What does "electable" even mean?

And does needing $30 million in dark money really count?

Welcome to a Sunday night edition of Progress Report.

A few things before we start.

1. Andy Burnham will become the new Prime Minister of Britain today. I was really impressed with his speech at the Labour conference last week, which was less a technocratic laundry list of policies than a narrative that explained the country’s decline and his vision for its revival. Burnham directly blamed four decades of Thatcherism for the vast gulf in wealth and steep downturn in economic opportunity, then explained how his approach will be different, promising a populist government that sharply contrasts with that of his predecessor, Sir Kier Starmer. It’s just too bad he’s an Everton supporter.

2. It looks like former state Senate President Troy Jackson, a pro-labor progressive, will be the Democratic nominee for Senate in Maine. While he gubernatorial bid fell short this year, he was ideologically similar to Graham Platner (politically, anyway) and able to run the sort of grassroots-insider campaign that the Senate sprint required.

3. Look at this clueless loser refuse to get off the stage:

OK, lots to discuss tonight, so let’s get to it.

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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Ls for DOJ: A federal judge tossed the Department of Justice’s lawsuits against both Virginia and New Mexico seeking the state’s unredacted voter rolls. The DOJ has sued for voter rolls from 30 states and Washington DC, and so far, they’re 0-for-15, with a majority of lawsuits tossed by Republican-appointed judges.

Save us from SAVE: The Trump administration also wants states to run those voter rolls through a database known as the SAVE system and purge voters accordingly. But SAVE is used for federal benefits and is frequently inaccurate and out of date, so it’s been known to wrongly flag citizens for removal. This week it emerged that after Texas’s Secretary of State used SAVE to check on 2000 voters, it returned such flawed results that she wrote a letter to the feds questioning its data, essentially accusing it of flagging citizens for removal. Embarrassing and dangerous.

I explored this effort at mass disenfranchisement in a report for More Perfect Union this spring:

Timely: More good news: a county judge in Kansas came through in the clutch, reinstating a law that counts mail ballots postmarked by election day that arrive up to three days late. The grace period became law in 2017 and was repealed last year; without that extra time, more than 2000 votes would have been tossed in 2024.

The ruling applies only to the upcoming primary election, as Attorney General Kris Kobach — who supported the law back when it passed in 2017, then took Donald Trump’s cues and went to war on mail voting — plans to appeal to the state Supreme Court. In something of a pleasant surprise, the US Supreme Court just upheld the Mississippi law that allowed for a post-election day grace period.

Take 2: A coalition of activists and lawmakers in Michigan is calling for a constitutional amendment to implement surtax on the state’s richest residents, reviving an effort that fell flat last year. The proposal would add a tax on an individual making over $500,000 or a married couple earning over $1 million, with the proceeds going toward pre-K-12 education, childcare, health and human services funding, housing and water infrastructure.

The hiccup right now is that they are seeking to pass the measure not as a ballot initiative, but through the legislative process. Doing so requires a two-thirds majority of votes in each chamber, and at the moment, Republicans control the state House. Yet another reason why we need to focus on flipping the state.

Losers can’t make the electability argument

As someone whose job entails a lot of being online and talking about government and elections, I have to regularly remind myself that most of the political arguments that play out across siloed social media and snippy tabloid reports do not reach everyday voters. Nobody in the real world cares when coalitions of whiny backbenchers write obnoxious and disconnected open letters, what think tank presidents tweet, what influencers with ghost-written books say on afternoon cable news hits, or whatever grievances high-level aides divulge to Axios on condition of anonymity.

As so many primaries have shown this year, support from the political establishment has become more harmful than helpful. This is confounding to Democratic leaders who are so used to controlling the party and its loyal voters, and over the past few weeks in particular, their loosening grip on power has inspired increasingly vitriolic and desperate attacks on the left and DSA in particular.

There is a bitterness to what is clearly a shift in ideology and temperament among voters, which would be amusing if it didn’t come paired with tens of millions of dollars in dark money from right-wing special interests. As my friend Greg put it so smartly in response to a CNN story about Hakeem Jeffries’ attempts to stop Bernie Sanders from endorsing leftist primary candidates: “If Bernie was a crypto-fueled super PAC he would’ve been warned against NOT meddling.”

Sanders was in Michigan this weekend to rally support for leftist Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, whose race against Rep. Haley Stevens has become the apex of this Democratic civil war. Unbelievable sums of money has poured in on Stevens’ behalf these past few weeks, upwards of $30 million from AIPAC its affiliates alone, a new record. As depressing as it is to see a Democrat eagerly accept help from right-wing billionaires and corporate slush funds, it isn’t particularly surprising, and the only reason it’s even worth commenting on in this space is the absurdity of the narrative being pushed by panicked centrist pundits and the avalanche of ads.

There are a lot of ideological differences between El-Sayed and Stevens: he’s a DSA member who backs Medicare for All and ending military aid to Israel, while she’s a center-right type who backs Israel to the end and continues to tout her role on the auto task force during the early Obama years. Establishment Democrats know that she is ideologically out of step with base voters, so instead, they’ve focused on the nebulous electability argument, insisting that Stevens would appeal more voters than El-Sayed.

But here’s the problem with that argument: if electability is a candidate’s main asset, it really shouldn’t require a deluge of dark money, upward of $50 million in TV ads and direct mailers, to convince the party’s most loyal supporters to hold their collective nose and vote for said electable candidate. It also shouldn’t require Islamophobic dog whistles and baseless insinuations that the insurgent candidate is misogynist, rumors that AIPAC is injecting into the discourse in an attempt to prove the establishment’s point about electability.

A similar story is playing out in the Wisconsin gubernatorial primary, where state Rep. Francesca Hong — who we featured very early in her run — has built an unprecedented grassroots machine and taken a firm lead in the polls. The leading establishment Democrat, Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, was forced to drop out of the race this week due to financial struggles, and things have gotten so dire that Gov. Tony Evers convinced centrist David Crowley, the Milwaukee County Executive, to jump back into a race that he left ten days earlier.

Like El-Sayed, Hong is a democratic socialist, outspoken about populist economic issues and American involvement in war crimes. As a single mother who still works in restaurants, she too is a somewhat unconventional candidate for a Midwestern state, and the party establishment are quaking at the thought of the attack ads that will come her way should she become the nominee.

Hong certainly represents something new for the state’s politics, and it’s possible that concerns concerns about both her and El-Sayed’s electoral viability do prove to have merit. But the people making that argument no longer have the credibility to do so: Democrats, under their current leadership, are a void of charisma, manifestly disliked in survey after survey, and only beating Republicans in generic head-to-head polls because Donald Trump is now the most unpopular president in modern history. And remember, Trump is only in office because these same leaders managed to lose to him twice in both Wisconsin and Michigan

Strategy aside, this sense of entitlement to control of the Democratic Party is completely undemocratic, made even more so by their efforts to close ranks and invitation to conservative dark money groups to pour money into misleading ads intended to mislead their own base voters. The Democratic Party consists of the voters who support it, and to ignore the clear policy and political preferences of those supporters because elites “know better” is both patronizing and doomed to fail. Blissful ignorance of what regular Americans are thinking and feeling has created an unfounded arrogance that fuels this collapse in public support.

There are some candidates whose flaws are obvious and overwhelming enough that it would be impossible for them to win, but the Democratic Party’s understanding of what is electable is rooted in a politics that no longer exists. At this point, “electable” is as much a kind of candidate than it is an apt description, meaning milquetoast, mildly conservative, and gutless more than someone who can win elections.

That centrists and neoliberals are panicking and scolding young people over the left winning elections is exactly why the left is winning elections: centrists and neoliberals spend their time panicking and scolding young people instead of trying to win elections. Those losses will continue to pile up until Democratic leaders come forward with new ideas that actually address people’s problems and prove that they can win elections.

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