was a “common sense” bill.
Primary opportunities
I’ve already written a lot this year about the need to primary bad Democratic lawmakers, but perhaps even more important is seizing the nominations for open seats and challenges to Republican-held districts. Now that candidates and target districts are emerging, I want to get a jumpstart on parsing out the best choices before big lobbyist money skews the playing field.
Michigan: There will be a number of top-level primary battles next year, none bigger than the wide open contest for the seat being vacated by retiring Sen. Gary Peters. Right now, there are four likely candidates, some of whom are far more palatable than others.
The first hack is former NFL player and Michigan House Speaker Joe Tate, who oversaw and then promptly lost a dysfunctional majority in Lansing. Sources have told me that he was personally responsible for killing a number of significant progressive bills during his two years in charge of the chamber, bills that passed through the state Senate — the chamber that Democrats wound up holding in November.
The second contender is current Rep. Haley Stevens, a mush centrist who was boosted by AIPAC in his 2022 primary against progressive pro-labor Rep. Andy Levin. She’s also positioned herself as a huge booster of autoworkers and other union members, but there’s another side to her work: Stevens picked up the Chamber of Commerce’s endorsement for her work pushing the USMCA, the successor deal to NAFTA.
Rabidly pro-Israel in a state that Kamala Harris lost in part because she lost the Muslim population, Stevens also voted to sanction the International Criminal Court when it put out an arrest warrant for Benjamin Netanyahu. And perhaps most egregiously, she just went on record with a glowing review of Chuck Schumer’s leadership.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who first gained renown with a viral floor speech defenestrating homophobes and their obsession with “grooming” in 2022. McMorrow has shown little regard for the tired old Democratic leadership, and recently said point blank that she did not believe that Schumer should continue as Senate minority leader.
“There’s still this idea that Democrats and Republicans are still abiding by the same rules and still believe in the same norms and systems and structure,” she told Politico, adding that she would not vote for him if elected to the Senate. “There seems to be a lack of recognition that this is no longer the Republican Party. This is a MAGA party. And the same approach is not going to work.”
McMorrow will have no problem raising money from the well-heeled progressive grassroots, while the left may get behind physician Abdul El- Sayed, who ran for governor in 2018 and just finished a term serves as health and human services director of Wayne County. He’s a proponent of Medicare for All and a former Bernie Sanders delegate, and has managed to remain politically relevant even as the state Democratic Party became dominated by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (who, it should be said, had a terrible week).
Lay of the Land
House Democrats will begin the election cycle by targeting 35 Republican-held House districts, according to a memo released by the DCCC, giving us at least three dozen competitive races to shape. I’m going to look at a handful of contests every week to assess the options and gauge the direction of travel.
AZ-06: GOP Rep. Juan Ciscomani won a highly anticipated rematch against Democrat Kristin Engels by a narrow 2.5% in a very good year for Arizona Republicans, so it didn’t take long for him to get his first new challenger for this cycle.
Democrat JoAnna Mendoza has a very impressive resume and dream disposition for this seat. The daughter of immigrants, she spent her summers as a kid picking cotton, then joined the Navy as a young adult, later serving in the Marines. She went on to work in constituent services for a former Democratic congressman and then served as the president of the Arizona Center for Economic Progress Institute, a liberal think tank.
Mendoza is a single mother and is focused on progressive populism and working families, who she wants to bring into the Democratic Party fold.
“I think people feel agitated. They feel like they’re being left behind, that their voice is not valued,” Mendoza recently told the Arizona Republic. “This is something I want to change, as someone who grew up in a rural community. … They have a very valid reason to feel the way that they do.”
The anti-populist…
Colorado: Here’s one reason why so many working class people have felt left behind by the Democratic Party: Politicians like Gov. Jared Polis are happy to leave them behind.
There is now less than a month to go before the end of the state’s legislative session, and as I recently reported, Polis has steadfastly refused to support the Worker Protection Act, a bill that would finally end the state’s absurd “right to work” law. A tech executive worth an estimated $400 million, Polis has spent the past few months pushing right-wing and corporate anti-union talking points while praising the existing law, which was passed in 1943 at the behest of the Rockefeller family’s mining companies.
I explained the latest here:
We released the video this morning, which turned out to be good timing: Polis’s office was scheduled to meet with Democratic lawmakers and union representatives to discuss the bill a little bit later today.
Fear is making us easy marks
An immigration judge ruled on Friday that the Trump administration could deport former Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil, agreeing with Secretary of State Marco Rubio that his mere presence, as a campus protestor against Israel’s genocide in Gaza, was so detrimental to US foreign policy that it invalidated his permanent legal resident status. Should the ruling hold, Khalil’s unprecedented deportation — sending him a world away from his wife and newborn child — will be executed under the guise of combatting antisemitism.
It will, without question, have the exact opposite effect.
Jewish people are being used as human shields for fascist bigots seeking the legal right to arrest and disappear anybody whose beliefs they disagree with or find inconvenient. We are being manipulated to indefinitely extend the self-serving genocide of a radical fringe Israeli government and protect its criminal leader. Too many of us are lining up eagerly to either be patsies or indulge in sick fantasies. And it is only getting worse and worse.
Tufts student Rumeysa Ozturk continues to suffer in a squalid, overcrowded detention center after armed ICE agents took her away in an unmarked van, a government-authorized abduction triggered by an op-ed she wrote in the school paper that was critical of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The administration has stripped more than 600 other students of their visas for alleged antisemitic social media posts, which it identifies using the same kind of artificial intelligence that has led DOGE to fire nuclear weapons experts and ban grants agricultural research that use the term “clean water.” The Trump White House is preparing to use alleged antisemitism as a legal justification for extraordinary antiterrorism measures run by Sebastian Gorka, one of many Nazi-linked advisers to the president.
That should give away the ballgame. These people do not care about Jews; they’re simply taking advantage of the fear stirred by the Oct. 7th attacks and the global post-WWII reckoning forced by the ceaseless advocacy of survivors, their descendants, and educators. What is happening now is morally reprehensible and utterly self-defeating.
There’s nothing more dangerous for Jews than a state that makes personal beliefs illegal. At first they came for the protestors. We will not be spared.
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Gluey is in Clark county, which is Klan kountry. Washington was not in the Confederacy, but you would never know it from the number of yahoos and Patriot Prayer bovver boys.