I’m not sure whether it makes me a medical marvel, but I’m happy to report that I underwent my latest open-heart surgery on Wednesday and am now on the mend. It’ll be a slow process — my chest and back are killing me, they’ve got to deal with my blood pressure, I’m connected to all kinds of movement-restricting wires and tubes, and I’ll probably need physical therapy — but I’ve been through it all before.

Personally, all that really matters is that I’ll be able to go home with my wife to my three-year-old son, but bigger picture, the stakes are high for everyone: that I was able to get my heart fixed so soon after the MRI found the latest issue is a privilege that too many Americans could never hope to enjoy right now.

Politics can leave you cynical, but that jadedness quickly fades when you remember that so many activists and organizers are working to extend that opportunity to all Americans. It also makes the endless Senate ads depicting Medicare for All as godless socialism — I’m in Ohio, where Sherrod Brown is trying to return to elected office — much more bearable.

There’s a solid chance that this reads like woozy nonsense, because that’s how my brain feels right now. My plan is to recuperate and take it easy for a bit before getting the newsletter back to a regular cadence ahead of the midterm elections. There’s too much at stake to rest for long. I’ll probably send out a newsletter with a lot of my live streamed interviews this weekend, including pieces with big primary winners who support Medicare for All, so keep an eye out for that.

Thank you to everyone who offered kind words, donations, or held to their paid subscription as I work through this illness. We lost quite a few paid subscribers over the last three weeks — which honestly was expected and totally fine — so your loyalty means the world to me. And again, thank you to the Cleveland Clinic for saving my life again.

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In a little less than 12 hours, my wife and I will be taking off from LaGuardia and headed to Cleveland, where I’ll undergo my seventh open-heart surgery (and third in less than three years). The surgery is scheduled for Wednesday, so I’ll be hanging in the hospital for a few days and will attempt to get out one final newsletter before going under the knife. We’ve lost a number of paid subscribers since I announced this upcoming surgery, so thank you to everyone who has stuck by me. The delay won’t be long.

Tonight I’m resending the in-depth interview I did with Melat Kiros, the next congressperson from Denver, because it evidently didn’t get to everybody due to some technical error.

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When the many books and expensive consultant-prompted postmortems are written about the ideological and generational uprising that is currently remaking the Democratic Party, the good ones will pay special attention to what happened in Colorado this summer. The progressive slate nearly ran the table in July, expanding the movement and giving it a beachhead in the Mountain West with upset victories in Congressional and gubernatorial primaries.

The left defied the overwhelming economic and institutional power of the Democratic establishment by harnessing the strength of anti-incumbent furor, grassroots organizing, and a mix of new candidates and experienced politicians. The most remarkable and initially unexpected win belonged to Congressional candidate Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old barista, PhD student, and former lawyer who defeated 15-term-incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette.

A democratic socialist, Kiros was everything DeGette has not been: opposed to corporate money in elections, deeply committed to Medicare for All, vehemently against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, and noteworthy more generally. Her movement — and it really became that — overwhelmed the millions of dollars that political action committees poured into the race in its final weeks, ensuring a nearly 10-point victory.

In the weeks since her win, Kiros has visited DC and campaigned on behalf of other leftist candidates. We spoke with her months before the election and caught up with her this week to learn more about how she pulled off the victory, Democrats’ reaction to her win, and some of the debates that have bubbled up around her and the democratic socialist uprising this summer.

Wither Woke?

We spoke a day after Wisconsin Rep. Francesca Hong unexpectedly fell short in the state’s gubernatorial primary, a result that many pundits have chalked up at least in part to old “woke” tweets that she struggled to explain in interviews down the stretch. Her loss, paired with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent effort to brush aside culture war questions by quipping that “Woke one was crazy,” further fueled a debate among Democrats over the relative electoral strengths and weaknesses of democratic socialism and the issues it champions.

For my part, I wrote last week that I believe that the left got more traction from economic populism than identity-driven issues, at least in swing districts. Kiros is a DSA member and ran as a proud democratic socialist (albeit in a very blue district), so I wanted to know what she made of Hong’s loss and the suggestion that some issues championed by the left might be more appealing to the public than others. Here’s what she said:

When we talk about some of these issues that maybe don’t translate as well in the public sphere — when we talk about the specifics of what “Defund the Police” actually means and we get into the nuance of it, it’s actually extremely popular. It’s also extremely successful when we’re talking about Baltimore or Chicago, where they’ve demonstrated that reinvestment of resources back into the community and into actual crime prevention instead of just policing is wildly successful.

And so the conversation around “Woke 1” has been really difficult and infuriating for me personally as an academic who understands the nuance behind what some of these things are trying to say. But I do think, when we’re talking about organizing the masses, you have to acknowledge when certain terms are just not translating in the way that we were hoping them to.

America has a very romanticized idea of what policing is. They think of law and order and all of the heroic ideas, and that’s not based in any real data, right? We know that policing does not actually do any work to prevent crime. In fact, it exacerbates it more often than not. So it is a difficult space to be in, and I think we’re all trying to figure out how to navigate some of these conversations as well.

I think that the simplest way is to just remember what my job is. And my job is, when we win in November, post-January will be to legislate. Which is actually talking about the specific policies, not getting bogged down in the question of “are you in favor of Defund the Police?” Our job is to just legislate and to talk about actual policies and programs that deliver on relief. So that's usually where I just default to.

The vacuum driving a new antisemitism

Kiros’s long journey to public office began with her opposition to the genocide in Gaza, a stand that cost her a promising legal job in New York and then became a central part of her campaign. The issue was both key to her rise and the source of one of the few hiccups she experienced, as Kiros ran into some criticism over an equivocating response when asked about the antisemitic firebombing at a synagogue in Boulder.

Since her victory, Kiros has worked to mend fences and refine her points; in a recent interview with PBS, pointed out that Democratic reticence to criticize Israel opened a lane for antisemites like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, whose anti-war rhetoric is steeped in Christian nationalism. I asked her to expand on that point, because I’ve noticed it myself — as a Jewish leftist, I should not be finding myself agreeing with Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Here’s her response, which you can also view above; we also discuss her recent conversations with Jewish organizations and community members, undertaken in an attempt to better communicate her position and clear misunderstandings.

I think a point of clarity that I’d want to say at the least is that I think there are a lot of really good people that see Tucker and Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes talking about this and they see it as a change and an opportunity for growth and like we can bring them all the way here. And at the end of the day, my philosophy has always been to believe the best in people. So I don’t want to take away from this idea that maybe there is a world where they genuinely are seeing what’s happening and they are feeling that empathy and that concern for the Palestinian people. So that’s one thing I do want to clarify.

But the reality is that how they’re getting there is from deeply conspiratorial anti-Semitic tropes that we cannot let go unchecked, not just for our commitment to fighting anti-Semitism, [also] for our commitment to the understanding that anti-Semitism never just stops at anti-Semitism. It always devolves into the greater form of fascism, which continues the actual white supremacist, Christian nationalist agenda.

I don’t think we’ve lost the left to them by any means, but I think it’s starting — maybe not with the left per se, but people who are disillusioned with politics generally and maybe don’t actually identify as leftists or right wing. And those are the folks that are actually an opportunity for us to bring in, to talk about how what you’re seeing in Palestine is not because of these ridiculous anti-Semitic tropes. It’s because of this long, long history of U.S. imperialism, of Western imperialism, of our role of extraction and exploitation of vulnerable populations. It is a product of capitalism.

Big, structural change and what’s on the horizon

And, among many other things, I asked Kiros about her biggest priorities when she gets to Congress and which policies she thinks are key to sparking true structural change in Washington DC.

So the way that I’m kind of envisioning it is that we have to have an immediate big win. It has to be the kind of win that we’ve been building towards already for over a decade, and that’s Medicare for All. That has to be something that we sign into law right out of the gate.

And doing that and coupling it with canceling all medical debt and breaking up Big Medicine, legislation that’s already been introduced and can be part of this Health Care for All package, that kind of immediate relief that we can deliver for working families.

Democrats have lost trust because we haven’t delivered for our voters since Obamacare. And Obamacare… I have a lot of complicated feelings about Obamacare. I think a lot of us on the left do. But at the end of the day, it did expand health insurance to tens of millions of Americans who didn’t have it before, including to young adults until 26.

The gratitude that I had for being able to stay on my dad’s health care until I was 26, that’s trust-building. And now we’re seeing that that last fabric of trust that we have, that last piece of goodwill that we’ve had with voters, isn’t even that strong anymore because we’ve lost out on the subsidies that were necessary because Obamacare was still just a Band-Aid to begin with. And so when we think about what it means to rebuild trust, it has to go back to the basics of just doing the job, to legislate for the relief of Americans.

And so when I think about this opportunity that we have for really expansive reforms that are already popular, I think what we've been missing is the political will. By making it clear that 2028 has to be about getting Medicare for All passed, and we can show the immediate goodwill that you earn with voters to be able to do that, we won't have as much fear, I think, from other members to say now we’ve got to expand the court, now we have to get publicly financed elections.

There’s much more to the conversation — watch the whole thing at the top of the newsletter.

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None of the money we’ve raised for candidates and causes goes to producing this newsletter or all of the related projects we put out. In fact, it costs me money to do this. So, I need your help.

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Thanks to everyone who tuned into the conversation with future Rep. on Wednesday — you can watch the whole conversation above or read up on it (and watch some clips) below.

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When the many books and expensive consultant-prompted postmortems are written about the ideological and generational uprising that is currently remaking the Democratic Party, the good ones will pay special attention to what happened in Colorado this summer. The progressive slate nearly ran the table in July, expanding the movement and giving it a beachhead in the Mountain West with upset victories in Congressional and gubernatorial primaries.

The left defied the overwhelming economic and institutional power of the Democratic establishment by harnessing the strength of anti-incumbent furor, grassroots organizing, and a mix of new candidates and experienced politicians. The most remarkable and initially unexpected win belonged to Congressional candidate Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old barista, PhD student, and former lawyer who defeated 15-term-incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette.

A democratic socialist, Kiros was everything DeGette has not been: opposed to corporate money in elections, deeply committed to Medicare for All, vehemently against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, and noteworthy more generally. Her movement — and it really became that — overwhelmed the millions of dollars that political action committees poured into the race in its final weeks, ensuring a nearly 10-point victory.

In the weeks since her win, Kiros has visited DC and campaigned on behalf of other leftist candidates. We spoke with her months before the election and caught up with her this week to learn more about how she pulled off the victory, Democrats’ reaction to her win, and some of the debates that have bubbled up around her and the democratic socialist uprising this summer.

Wither Woke?

We spoke a day after Wisconsin Rep. Francesca Hong unexpectedly fell short in the state’s gubernatorial primary, a result that many pundits have chalked up at least in part to old “woke” tweets that she struggled to explain in interviews down the stretch. Her loss, paired with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent effort to brush aside culture war questions by quipping that “Woke one was crazy,” further fueled a debate among Democrats over the relative electoral strengths and weaknesses of democratic socialism and the issues it champions.

For my part, I wrote last week that I believe that the left got more traction from economic populism than identity-driven issues, at least in swing districts. Kiros is a DSA member and ran as a proud democratic socialist (albeit in a very blue district), so I wanted to know what she made of Hong’s loss and the suggestion that some issues championed by the left might be more appealing to the public than others. Here’s what she said:

When we talk about some of these issues that maybe don’t translate as well in the public sphere — when we talk about the specifics of what “Defund the Police” actually means and we get into the nuance of it, it’s actually extremely popular. It’s also extremely successful when we’re talking about Baltimore or Chicago, where they’ve demonstrated that reinvestment of resources back into the community and into actual crime prevention instead of just policing is wildly successful.

And so the conversation around “Woke 1” has been really difficult and infuriating for me personally as an academic who understands the nuance behind what some of these things are trying to say. But I do think, when we’re talking about organizing the masses, you have to acknowledge when certain terms are just not translating in the way that we were hoping them to.

America has a very romanticized idea of what policing is. They think of law and order and all of the heroic ideas, and that’s not based in any real data, right? We know that policing does not actually do any work to prevent crime. In fact, it exacerbates it more often than not. So it is a difficult space to be in, and I think we’re all trying to figure out how to navigate some of these conversations as well.

I think that the simplest way is to just remember what my job is. And my job is, when we win in November, post-January will be to legislate. Which is actually talking about the specific policies, not getting bogged down in the question of “are you in favor of Defund the Police?” Our job is to just legislate and to talk about actual policies and programs that deliver on relief. So that's usually where I just default to.

The vacuum driving a new antisemitism

Kiros’s long journey to public office began with her opposition to the genocide in Gaza, a stand that cost her a promising legal job in New York and then became a central part of her campaign. The issue was both key to her rise and the source of one of the few hiccups she experienced, as Kiros ran into some criticism over an equivocating response when asked about the antisemitic firebombing at a synagogue in Boulder.

Since her victory, Kiros has worked to mend fences and refine her points; in a recent interview with PBS, pointed out that Democratic reticence to criticize Israel opened a lane for antisemites like Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens, whose anti-war rhetoric is steeped in Christian nationalism. I asked her to expand on that point, because I’ve noticed it myself — as a Jewish leftist, I should not be finding myself agreeing with Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Here’s her response, which you can also view above; we also discuss her recent conversations with Jewish organizations and community members, undertaken in an attempt to better communicate her position and clear misunderstandings.

I think a point of clarity that I’d want to say at the least is that I think there are a lot of really good people that see Tucker and Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes talking about this and they see it as a change and an opportunity for growth and like we can bring them all the way here. And at the end of the day, my philosophy has always been to believe the best in people. So I don’t want to take away from this idea that maybe there is a world where they genuinely are seeing what’s happening and they are feeling that empathy and that concern for the Palestinian people. So that’s one thing I do want to clarify.

But the reality is that how they’re getting there is from deeply conspiratorial anti-Semitic tropes that we cannot let go unchecked, not just for our commitment to fighting anti-Semitism, [also] for our commitment to the understanding that anti-Semitism never just stops at anti-Semitism. It always devolves into the greater form of fascism, which continues the actual white supremacist, Christian nationalist agenda.

I don’t think we’ve lost the left to them by any means, but I think it’s starting — maybe not with the left per se, but people who are disillusioned with politics generally and maybe don’t actually identify as leftists or right wing. And those are the folks that are actually an opportunity for us to bring in, to talk about how what you’re seeing in Palestine is not because of these ridiculous anti-Semitic tropes. It’s because of this long, long history of U.S. imperialism, of Western imperialism, of our role of extraction and exploitation of vulnerable populations. It is a product of capitalism.

Big, structural change and what’s on the horizon

And, among many other things, I asked Kiros about her biggest priorities when she gets to Congress and which policies she thinks are key to sparking true structural change in Washington DC.

So the way that I’m kind of envisioning it is that we have to have an immediate big win. It has to be the kind of win that we’ve been building towards already for over a decade, and that’s Medicare for All. That has to be something that we sign into law right out of the gate.

And doing that and coupling it with canceling all medical debt and breaking up Big Medicine, legislation that’s already been introduced and can be part of this Health Care for All package, that kind of immediate relief that we can deliver for working families.

Democrats have lost trust because we haven’t delivered for our voters since Obamacare. And Obamacare… I have a lot of complicated feelings about Obamacare. I think a lot of us on the left do. But at the end of the day, it did expand health insurance to tens of millions of Americans who didn’t have it before, including to young adults until 26.

The gratitude that I had for being able to stay on my dad’s health care until I was 26, that’s trust-building. And now we’re seeing that that last fabric of trust that we have, that last piece of goodwill that we’ve had with voters, isn’t even that strong anymore because we’ve lost out on the subsidies that were necessary because Obamacare was still just a Band-Aid to begin with. And so when we think about what it means to rebuild trust, it has to go back to the basics of just doing the job, to legislate for the relief of Americans.

And so when I think about this opportunity that we have for really expansive reforms that are already popular, I think what we've been missing is the political will. By making it clear that 2028 has to be about getting Medicare for All passed, and we can show the immediate goodwill that you earn with voters to be able to do that, we won't have as much fear, I think, from other members to say now we’ve got to expand the court, now we have to get publicly financed elections.

There’s much more to the conversation — watch the whole thing at the top of the newsletter.

Wait, Before You Leave!

Progress Report has raised over $7 million dollars for progressive candidates and causes, breaks national stories about corrupt politicians, and delivers incisive analysis, and goes deep into the grassroots.

None of the money we’ve raised for candidates and causes goes to producing this newsletter or all of the related projects we put out. In fact, it costs me money to do this. So, I need your help.

For just $5 a month, you can buy a premium subscription that includes:

• Premium member-only newsletters with original reporting

• Financing new projects and paying new reporters

• Access to upcoming chats and live notes

Get 50% off for 1 year

You can also make a one-time donation to Progress Report’s GoFundMe campaign!

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When we began our live stream last night, it looked almost certain that Wisconsin state Rep. Francesca Hong would win the Democratic nomination for governor, and in commanding fashion. She had a 20-point lead in the polls over her closest rival, who had just re-entered the race a few weeks earlier after other candidates melted down, and turnout in Hong’s home base of Madison was soaring.

But doubts began to creep in shortly after polls closed and the vote count began, and in the early hours of the morning, the national news outlets called the race for Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, a massive upset that nobody saw coming. Thanksgiving had been avenged.

There will be reams of postmortems and lessons cherrypicked from the shock result, but we shouldn’t look past how Hong reached the precipice of power. An outspoken DSA member who had never run outside of her lefty district, Hong went from 1% in the polls to a dominant frontrunner who just missed out on the nomination. How did that happen?

To better understand her rise and unconventional gubernatorial campaign, I spoke with Josh Klemons, her long-time digital director (he left the campaign in January). He helped create an unlikely political juggernaut over the course of five and a half years, and now works with countless down ballot candidates, using the same principles to win election after election.

We spoke about how Hong got to this point, what campaigns can learn from it, the heights of economic populism, and the limitations that come with cultural “woke” positions. We also discussed how the media freakout over “electability” helped shape this race; watch that clip below and the whole interview up top.

Note, because we recorded this before polls closed, it was based on the premise that Hong won. Other than being a bit embarrassing for me, everything in the conversation still applies.

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Also watch:

One week from now, I’ll be at the Cleveland Clinic, awaiting yet another open-heart surgery (lucky number seven). I’ll still be writing newsletters this week, and hopefully hosting a live stream interview or two.

Thank you to everyone who has remained a paid subscriber since I announced the heart surgery; your support really means the world.

Tonight, we’re talking about elections.

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How about some polls and trolls?

Texas: Races are tightening up!

• State Rep. James Talarico has opened up a four-point lead on psychopath AG Ken Paxton in the crucial Senate race, according to a poll from Texas Pulse and Texas A&M. It stands at 47-43% in the Democrat’s favor.

• State Rep. Gina Hinojosa has climbed to within one point of Republican three-term incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott, 46-45%.

• Democratic state Rep. Vicki Goodwin has a two-point lead over incumbent Dan Patrick in the Lt. Governor race, an advantage that only figures to grow due to Patrick’s integral role in banning THC in Texas. Idiotic.

Pennsylvania: Rare state legislature poll alert — with good news for Democrats, who lead in several must-win districts.

State Navigate surveyed five districts with competitive races; Democratic challengers lead in three of them, another is topped by a Democratic incumbent, and one has a Republican firmly in the lead. Democrats hold a one-seat lead in the House and have to flip three Senate seats to win a majority in that chamber as well.

You can check out all the races at my website, FlipSeats.org.

Read more

Just a few quick things before I get to tonight’s newsletter:

1. This one had enough text and graphics that I have to split it up; I’ll be sending a follow-up with lots of news tomorrow.

2. I’ve lost a fair number of paid subscribers since announcing that I’ll be out with a seventh open-heart surgery in a few weeks, which I understand. It also makes me really appreciate everybody who is sticking by me.

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The difference in how the two sides of the Democratic Party’s divide reacted to Tuesday’s bombshell election results in Michigan explain a whole lot about how it’s gotten to this point:

• Third Way, a corporate-backed think tank that is filled with zealously pro-business Democrats, announced in the New York Times that it planned on spending $15 million in an attempt to crush DSA and populist Democrats during the upcoming midterm elections.

• Strategists and organizers on the left assembled to study the results and fine tune the messaging and approach for the remaining primaries and general election.

There was plenty of gloating on the left, too, but after a clean sweep, you can’t really begrudge it. More importantly, I was on one of the strategy calls on Wednesday, featuring some leading progressive figures and pollsters. We went over poll numbers and election results, and tonight I want to give you insight into what was discussed and the lessons I learned during the meeting.

1. Fixing for fights

Much has been made of the role that Israel has played thus far in in the party’s primaries, and for good reason, given how politically toxic the war on Gaza has become since the 2024 election, when it helped sink VP Kamala Harris (don’t just take my word for it). Yet while it has undoubtedly mattered in certain races, especially here in New York, I think that its been more symbolic than decisive, reflecting a broader generational and ideological shift in the voting base.

Ryan O’Donnell, the executive director of Data for Progress, presented excerpts from a fair number of polls conducted over the past four or five months. There was no love for AIPAC among respondents, but the most pressing issues to Democratic voters involved radical change in the halls of power and in the economy.

Read more

It’s a big primary night tonight in the Midwest. To sum it up:

• In Michigan Abdul El-Sayed looks likely to secure a double-digit win over Rep. Haley Stevens in the Democratic Senate primary.

• In Missouri, voters rejected the GOP’s regressive plans to eliminate the state’s income tax AND make it impossible to pass constitutional amendments.

This is all good news, and we’ll talk more about it in upcoming issues. Tonight, we have the full interview with Texas Rep. Gene Wu, who is leading a spirited, novel effort to organize Southern Democratic lawmakers against encroaching GOP fascism — and maybe even flip their states.

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In June, Democratic legislators gathered in Atlanta to compare notes and exchange tips about how to survive — and maybe even one day win majorities — in hostile terrain. It was the first meeting of what Rep. Gene Wu, the Texas state House minority leader, is calling the New Southern Strategy, a nod to the racially inflammatory, divide-and-conquer approach adopted by Republicans in the 1960s and ‘70s, which helped turn the region from a Democratic stronghold to solid red.

“I'm so sick of it, I want to throw all this crap back in their faces,” Wu, who represents a district in Houston, told Progress Report. “All the propaganda they spin against us, all the things they've done against Americans. I want to take that language and take what they're doing and just throw it back in their face. And this that, not just to spite them, but to actually do something.”

The idea came to Wu after Texas House Democrats broke quorum and left the state last August in an attempt to prevent Republicans from passing an extreme partisan gerrymander at Donald Trump’s request. Monday was the one-year anniversary of the exodus, which drew national attention and galvanized Democrats elsewhere to resist the unprecedented mid-decade redistricting designed to cement Republican control of Congress.

Texas Democrats received outsized support from other state Democratic caucuses during that time, and after the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callis spurred other Republican states to redraw their Congressional maps, Wu found himself providing advice and resources. At some point, it dawned on him that in the world of low-budget legislative minority politics, interstate collaboration could be key to scaling up in these underdog battles.

“Texas ain't that much different than Georgia or Alabama, so we can just share materials,” Wu said. “And it kind of made us think: All these attacks on our community, whether it's ICE, whether it's redistricting, whether it's anti-Asian attacks, whether it's anti-Sharia attacks, all these different things, they’re coming from the same source. They're unified in their attack of our communities, in the destruction of our nation. So why shouldn't our defense be unified?”

During the fight over Texas’s gerrymandering, Democrats protested the GOP’s limited public hearings on the proposed new maps by holding their own shadow hearings, with testimony from angry citizens and redistricting experts. Those events turned out to be a cheap, easy way to gather reams of evidence for the lawsuits that followed, which were initially successful until the Supreme Court intervened. Wu shared that strategy with other Democrats in a conversation that took place at the New Southern Strategy’s inaugural meeting.

The goal is to eventually flip these legislatures, which will require ongoing coordination and vigilance in the face of further attacks on democracy.

Democrats have spent years trying to flip Texas, believing demographic shifts would — it’s now a majority-minority state — would prove to be destiny, inevitably turning the Lone Star State blue. That hasn’t happened, in part because Hispanic voters shifted heavily to the right in 2024. Wu suggests that there is more than a bit of buyers’ remorse there, especially as the ICE raids ramp up and turn deadly in Texas, and he gets fired up when discussing the boot on the neck of middle and working class constituents.

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“This is the laboratory for evil,” he says of Republican-run Texas. “This is the laboratory for every twisted, amoral, unethical, illegal, unconstitutional thing you can think of. If it has been done, it was tried here first.”

The New Southern Strategy is an attempt to unwind the root causes of the success enjoyed so frequently by “evil” lawmakers. At the same time, Wu was realistic about the sort of racial divisions that he thinks have kept so many minorities siloed and unwilling to collaborate with one another, including the friction that remains between Asian and Black communities since the conflagrations of the 1990s.

But he’s hopeful that the twin crises of affordability and freedom — Texas, as we discussed, just banned THC, drawing mass outrage — will prove more pertinent to voters this year. With that in mind, I was interested to know whether he thought that Republicans’ would be successful in their inevitable attempts to weaponize the rise of leftists such as NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani and likely Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed.

Wu didn’t mince words — it’s his own party that he is concerned about being bamboozled by the far-right outrage machine: “What I'm worried about is that we were to fall for that again,” he said. In fact, Wu doesn’t think Democrats should run away from leaders in the Mamdani mold; if anything, they should seek to emulate their ambition and constituent services.

“For the last 30 years, the way that Democrats have screwed themselves is by not listening to the people, and instead listening to the pundits and the experts and consultants who say like, ‘oh, you need to run to the middle,’” Wu lamented. “The Republicans never run to the middle. The Republicans run as far right as they can possibly go every single time and they win every single time.

“And Democrats,” he continued, “instead of doing the things that the people actually demand, like fixing healthcare, fixing education, having freaking actual public transportation, simple things that people all around the world have, Democrats say, ‘I don't know. They might call us socialists. They might call us communists if we said we should have healthcare.’ We shoot ourselves in the foot.”

You really ought to watch the entire conversation, at the top of this email, partly because Wu had a lot to say about Texas AG Ken Abbott, a scandal-scarred lunatic who is now the party’s nominee for US Senate. He was fired up throughout the conversation, and it provided the hope that after years of tantalizingly close (and frustratingly far) misses, Democrats might be getting their act together in the South.

If Wu is any indication, they’re definitely not in danger of being milquetoast, dispassionate political bystanders.

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Well, I’m back with the news and analysis, with more to come this weekend — a lot is happening right now and there are a good number of stories to explore and catch up on.

Before we get started, I just want to thank everyone for their very kind words of empathy and encouragement as I deal with this ongoing heart issue. I’m dreading surgery but your notes and comments have made it a bit less lonely and daunting.

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A month after a democratic socialist tsunami wiped out establishment-backed politicians in New York and Colorado, a progressive wave is now making its way to the Upper Midwest.

According to new polls, expensive and bitter primaries in both Wisconsin and Michigan are on the verge of turning into blowouts for left-wing populist outsiders. In the Badger State, several polls show state Rep. Francesca Hong with an overwhelming lead on the other candidates: Marquette Law School has her ahead by 22% over former Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, with Milwaukee County Exec David Crowley clocking in at just 7%. Barnes dropped out of the race on Thursday, which won’t likely do much for Crowley’s chances: Marquette also polled voters on their second choices and found that with Barnes out, Hong’s lead grows to a whopping 33%.

The Wisconsin numbers are equally dismal in a poll by State Navigate, which found Hong with a commanding 29-point lead over Crowley, who led Barnes by one point in the race for second place. Recalibrated after Barnes’s exit, the poll has Hong with a 28-point advantage over Crowley, with 17% still undecided even as early voting has begun.

Over in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, a very progressive public health official, has built as much as a 15-point advantage in the state’s US Senate primary. He has surged ahead of his one remaining opponent, Rep. Haley Stevens, a centrist who has received the backing of virtually the state’s entire roster of Democratic elected officials since state Sen. Mallory McMorrow left the race. Stevens has also been the beneficiary of more than $50 million in outside PAC spending, including $30 million from AIPAC alone.

So how are they doing this?

Both Hong and El-Sayed dominate with younger voters… and others

Barnes’ exit from the race on Thursday will ostensibly allow Crowley, a centrist who quit several weeks ago, only to be summoned back into the race by a panic-stricken Gov. Tony Evers, to consolidate the anti-Hong vote. Just where that will come from, however, is unclear.

In the State Navigate poll, Hong took 66% of the vote among voters 18-29, with the second-closest choice being “not sure” with 17% of the vote. In the Marquette poll, Hong’s lead among voters aged 30-44 sat at 42 points above Barnes; only voters 65+ did not rank her at the top.

El-Sayed, meanwhile, enjoys a 34-point advantage among the 18-29 crew, and remarkably for a one-on-one race, owns a 54% advantage among voters 40-49. That resiliency among “older” voters reflects an unexpected strength with a number of demographics that might typically lay outside what an establishment-bucking, DSA-tinged Muslim candidate might expect to earn.

As expected, El-Sayed, who is ideologically far to the left of centrist Stevens, trounces his rival with college-educated voters, to the tune of a 33% lead. But he nearly breaks even with voters who have at most a high school degree, trailing by just 3%, and actually leads among graduates of vocational and technical schools, a significant demographic in Michigan.

Gender also defies typical fault lines, as El-Sayed holds a 14% lead among both men and women. Physically shredded, especially for a national politician, El-Sayed has tried to emphasize his masculinity in non-toxic ways, including in a recent ad that prominently featured his muscles straining during an indoor rock climbing session. The campaign has been happy to lean in on his “bro” reputation, at least to a point, figuring that it’s better to embrace it than fight and alienate half of eligible voters.

A little help from their enemies

Hong and El-Sayed support Medicare for All, have spoken out defiantly about the genocide in Gaza, and support abolishing ICE. They want to tax the rich and offer structural solutions to the economic precarity long experienced by working and middle class Americans. These positions place them well out of step with the median Democratic elected official, but right in line with a voting base that has moved to the left during the Trump era, especially over the past few years.

Actually, it’s probably more accurate to say that Democratic voters have always leaned further to the left, but until recently, they were so spooked by the prospect of losing that they would sacrifice ideology for “electability.” For decades, that’s been code for pro-capital centrists, and the base has dutifully agreed to nominate bland, right-leaning, replacement-level politicians. But between the disastrous 2024 election and the party’s ongoing inability (or refusal) to put up a strong united front against Donald Trump, Democratic voters are simply not buying the argument that corporate-friendly milquetoast is electable anymore.

And that’s a problem for party leadership, because they’ve spent the past month trying to stop Hong and El-Sayed’s grassroots momentum with electability arguments, warning Democratic voters that nominating the two progressive populists will lead to certain doom in November.

It’s been an all-out barrage. In Michigan, nearly all of the most prominent elected Democrats, including Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, have all thrown their weight behind Stevens, while taking aim at El-Sayed for everything from his campaigning with uber-popular lefty streamer Hasan Piker to misleading accusations of misogyny. Rep. Hillary Scholten has gone so far as to call El-Sayed antisemitic and refuse to say she’ll vote for him if and when he becomes the Democratic nominee.

In Wisconsin, meanwhile, the panic over Hong’s huge lead — and rumors of an unflattering investigation of Barnes — led Gov. Tony Evers to summon Crowley back into the race weeks after he dropped out. Hong’s lead has only grown since Evers’ desperation move, and Crowley is unlikely to gain any ground with Barnes’ departure.

If anything, the wagon-circling and coordinated attacks look to be backfiring, reflecting an unprecedented anti-incumbent, “throw the bums out” posture from Democratic voters. Widespread disgust with leadership has voters rejecting anything associated with senior Democrats, regardless of ideology. Hong, for instance, carries wide leads with very liberal and liberal voters, but perhaps even more significantly, only trailed Barnes among moderate/conservative voters by a mere three points. El-Sayed has made AIPAC’s support of Stevens a central plank of his campaign, leading to awkward exchanges like this one, with Stevens weaponizing Jewish voters’ fears in order to defend $30 million in dark right-wing money.

Many of the attacks on Hong and El-Sayed are cynical dog whistles and attempts to weaponize the fact that Republicans will undoubtedly run racist, misleading ads against the two firebrands. That said, it doesn’t mean that they are entirely off-base. Recent polls show Crowley (and Barnes) slightly better positioned to beat Rep. Tom Tiffany, the extremist Republican nominee for governor, and the same goes for Stevens against former Rep. Mike Rogers. Republicans are already attacking Hong for her call to defund the police during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, comments that she’s disavowed but cannot erase from her past.

Still, no matter how much this annoys Democratic Party power-brokers, this what democracy looks like: sometimes people vote their values instead of making calculated decisions intended to mitigate supposed risk. It’s unfortunate that Hong and El-Sayed will have to bear the burden of proving the left’s theory that progressive populism can win back working class voters, especially because they are actively being sabotaged by liberal influencers. A new poll, released Thursday evening, shows that 12% of Stevens supporters would cross over to back Rogers if El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination, a direct result of these internecine attacks on his character.

Still, there’s probably going to be no better year or political environment to create a watershed breakthrough for the left. It’s unfortunate that it may hinge on whether centrists are willing to make ideological concessions and giving up total control of the party.

Federalize this: President Trump has asked the Supreme Court to intervene after an appeals court last week denied his administration’s bid to resume implementing an executive order designed to severely restrict mail-in voting. The ruling kept in place an injunction granted to 23 states that sued over the policy.

Among other things, the Trump administration wants to run every state’s unredacted voter roll through shoddy citizenship check databases, and the executive order prohibits the USPS from mailing ballots to anyone in states that do not comply. Initially, a lower court judge refused to intervene on the states’ behalf because the USPS had not yet refused to send ballots, but a second judge came to the opposite conclusion, based on the fact that several components of the order were patently unconstitutional.

By a 2-1 vote, the Massachusetts-based appeals court agreed with the latter judge, rejecting the cynical attempt to run down the clock inherent in the original argument.

“As the district court reasoned, the [executive order] lays out a clear set of rapidly approaching deadlines by which states must ​coordinate with federal officials and comply with new voting procedures – all while ‌the states must also ensure that their officials ‌and the public understand the evolving set of rules that would govern the upcoming September and November elections,” the judges wrote in a 2-1 decision. “The Plaintiff States have no practical choice ‌but to respond to the [order] now.”

On Wednesday, I joined a press call hosted by the Fair Elections Center and asked them about the administration’s request that the Supreme Court overturn the appeals court decision and allow the USPS to withhold ballots from tens of millions of Americans. Officials there weren’t exactly sanguine about the high court’s record on voting rights and what might happen with this case.

“The Trump administration has not generally been shy about going to the Supreme Court to try to get what they want,” Michelle Kanter Cohen told me. “We’ve seen just recently the Court both gutting the VRA yet also upholding the opportunities for voters to have their postmarked ballot counted [in Watson v RNC]. So it’s something we’re watching. It’s we really can’t predict sort of the outcomes here.

Rebeka Caruthers, the CEO and president of the Fair Elections Center, was sharper in her criticism of the court:

“We see that there are folks on the Supreme Court that have different viewpoints on who should be able to vote and what standards should be used and shouldn’t be used,” she said. “I would characterize the Supreme Court as a court that isn’t showing willingness to support expansive voting or a representational democracy.

“Ultimately there has to be real legislative change. If we want to make sure that people’s right to vote is enshrined, if we want to make sure that people really have the right to vote in this country, there’s going to have to be a set of strong effective laws that are very clear on the right to vote in this country. We are hopeful that there will be a pro-democracy Congress at some point that would choose to strengthen voting laws in this country.”

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Being sick is a full-time job, even when you have a short runway to surgery: between conferring with doctors, additional tests, more conferring, hammering out logistics, and figuring out finances, there’s barely enough time to process what you’re actually facing. Add in a full-time job, the fear of the unknown, the deep familiarity of the pain that comes with the best-case outcome, and having an adorable three-year-old son who can’t fully comprehend why you’re so bummed and distracted (plus guilt that comes with being bummed and distracted in the few weeks left before surgery), and functioning becomes a legitimate challenge. Writing highly technical news about the federal government and all 50 states at times feels impossible.

I’m not writing this to complain or fish for sympathy; I’m a pretty private person, I get nauseous at the thought of public vulnerability, and most of me thinks this is gratuitous and annoying (apologies if you agree). But I have paid subscribers who expect and deserve regular output, and over the past week, I’ve fallen short of that responsibility. Not for lack of trying — I have started two or three new newsletters, only to stop halfway through, pressed for time and unable to focus. Nobody sees those half-written drafts, though, so they really don’t mean much at all.

Everyone has been very kind about my situation — the comments in the last post were really uplifting — and this email isn’t a response to any demand from anyone. I just thought I’d give you all a heads up, along with an explanation for the radio silence.

Anyway, the plan is to get back to sending out newsletters tomorrow or Thursday at the latest; I’ve got a big news roundup in the works as well as another newsletter on Trump’s assault on our elections on tap. After that, I’ll do my best to keep them going until I have to enter the hospital for an IV blood thinner transition on August 16th.

(Why am I explaining the medical process? Well, I can’t find any case studies or first-person stories about somebody who has had a seventh open-heart surgery, especially not in my circumstances, so if nothing else, it’d be nice if my experience could be something that other people could reference one day.)

Thank you all for your patience.

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I was halfway through writing Wednesday’s newsletter when I got a call from my cardiologist. That part wasn’t a surprise; I’d underwent an MRI on Tuesday to establish a new physiological baseline nine months after my sixth major open heart surgery, so I was anticipating the call. I wouldn’t say I was looking forward to it, but I was hopeful I’d get the all-clear after a difficult rehab period.

Ironically, when a doctor tries to cushion the blow by opening by saying he has “a bit of disappointing news,” it creates a spike in blood pressure that really isn’t productive in situations like this one: it turns out there’s a leak somewhere in my aortic graft, it’s causing a pseudoaneurysm, and I’ll need a seventh surgery. ASAP.

For those of you who are new here, or weren’t subscribed until after I returned to work in February, I’ve dealt my with heart issues my entire life, largely surrounding my valves, and it’s required repeated intervention. Humans aren’t really built to have their chests cracked open, ribs split apart, and most delicate organs rearranged that many times; it takes a huge toll on the cardiac tissue and body at large, recovery is more difficult with each surgery, and it has you thinking about death way more than you ought to. The only thing worse than paranoia about your health is suspecting the worst and being right, and unfortunately, that’s where I am right now. I’ll be blunt: terrifying.

My fifth surgery took place in February 2024, followed by sixth surgery late last November, two days before Thanksgiving. It took me a long while to recover both physically and mentally from the last one; I actually haven’t even finished cardiac rehab, and now here I go again.

With the world on fire last winter, I restarted the newsletter about a month after my most recent surgery, writing and reporting from my bed, powered by painkillers to numb the aches and the urgency that pushed me through them. It’s this ongoing health problem that first turned me on to progressive politics — my first big issue as a teenager was single-payer healthcare — and once again, I’m lucky to have the health insurance that made it possible for me to undergo the routine MRI that caught this latest issue before it quite literally blew up on me.

Yesterday, as I waited for the CT scan, my appointment was pushed back while the hospital administration waited for authorization from the insurance company; it was inconvenient and annoying, and yet I’m lucky that inconvenience and annoyance were all I had to navigate. The thought that so many people are simply not able to get care at all right now (especially with Medicaid being slashed to the bone) makes me viscerally angry, so as unfortunate as these setbacks are — and man, the experience is months of awful — they also motivate me to do whatever I can to create a system in which everyone has the opportunity to recover from surgery instead of just dropping dead (or declaring bankruptcy).

Right now, the surgery is scheduled for the third week in August and there’s lots to do: prepping for an operation like this is a time-consuming, with paperwork, logistics (it’ll be in Cleveland, I’m in NYC), and trying to stay healthy. Plus, I need to spend as much time as I can with my three-year-old son before I go under the knife, both because I’ll be gone for at least a while and there is always the chance that it doesn’t go as planned (I just don’t want to assume anything, this is inherently risky stuff, though my surgeon is thankfully amazing). So I’m going to continue the newsletter until the week of the surgery, including the interviews and live streams, but the editions are not going to be as frequent for a while.

(That said, I may start documenting the heart surgery experience, if that’s of interest, but that probably won’t involve much political news.)

After the surgery, assuming everything goes well (pray for me), I’ll hope to get back to the political newsletter by late September, but it’s hard to say for sure; a seventh surgery comes with a lot of uncertainty. If you’re a paid subscriber, definitely feel free to pause or cancel your subscription until I’m back full force. This has become a decent chunk of my income, but I know times are tight and always want to deliver on the promise that comes with a paid subscription.

I’ll end the ramble here; thank you as always for reading and the support.

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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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I’m working on a few big stories and booking interviews for the upcoming weeks, so there’s a lot to be excited about. And on that note, if you’ve ever bought or sold anything online, you’ll want to watch tonight’s story — it’ll make you angry and ideally laugh some, too.

Note: Think of Progress Report as the news before you read the news, bringing you conversations with up-and-coming candidates, behind the scenes with activists running critical campaigns, and perspectives you don’t hear on cable news. It’s a one-man publication and a second full-time job, so if you value this work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for just $2.50 a month — it’s the only way I can keep the work going.

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It was two city heat waves ago that I sat in the steamy garage of a makeshift production studio, sweating through a three piece suit made from i could have sworn was a couch my grandparents owned in the 1980s. It somehow fit me better than any suit I’ve ever worn, despite the fact that I bought it “off the rack” from SHEIN, the ultra-cheap fast fashion online retailer whose clothes tend to fall apart at the seams. But I needed the suit ASAP, and I only needed it once, and beside, I’ve spent the last few months reporting on how Amazon, the undisputed go-to online mall for these kind of situations, isn’t exactly the cheap and convenient retailer it claims.

Next week, California Attorney General Rob Bonta will argue a motion for an injunction against Amazon that would require the shopping behemoth to end a longtime practice that has soaked American consumers and burned small businesses for the past decade. The strategy, at one point referred to internally by the company as the price parity policy, has driven up prices across industries and retailers, manipulating markets and costing hundreds of millions of Americans many tens of billions of dollars.

Evidence unsealed in April illustrate how pernicious the company has been and how clear a case Bonta has; this is real mafioso material, or as Bonta put to me, “real smoking gun stuff” that rarely arrives this blunt.

California’s lawsuit against Amazon, which goes to trial next year, is one of several seeking to end the practice, which uses the company’s market size to extract obscene fees from vendors and force price increases at every other retailer, while fooling customers into a false sense of competition.

The Biden FTC under Lina Khan also sued Amazon for its price-fixing regime, which has driven inflation enough that it’s one of the few cases against big business that the Trump administration has seen fit to continue pursuing. There’s also a massive ongoing class action lawsuit over Amazon’s price-fixing, led by the same firm that scored billions for college athletes just a few years ago. The allegations against Amazon amount to mass extortion and economy distortion, and potential remedies could see the monopoly broken up.

I spoke with Bonta, class action attorney Steve Berman, prominent Amazon sellers, and other experts for the piece below, which I wrote, produced, and hosted for More Perfect Union. If you’ve ever bought anything online — or even just watched an old film noir — you’ll want to watch this one.

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Thank you to everyone who tuned in this morning to watch my live stream with my good pal Jason Sattler, who you probably know on the internet as ! He’s been doing smart, witty, and selfless work on behalf of democracy for years now and was kind enough to discuss upcoming elections and my various projects — see: On the Ballot and the Flip Seats legislature index. You can watch the conversation above, and in tonight’s edition of the newsletter, I dive deep on some of the news that we reviewed.

As for today’s biggest headline, the death of South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham, my first reaction was less glib than you’d expect. It actually wigged me out, because he died from a dissected aorta, a fate that I narrowly avoided when I was 23-years-old. That part of my heart has haunted me: the main focus of my surgery last fall was replacing the aortic valve and root, and it’s constantly on my mind. It’s impossible to root for someone to suffer that kind of fate.

That said, Lindsey Graham was a blood-thirsty hypocrite (in so many ways!) who spent three decades cheerleading endless war and the deaths of countless innocent men, women, and especially children. I think he was well aware that he hurt millions of people, but for whatever complicated or twisted reason, he just didn’t care.

OK, let’s get to the good stuff.

Note: Think of Progress Report as the news before you read the news, bringing you conversations with up-and-coming candidates, behind the scenes with activists running critical campaigns, and perspectives you don’t hear on cable news. It’s a one-man publication and a second full-time job, so if you value this work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for just $2.50 a month — it’s the only way I can keep the work going.

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The US Supreme Court’s ongoing dismantling of voting rights and the Trump administration’s relentless attacks on elections are together enough to create a sense of despondency, as if the fundamentals of democracy are irrevocably doomed here in the United States. But as usual, you can look o the states for a bit of hope.

Or, more specifically, you can look to the people in the states, who are finding innovative new ways to fight back against fascism.

It’s become a predictable, even rote routine: citizens get together, spend several years hustling to get a progressive initiative — be it abortion rights, Medicaid expansion, minimum wage increase, etc. — on the ballot, and then overcome steep odds and millions of dollars in right-wing money to pass it in their politically conservative state. And then before they’re even done celebrating their grassroots victory, Republican legislators find a way to stymy the will of the people.

Sometimes, they try to ignore the result until they’re sued; other times, they roll back a popular policy. And increasingly, state Republicans are striving to blow up the whole initiative and amendment process altogether, making it all but impossible for citizen activists to qualify, much less pass, popular laws.

All of the above is happening in Missouri, which has become ground zero for the struggle over the future of democracy. On August 4th, the conservative attack comes to a head, as voters will be asked to weigh in on four ballot initiatives, including one that would make passing a citizen’s amendment so difficult that a resolution declaring “all puppies are good” would be a challenge. Amendment 4 would require that an initiative win majority support from all eight Congressional districts in the state, which is both very rural and very gerrymandered.

To understand just how impossible it would make it to pass an amendment, take the amendment that re-legalized abortion in Missouri in 2024: Amendment 3 won with 51.6% of the vote but only took a majority in three districts; today, with the new gerrymander, it’d probably only pass in two of them. Notably, the new standard would not apply to amendments sent to the ballot by the legislature, giving them a big leg up when they try to pass things like this November’s amendment to re-ban abortion and trans care for minors.

Reversing the will of voters is one of the Missouri GOP’s specialties: In January, Gov. Mike Kehoe signed a law that rolled back a key element of a successful ballot initiative to raise the state’s minimum wage: while the boost to $15 held, the legislature revoked the right to earn guaranteed paid leave, stripping access to sick time for more than 700,000 Missourians.

Okay, this hasn’t been too uplifting or encouraging yet, so here’s where the good news kicks in: activists are fighting back in Missouri and beyond.

In response, organizers quickly put together the Respect MO Voters coalition and qualified an amendment that would protect the initiative process from interference, preventing frequent GOP tactics like changing signature thresholds, shrinking collection periods, and arbitrarily rewording initiatives. The amendment would also require an 80% majority of the legislature to change voter-approved initiatives, which not even Missouri Republicans have been able to muster.

(Activists in Nebraska are also advancing such an amendment, having seen their people-approved minimum wage increase gutted, and just submitted more than 180,000 signatures to get on the ballot in November.)

Missouri Republicans are trying to pre-empt this display of democracy by scheduling their anti-initiative amendment for the August primary election. Perversely, that only has to win a simple majority to pass and make it harder to win future initiatives, but if activists can defeat it next month, they’ll be in good position to protect their rights in November.

And it’s not just Missouri: similar efforts are happening in other states where democracy, civil rights, and bodily autonomy have been under attack.

Fighting Back in Red States

Perhaps the most innovative pro-democracy amendment campaign this year is happening in Montana, where activists want to strike a major blow in the fight against corporate donations and dark money in the political process.

Read more

Thanks to everyone who tuned into our interview last night; you can watch the whole thing above or read about it and watch clips below. It’s the latest in our series featuring progressive activists and down ballot lawmakers running in tough primaries, aiming to remake the Democratic Party and Congress altogether.

In exciting news, Denver activist and soon-to-be Congresswoman Melat Kiros will be joining us again on July 21st for a discussion about her triumphant campaign, how she pulled it off, and where she goes from here. Watch our first conversation, from back in April.

Note: Think of Progress Report as the news before you read the news, bringing you conversations with up-and-coming candidates, behind the scenes with activists running critical campaigns, and perspectives you don’t hear on cable news. It’s a one-man publication and a second full-time job, so if you value this work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber for just $2.50 a month — it’s the only way I can keep the work going.

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The shift left could be shifting west.

Longtime activist and organizer Kai Newkirk is challenging former Phoenix mayor and four-term incumbent Rep. Greg Stanton in Arizona’s fourth Congressional district, betting that the grassroots uprising against corporate-friendly, right-leaning Democrats can flourish in the desert, too.

After major wins for progressives and democratic socialists in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Denver, the next big opportunity — and the only primary in July — has presented itself in the suburbs of Phoenix. Newkirk is a peace activist who has worked for years on immigrant issues and pivoted to become an early voice against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. His campaign video was produced by the same team that made NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign spots, and he’s working with the campaign manager who led democratic socialist Chris Rabb to victory in a Philadelphia Congressional primary in May.

Stanton, meanwhile, has voted in recent years to support the right-wing Laken Riley Act and has unceasingly supported Israel, even speaking out against President Joe Biden when he sough to temporarily block the sale of 2000-pound bombs used to devastate Palestinian cities. AIPAC is his single-biggest campaign contributor.

A supporter of Medicare for All and opponent of big data centers, Newkirk is generating enough heat that Think Big, the PAC funded by pro-AI group Anthropic and Marc Andreesen, just dropped $227K on ads intended to stymy his campaign.

Word of those ads first reached the internet just before Progress Report’s interview with Newkirk last night, but I was focused on another piece of breaking news: the AZ Young Democrats issued a statement Thursday evening rescinding their endorsement of Newkirk due to rumors of “concerning patterns of behaviors,” without offering any specifics or hints.

The Arizona Republic reported today that there still have been no specific or substantiated allegations made against Newkirk, only vague insinuations; much of the noise seems to be based on an essay about his time organizing in his native West Virginia, which said he’d had consensual relationships with other organizers. One of the authors of that essay has since renounced it and endorsed Newkirk, which the campaign pointed out on social media.

As a reporter, I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask Newkirk about it. So early in our interview, I put it to him point blank, which you can watch below:

The left is obviously skittish right now after the controversy in Maine with Graham Platner, but it’s important to note that these situations, as of now, are nothing alike. The campaign alleges that the Stanton camp is playing dirty, dredging up old rumors.

Newkirk has been an activist for the better part of 25 years, going back to the WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. He is running an uphill campaign, and the allegations makes the challenge steeper, but 11 days out from the election deadline, internal polls have him tied with Greg Stanton while the big spend from the AI super PAC indicates that there is real concern that this will be the next big upset.

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Tonight we’re going to talk about — you guessed it — Graham Platner.

And on another Democratic primary note, on Thursday evening we’ll be live with Kai Newkirk, the dynamic activist who is challenging Rep. Greg Stanton in Arizona. Keep an eye out for the invite.

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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Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner was accused of sexual assault on Monday by a former girlfriend, the latest in a long line of scandals that seems almost certain to result in his ouster as the Democratic nominee. It’s really only a matter of time — the Maine Democratic Party chair released a video tonight promising an “open, inclusive, transparent, and fair” process for replacing Platner and revealing that his campaign has been trying to shape the process of selecting a new nominee.

What comes next should be easy: Platner needs to drop out of this race. He lied to Mainers time and again, which negates any mandate or claim to represent the wishes of Democratic primary voters. There should be no equivocating, no trying to name his successor, no leverage plays.

That being said, establishment Democratic leaders cannot simply say “told ya so,” do some gloating, and then push some empty suit or corporate stooge when the party picks its nominee later this month. Because despite what all the angry centrist trolls in my Twitter mentions have been screaming for the last 24 hours (welcome to my world), this calamity is not simply a matter of terrible and flimsy vetting and eager leftists investing their hope in a very troubled candidate, though both of those things were of course factors.

Instead, as I wrote exactly one month ago, the Platner phenomenon was a symptom of a bigger problem, one that won’t disappear when the candidate exits stage left:

Graham Platner’s ascendancy is as much a condemnation of a sclerotic national establishment as it is affirmation of his talents. To put it simply, nobody outside of local seafood aficionados would know Graham Platner’s name if Chuck Schumer and the DSCC hadn’t cleared the field for a 78-year-old centrist governor who’s been in public office since the 1980s and didn’t ever seem all that interested in going to Washington.

In the most turbulent and dangerous times of our lives, they went with business as usual. Mainers responded by giving Platner a 64-26% lead in April.

Is Platner that compelling? He’s a decent speaker with a compelling background, but he’s no rock star or Barack Obama, and it’s safe to say that he would probably not be drawing massive crowds at raucous rallies if there were some other candidate who was willing to speak truth to power, channel populist outrage, and promise to work on behalf of working people.

If Democrats had welcomed a competitive primary and backed a half-decent elected official with a pulse, Graham Platner probably never would have been recruited by outsiders, much less become the presumptive nominee for Senate.

About a week ago, a report in NOTUS about Chuck Schumer’s heavy involvement in candidate recruitment essentially confirmed the most important element of this thesis: the DSCC wanted Gov. Janet Mills as its nominee from the start and warned off other younger, progressive, and presumably less problematic potential candidates, using the specter of a massive fundraising and institutional disadvantage to prevent them from running.

There were some denials from Schumer’s camp in the story, but it was really a matter of semantics, as the DSCC acknowledging that it had “made clear from the start that it would back Mills’ potential candidacy.”

A few other candidates did declare for the race, but with the thumb on the scale for Mills and Platner gaining steam — he was the one who did not heed the DSCC’s warning and jumped in before the governor — there was just no oxygen for a third contender. Considering how poorly Mills campaigned and how little money she raised, it’s very feasible that without the DSCC staying neutral could have made it a three-way race.

Instead, they wound up with a charismatic sociopath, a selfish and violent man, a black mark on the party and a black eye for people who thought better was possible.

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That voters flocked to Platner was indicative of the desperate thirst for populism, for something new and uncensored, for somebody who understands the financial and existential struggles that they face and won’t respond to them with platitudes and expiring tax credits. Graham Platner wasn’t just a tatted up ex-Marine oysterman and his appeal wasn’t just aesthetic: he stood against outrageous wealth inequality, backed Medicare for All, and had no problem calling what Israel is doing in Gaza a genocide. He was walking, talking proof that “electability” was no longer code for moderate, milquetoast, and poll-tested, and that people who never pay attention to politics can be activated by an authentic, inspiring leader.

People thought they could believe in Graham Platner, which, along with the fact that the guy seemingly hurt a lot of women, is the larger tragedy here. He was a legitimate populist phenomenon; people who had never before engaged in the political process packed his town halls in the most rural parts of Maine, waited hours to meet him, volunteered for a movement that looked poised to realign the state.

But the people who recruited Graham Platner were so eager for something and something new that they failed to vet him, ignored all the red flags, foisted him on the public, promised that he was the real deal, took their time and money and belief. And in exchange, all voters got was disappointment and more reason to be cynical, with the easy takeaway being that anyone who offers them the hope of something better is full of shit. Worse, this sloppy and disastrous operation sends the message that regular people can’t run for office, that working people aren’t to be trusted and should just leave governing to the “professionals” and forget about even being involved.

We need more oyster farmers — people who work with their hands, who make money off labor and not investment income — in Congress. This feels like a setback on that front.

It should be a lesson for the left, too, because even avowed socialists are prone to searching for a savior and worshipping a hero. It’s easy to start making excuses for people, to rationalize their flaws, to say maybe this time, it’s other people who are lying and that our guy is the victim even in absurd circumstances. For what it’s worth, I was never fully sold on Platner, even if I did — and still do — believe that we need candidates who break the mold and the death grip that the party establishment as on the nominating process. Here’s what I wrote way back in October, when the Nazi tattoo story first broke:

Let’s be objective: Platner is a history buff who apparently liked taking his shirt off at big parties. Is it really possible that he went nearly two decades without either stumbling across the image of the SS Totenkopf or having someone tap him on the shoulder and politely inform him that he had the insignia of the Nazi concentration camp guards above his right nipple?

Criticizing Israel’s government and genocide has opened the left to deeply cynical and unfair accusations of antisemitism, but it’s going to be that much harder to combat them if activists stick with a guy who had a giant Nazi tattoo for nearly 20 years. This isn’t to say that Platner is actually a Nazi or that he’s lying about his political convictions, but the bar for a political candidate has to be higher than broad ideological agreement, especially when it comes to this particular subject.

If Platner can prove that he really didn’t know the significance of his tattoo up until this month, I’m happy to retract my skepticism, but if we’re going to call out conservatives for believing Trump’s lies because they love tax cuts and ICE raids, we should think twice about buying such a far-fetched story.

Our democracy, with its individual candidates in a first past the post system, almost demands cult of personality around politicians, which invests them with far too much power. Graham Platner was the avatar of this movement, but it does not belong to him. Whoever gets the nomination after him should be somebody who can galvanize, not simply satisfice in a year where real change is in the air.

The process should be as democratic as possible, with no maneuvering by party insiders to promote one candidate over another. Platner didn’t work out, but his voters should not be punished. They showed faith and a rare desire to involve themselves in politics, so the only way for Democrats to make anything positive out of this mess is by honoring the message they sent.

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How was your July 4th weekend? It felt strange to celebrate the country at this moment in time, but I always see it as a way to honor the people who have given everything to bring the US closer to the lofty ideals it espouses. That and an excuse to eat hot dogs and stand on my roof to watch amateur fireworks explode over Harlem, the Bronx, and Queens.

Tonight is a delight for me personally, because we’re covering two of my favorite things: soccer (it’s political, don’t worry) and ballot initiatives.

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It’s not very often that my obsession with soccer intersects with this newsletter, but the news today that Donald Trump pressured FIFA into allowing US striker Folarin Balogun to play in Monday’s match despite the red card he received last week is a perfect encapsulation of his idiotic, short-sighted reign.

In isolation, Balogun’s availability is a boon to the US on the pitch, as he’s emerged as the team’s best forward and leads the squad with three goals in the tournament. But the way he became eligible also creates a huge distraction that threatens to overshadow what should be the biggest match in US Men’s history. It’s a no-win situation, even in the event of a win.

Let’s game it out: If Balogun plays and the US defeats Belgium, one of Europe’s best sides, to advance to the quarterfinals, it would be the most iconic victory in USMNT history — and forever tainted by its association with Trump’s blatant corruption.

And in the extremely unlikely event that US coach Mauricio Pochettino leaves Balogun out of the lineup in the interest of fairness, well, he’s going to draw the ire of both Trump supporters and many liberal American soccer fans, a decision that would probably cost him his job if the US loses.

Given America’s belligerence, you may not think that it’s a big deal if the US’s greatest victory is tainted in the eyes of the rest of the world. But here’s why it matters: lifting the trophy has never been the primary American goal of this World Cup; instead, it’s been a decade-in-the-making endeavor to integrate American soccer with the rest of the world and enrich a growing domestic league.

Things were going well, too, with all the nasty politics, worries about ICE at stadiums, and sky-high ticket prices fading into the background during what’s been an incredible tournament. But Trump, the US’s biggest liability with the rest of the world, just had to insert himself.

Maybe some other president’s involvement would be okay, if they were a respected figure who made a passionate public case and built international support for a reversal based on fairness and mutual respect. But instead, Trump went about it like a mob boss demanding a favor from a corrupt public official, reminding the world of the gross lead-up to the tournament, everything they hate about this country, and the absurd corruption that continues to blemish FIFA.

Like America’s CEOs, FIFA president Gianni Infantino has fallen over himself to flatter Trump, including handing him the organization’s inaugural “peace prize” weeks before the president attacked Venezuela and Iran. The soccer federation also rents an office in Trump Tower that it barely uses. The Balogun decision is another tribute to Trump, and it’s already triggered international outrage.

Belgium’s coach likened it April Fool’s Day. The Belgian football federation has called for an investigation. And UEFA, the governing body of European football, plans to echo that demand. Triggering Europeans probably delights Trump’s base, but this entire tournament has been focused on finally establishing the United States as a true soccer nation, and as much as that requires Americans to love the sport, it also mandates the rest of the world respecting the American game.

MLS is bringing in more European stars than ever, and the league is changing its entire structure to align its season with the continent’s various domestic leagues, all in hopes of appealing to the same fans who are now livid at FIFA’s decision. Instead of grudgingly respecting to the US team, Trump has given the world every reason to root against them and root instead for Belgium, which now has to throw days of preparation out the window.

Even Alexi Lalas, the Trump-supporting former USMNT star turned oft-criticized broadcaster, and a guy never known for his self-awareness, recognized the problem this creates.

"I will say this: It is now USA vs. the world after this decision," Lalas said during Fox’s pregame broadcast tonight, "because any support or a treaty or benefit of the doubt kind of just went out the window with this. Because we will be seen after this, and we're already starting to see, some of this as being given special treatment right now.”

Lalas wasn’t too worried about the international scorn, but he’s a myopic former player who is widely hated by the rest of the world. Trump, so eager to win and take credit for it, may have just sealed that fate for the national soccer program, wasting a full decade of hard work and graft by countless others.

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The Headline: Ballot Box Blitz: Direct Democracy Fights Escalate Ahead of November

The Lede: Citizens groups across the country hit July signature deadlines this week in some of the year’s highest-stakes ballot fights, even as courts remain the real gatekeepers on several of them.

The Details:

Arkansas: It was good week for democracy in Arkansas. A federal judge ruled that most of the state’s new ballot petition-restriction laws — photo-ID and residency requirements for canvassers among them — are unconstitutional, a win for organizers even as the state appeals to the Eighth Circuit.

Separately, the coalition Protect AR Rights submitted over 108,000 signatures for a constitutional amendment that would make the citizen-initiative process itself a protected right, require notice before rejecting signatures, and cap the legislature’s ability to override citizen-passed laws. They need 90,704 valid signatures to qualify.

There was one hitch, unfortunately: For AR Kids — spot the naming trend? — fell short of the number of signatures it needed to collect to qualify its school voucher reform initiative. Arkansas has one of the biggest and messiest school voucher program, with no accountability for the schools that take public money. This initiative would have required “identical academic standards and identical standards for accreditation including assessments of students and schools based on such standards” for private and charter schools, which fail students fare more often than public schools.

Arizona: In much better education reform news, Save Our Schools Arizona and the state’s teacher’s union together submitted more than 420,000 signatures for the “Protect Education Act,” which would put significant restrictions on the state’s school voucher program, which has become a billion dollar slush fund for rich families. I’ve reported on the voucher scam in Arizona before, and last week, one of my colleagues at More Perfect Union delivered this report on what’s happening there:

In an ideal world, the activists and teachers behind this campaign would be able to fully eradicate the program, but this is a good start: the initiative would create a $150,000 income cap and a requirement that leftover voucher funds return to the state’s general fund. A rival school-choice group, the DeVos-funded American Federation for Children, has already vowed to challenge the signatures in court. With 150,000 more signatures than necessary, good luck to them.

Idaho: Organizers with a group called Idahoans United for Women and Families turned in nearly 110,000 signatures to qualify a measure ending Idaho’s near-total abortion ban for the November ballot, a proposal that would legalize abortion until fetal viability or in medical emergencies.

Idaho, despite being as dark red as it gets, has seen a number of progressive ballot initiatives pass in recent years, including the landmark 2018 campaign that expanded Medicaid. Unfortunately, the conservative legislature just implemented strict work requirements and reimbursement reductions that will hinder the program, so their threats are not hollow.

Nebraska: The coalition Respect Nebraska Voters submitted more than 186,500 signatures for a constitutional amendment that would raise the threshold for lawmakers to alter voter-passed laws from a 2/3rds vote to 4/5ths.

Sponsors say it’s needed because state legislators have repeatedly moved in 2025 and 2026 to weaken or unwind voter-approved measures like minimum wage increases, paid sick leave, payday-lending caps, and medical marijuana legalization. The rollback minimum wage increase was especially egregious because it was a Democratic-aligned lawmaker who pushed the bill, which lowers the bar for paying teenagers, in service of her family’s supermarket chain.

Maine: Something to look forward to: A coalition called Health Care For All Maine relaunched its campaign for a ballot initiative that would direct lawmakers to finally produce and implement a single payer healthcare system for every resident by 2028. It’s purposely light on specifics, leaving the particulars to lawmakers and experts (probably the best choice with something as complicated as a single payer healthcare system).

Volunteers collected over 20,000 signatures at primary polling sites toward the roughly 67,700 needed for the 2027 ballot.

And in more immediate news, the state Supreme Court heard arguments over whether an anti-trans high school sports referendum can qualify for November after election officials invalidated over 12,000 signatures and left the campaign about 500 signatures short. The disqualification came as something of a surprise, as Secretary of State Shenna Bellows originally said that they would not be tossing the issue off the ballot, but allegations of fraud made it impossible to avoid taking action.

Washington: Conservative activists submitted more than half a million signatures to qualify a ballot initiative that would repeal the state’s new millionaire tax, but passing is going to be a very different story.

Washington has long gone without a state income tax, the result of a conservative state Supreme Court decision nearly a century ago. It took years and years of effort, but progressives were finally able to pass a 9.9% tax on incomes above a million dollars this year, a stunning reversal that reflected the state’s faltering finances and the lack of money coming from the federal government.

One of the state’s richest men, Brian Heywood, finances most of the conservative ballot initiative campaigns in Washington through his group Let’s Go Washington. It is the primary sponsor of the wealth tax repeal, which has a big mountain to climb if it’s going to pass: polling from Democratic firm GBAO shows the repeal losing by 19 points, 38% to 57%. Numbers like these, via The Guardian, help explain why a state that frequently rejected income taxes is now firmly in favor of the wealth tax:

According to the Economic Opportunity Institute, a Seattle-based non-profit, the bottom 20% of state households pay 13.8% of their income in state and local taxes, the middle 20% pay 10.9%, and the wealthiest 1% pay just 4.1%.

The tax doesn’t go into effect until 2028, and it’s hard to see it losing this year given the populist anger and blue wave incoming.

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It was a historic week at the Supreme Court, as the conservative justices took a wrecking ball to some segments of society and (barely) spared a few of Americans’ most basic constitutional rights.

The court handed down eight decisions, some of which invented new standards to bully trans kids, gave the president carte blanche to fire regulators, and unleashed a torrent of dark money on our elections. They also Donald Trump several significant and embarrassing losses, though even those decisions come with intrigue and indications of future trouble.

I’m no lawyer, so to really understand these decisions, their implications, and the broader question of how the hell we are going to get out of this situation, I spoke with , a former senior counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee and the co-founder of Court Accountability and True North Research. She’s also a cohost of and author of Without Precedent, a book that chronicles Chief Justice John Roberts’s rise and how he has quietly defiled and rewritten the constitution again and again during his two decades at the Supreme Court.

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Our conversation touched on all of those decisions and much more beyond; you can watch the whole thing above or excerpts below.

First up, I asked Graves about the court’s decision in NRSC v. Federal Election Commission, which repealed what thin veneer of campaign finance limitations remained. The decision removes the limits on the amount of money that political parties can spend in coordination with a candidate, opening the door for even more billionaire influence on elections. Graves explained the ins and outs of what it means and how it works:

Soon after, we moved on to another decision, where the court upheld birthright citizenship. It was certainly good news, but not unequivocally so, as four justices — one short of a majority! — were willing to accept a manufactured right-wing “theory” claiming that the 14th amendment does not mean what everyone has unanimously accepted it means for the past 150 years.

I wanted to understand how the hell we got to this point and whether these justices — who all attended the best law schools in the country and presumably have closely studied the constitution — were just being cynical opportunists or actually somehow believe the stupidest interpretation of tha amendment possible.

I spent much of the Biden administration campaigning for Senate Democrats to seriously investigate the blatant corruption on the court, particularly the clear bribes taken by many of the right-wing justices. Graves played a large role in breaking those stories with ProPublica

Judiciary Committee chair Dick Durbin did everything he could to avoid taking meaningful action, and over the past few years, I’ve theorized that the lack of consequences — or even a real investigation into the millions of dollars in gifts, trips, and financial help provided to the justices — emboldened them to author even more extreme rulings. Obviously, I asked Graves what she tought about that:

OK, let’s end on a hopeful note. Here, we talk about how we can stop the bleeding and reverse the damage being done to American democracy, civil rights, and human rights all across the world. The easy answer is Supreme Court reform, but what does that mean, exactly?

For Graves, it’s an expansive to-do list, and to give you a bit of hope going into this holiday weekend, she thinks it’s closer than it might seem.

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It’s election night — again — and I’m happy to report that a candidate you probably first heard about here at Progress Report is headed to Congress. More below!

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Another week, another earthquake upset in a Democratic primary.

Several, in fact.

Progressive Attorney General Phil Weiser defeated Sen. Michael Bennet in a hard-fought but not particularly close gubernatorial primary, putting him in position to succeed centrist libertarian Democratic Gov. Jared Polis. Bennet was seen as the favorite in this race, so much so that every other Democrat stepped aside when he announced his candidacy. Weiser decided not to defer and hit Bennet for a perceived softness on the Trump administration, including his votes to confirm several of the president’s cabinet nominees.

“For too many people, the Democratic Party doesn't show up, listen and fight for you. The view across Colorado, particularly rural communities, working class communities is I don't see you maybe other than election time. For me, this has been a challenge since I started running for office. I've gone to every single county in Colorado, all 64 counties, and I've gone there again and again,” Weiser said in a debate with Bennet earlier this month.

Disappointment in the party also shaped its marquee Congressional race.

Melat Kiros ousted 15-term incumbent Rep. Diana DeGette in resounding fashion on Tuesday night, completing a once-unlikely upset against a lawmaker who first entered Congress months before the 29-year-old was born. A political newcomer, Kiros becomes the latest democratic socialist to unseat a long-time centrist incumbent in a primary season that shaped by the anger of Democratic voters.

Kiros worked as a lawyer in New York for several years before being fired for writing an op-ed in support of student protests against the genocide in Gaza. After returning to Colorado, where she grew up after her emigrating with her parents from Ethiopia when she was a baby, Kiros threw herself into politics, working for local campaigns. Dissatisfied with DeGette and eager to see her replace, Kiros launched her own campaign in the summer of 2025; the grassroots effort, backed by DSA and Justice Democrats, picked up momentum over the winter (Progress Report hosted her for a live stream in April) and was boosted late in the campaign by an endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders.

I spent most of the weekend working on a piece about her campaign for More Perfect Union, which you can watch below:

American support for Israel’s government has been one of several animating issues in her campaign, which has otherwise focused heavily on affordability, economic populism, and immigrant rights. A democratic socialist, Kiros is a vocal supporter of Medicare for All, universal childcare, and social housing, issues that she says DeGette has been reluctant to support or pursue.

“I have a lot of respect for the work [DeGette] has done on reproductive justice and environmental justice, but that work hasn't really been done in the last decade,” Kiros told us late last week. “And in that time she's also taken millions of dollars from big Pharma, big energy and oil, from defense contractors, and special interests like AIPAC. Denver is a city that voted for publicly financed elections, for term limits, for universal pre-K. So we deserve to have representatives that are fighting for that on the federal level.”

DeGette benefited from millions of dollars in late Super PAC spending from a bevy of special interests, including $2 million from AIPAC and Big Tech. More than $1.3 million was spent last week on ads that attacked Kiros as “divisive” and making misleading statements about her residency. Money poorly spent.

You can watch my longform interview with Kiros from April below:

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It seems like every few months, we’re treated to another cycle of pitiful tantrums thrown by establishment centrists angry over the left’s habit of participating in politics and government. This past week’s romp by progressives and leftists in New York’s Democratic primary elections has triggered a particularly bitter chorus from the corporate class, including sulking tweet threads, whiny appearances on cable news, anonymous complaints to Axios, and statements from newly formed astroturf groups that we’ll never hear from again — all the pissy, insular tactics that put them in this position in the first place.

The complaints all amount to some version of “this is our party, stop competing against us” and “the left is going to take down the Democrats and cost us elections.” The latter is particularly rich coming from the same people who have spent the last 16 years losing elections to the biggest bozos alive and making the Democratic Party less popular than Gonorrhea, failings that should render any opinion they have irrelevant.

Before NJ Rep. Josh Gottheimer insists that democratic socialists aren’t actually Democrats, he should recall that he got leveled in the state’s gubernatorial primary last year, finishing a distant fourth, so his understanding of what a majority of the party wants isn’t exactly authoritative or even coherent.

Ditto Jaime Harrison, the former DNC chair, who complained that people critical of Democratic leaders were running in the party’s primaries. Harrison oversaw one of the most disastrous four-year tenures in modern party history, culminating in a second loss to Donald Trump, so if anybody should have zero say over the mechanisms of the party, it’s him.

But instead of easy insults, I’d actually like to extend some advice to the bereaved centrists in the party: if you’re so concerned about the left winning so many primaries, they should try harder to win them!

They have far more money, more institutional support, more allies in the media (see below), and generally more name recognition, but they continuously blow it on lame old candidates and cautious, corporate-approved platforms designed to appeal to theoretical voters but nobody with an actual pulse. Janet Mills in Maine, Haley Stevens in Michigan, Adriano Espaillat in New York, Diana DeGette in Colorado (see the section below)?

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Nobody is mandating that they get behind tired voids of charisma who are bereft of political imagination and run campaigns stuffed to the gills with corporate PAC money; supporting incumbents until the end of time and recruiting bizarre, passionless functionaries is a choice, and yelling at voters for not backing them sends a very different message than intended. If these Democrats are so concerned about winning elections, they should try to do it themselves.

However, I’m not actually sure that these bitter centrist establishment Democrats actually care all that much about winning, because the only way to explain their behavior is that it’s pure sabotage. Trashing the left is meant to be a self-fulfilling prophesy, as they know that the media relishes this in-fighting and will turn it into the main event.

There’s nothing that DC reporters and editors savor more than concern-trolling the left and red-baiting. You’ll never see the political media asking whether nominating ultra-reactionary homophobes, Nazis, and Islamophobes in red districts will hurt Republicans in the general election. But that part’s baked in and not all that interesting to me; complaining about that double standard is just pissing in the wind.

The Headline: The next Democratic primary upset?

The Lede: A series of heated primary races will reach the finish line on Tuesday in Colorado, where long-time incumbents and establishment Democrats face challenges from the left in a number of top races.

The Details: After Zohran Mamdani’s democratic socialist endorsees swept through Congressional and legislative primaries in New York last week, hype is building for another dynamic young DSA member, Melat Kiros. The attorney and barista — she was fired from her firm for publishing a letter defending student protestors against the Gaza genocide — is running against Rep. Diana DeGette (CO-1), a 30-year incumbent who has been in office since 1997, the year that Kiros was born.

It’s not just hype: Kiros led by five in the most recent public poll, which was conducted for her campaign but not disputed by DeGette’s camp. But the incumbent has spent decades building up a campaign war chest from donations from pharmaceutical companies ($500k since 2010), health insurers, and military contractors; some of them are now trying to save her career with a late flurry of millions of dollars in independent expenditures.

If Kiros’s name sounds familiar to you, it may be because she came on the Progress Report live stream for an interview in April, before all the national attention began. Watch that here:

Elsewhere: Just about every major seat is being contested by progressives: state Sen. Julie Gonzales is challenging US Sen. John Hickenlooper in his re-election bid, Attorney General Phil Weiser is running for governor against Sen. Michael Bennet, and antitrust attorney Davey Seligman is taking on Secretary of State Jena Griswold in the contest to succeed Weiser as AG.

All of these races are a product of national anger among Democrats as well as the shifting politics of Colorado, once a purple state that has advanced from solidly blue to verging on progressive bastion. I’m working on a story about Kiros at More Perfect Union, which will publish on Tuesday.

The Headline: Trump’s voter suppression regime is crumbling

The Lede: Multiple federal judges struck down or blocked several aspects of President Trump’s anti-voter executive orders, dealing a blow to the administration’s attempts to “take over the voting” ahead of the midterm elections.

The Details: We’ll work backwards, starting with a ruling on Thursday by a district court judge in Massachusetts who placed an injunction on the March executive order in which . Earlier in the week, the Postmaster General said that the postal service planned to refuse to send mail ballots to people in states that did not comply with the order. That would be catastrophic, as I explored in this report:

That report also explores how Trump’s executive order requiring proof of citizenship in order to register to vote would impact the electorate; even if you haven’t watched, you probably could guess that it would also be catastrophic. Fortunately, that requirement, part of a March 2025 executive order, was permanently blocked by a federal judge on Wednesday. The judge also blocked the provision of Trump’s order that mandated mail-in ballots be received by election day.

Finally, on Monday, another federal judge blocked the other half of the most recent executive order, which would have created a federal database of citizens against which states would be asked to compare their voter rolls. The government admitted that the database, which would be derived from various social safety net eligibility rosters, would have been flawed and risked disenfranchising voters.

Elsewhere: Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine vetoed a bill that would have required voters to provide photo ID to cast their ballot by mail.

"While there may be disagreement whether these are large or small burdens, they are burdens, nonetheless, and when layered upon the existing steps already required to vote absentee and vote by mail, there would certainly be voters discouraged from exercising their right to vote," DeWine said in his veto statement.

State law already requires Ohioans to provide a full driver’s license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number in order to obtain a mail-in ballot. The new law would have necessitated that Ohio create a new online portal for the photo ID uploads, an extra expense that made Secretary of State Frank LaRose less than bullish on the bill, too.

The Future: It was good news that the federal judge blocked the aspect of the executive order that required mail-in ballots to arrive by election day, but that may not be the end of the line for that particular attempt to disenfranchise what could be millions of Americans.

The Supreme Court is due to issue a ruling this week in Watson v. RNC, a GOP challenge to a law in 14 states that allow absentee ballots to arrive at some point after election day.

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Progress Report has raised over $7 million dollars for progressive candidates and causes, breaks national stories about corrupt politicians, and delivers incisive analysis, and goes deep into the grassroots.

None of the money we’ve raised for candidates and causes goes to producing this newsletter or all of the related projects we put out. In fact, it costs me money to do this. So, I need your help.

For just $5 a month, you can buy a premium subscription that includes:

• Premium member-only newsletters with original reporting

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What a crazy week! And we’ll review the most important headlines — both the ones you’ve heard about and the ones you haven’t — in a paid-subscriber only edition of the newsletter. We’ll be doing that every Sunday going forward, so it’s a great time to upgrade.

Tonight’s newsletter features my conversation with Alejandra Gomez, the executive director of Living United for Change in Arizona. Better known as LUCHA, the organization has since 2010 led the way in pushing back against right-wing fascism in Arizona, initially against Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s reign of terror against the state’s Latino community.

Their work has expanded to touch on a variety of issues, including the fight against data centers, which produced one of the nation’s largest victories: a three-year moratorium on the state’s generous tax breaks for building data centers, signed into the budget by Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs earlier this month.

You can’t overstate the size of this accomplishment: Arizona was the first state to offer tax breaks for data centers in 2013, expanded the incentive in 2016, and has become one of their leading destinations for this behemoths. As I discussed with Gomez, they were able to defeat the Big Tech lobby and pass the moratorium through a Republican-run legislature filled with extremists.

You can watch our conversation above to hear Gomez explain how they organized to pull it off, how the data center blowback points to a sea change in politics and the potential for a new coalition, and how they’re fighting ICE. If you’d rather read the transcript, it’s available for paid subscribers below.

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