A shock poll in South Dakota and a NY streets fight

“Streets” is a pun, not a typo

Welcome to a Wednesday edition of Progress Report.

There’s all kinds of news to discuss tonight, but first, a bit of personal news and a programming note:

My sister-in-law passed away on Monday after a valiant two-month battle against an inoperable brain tumor. It’s been a surreal and unbearably difficult year, but as I wrote on Instagram, her indefatigable optimism and courage are now a source of inspiration and resilience. I’ll be spending time with family this weekend, so there will be no newsletter on Saturday or Sunday. We’ll be back to a regular schedule by mid-week next week. Thank you for understanding.

OK, now let’s get to the news.

Note: To make this work as accessible as possible, I’ve lowered the price for a paid subscription back down to Substack’s $5 minimum. If you can’t afford that right now, please email me and I’ll put you on the list for free, no questions asked. Every paid subscription makes it sustainable for me to do this.

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🏭 🏄 Seizing power: Activists in San Diego say they’ve collected enough petition signatures to advance a ballot initiative calling for the city to replace its for-profit utility company with a publicly-owned nonprofit.

Here’s the catch: the next step is a vote by the city council on whether or not to put the initiative on the ballot. Had the activists collected at least 80k signatures, they could have skipped that step and gone right to the ballot, but they only had the resources to hit the 24,600 signature number that puts it before the council. They’ll face an uphill battle to win over the City Council, which already rejected the opportunity to put it directly on the ballot in April.

If it does get on the ballot, it’ll be an interesting dynamic: San Diego Gas and Energy, the utility company, will undoubtedly spend a massive amount of money on a vote no campaign, and unions with workers at the company will mobilize, as well. The same dynamic played out in Maine last year, where a similar statewide amendment wound up getting crushed. But with SDG&E price gouging its way to record profits, anything is possible.

✝️ 🤑 Voucher virus: Conservatives in Oregon are working to qualify a ballot initiative that would create a voucher program that siphons money off to private and religious schools. The publicity around the measure, though, is far more advanced than the campaign itself.

School privatization advocates have around 30,000 petition signatures banked and a bit less than a month to gather at least another 130,000 valid signatures, so it’s going to take a one of the great grassroots campaigns in modern memory to get this thing on the November ballot.

If only that were the case in the rest of the country. There are now 11 states with expansive school privatization voucher scam policies in place, and even though many of them haven’t yet taken on their final universal form, they are already sending billions of public dollars to private religious schools.

🏜️ 🙄 High stakes: A decade and a half since the state’s “Show Me Your Papers Act” inspired generational blowback and turned Arizona into a swing state, Republicans in the legislature are betting that a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment will help them consolidate power once more.

On Tuesday, the House rerouted the controversial Secure the Border Act, vetoed earlier this year by Gov. Katie Hobbs, to the November ballot, where voters will weigh in directly on whether they want a return to draconian immigration policies. The bill mimics the patently unconstitutional law passed by Texas that bars illegal entry into the state by people from outside the country. Immigration law is in fact a federal responsibility, but with this Supreme Court, all bets are off.

Arizona’s ballot, by the way, is going to be packed to the brim with tight elections this year. It’s a presidential battleground, has an open US Senate seat up for grabs, there are several close Congressional races, the legislature could very easily flip, and there’s already an abortion rights amendment set to go before voters.

🔉 😲 Wow: A new poll out of South Dakota finds that support for an abortion rights ballot amendment is up by nearly 20 points, with even a plurality of Republicans in favor.

Overall, 53% of voters in South Dakota say they will vote for the amendment, while 35% plan to vote it down. Eleven percent of South Dakotans said they were uncertain about lifting the total prohibition on reproductive rights in the state. The amendment has surged in support since last fall, when it had just a 46-44% lead.

The amendment is relatively modest, as far as these things go. Abortion would be protected in the first trimester, while the health of the mother must be factored into any regulations written for the second trimester.

🥤 🇬🇧 Milkshake, duck: A 25-year-old woman named Victoria Thomas Bowen fired a milkshake directly into the puckered face of right-wing British leader Nigel Farage on Tuesday, producing one of the great action shots in the history of political photography while humiliating the country’s most smug racist.

Bowen, who is a Jeremy Corbyn supporter and OnlyFans model, also delivered one of the great quotes in recent memory when asked why she flung the McDonald’s shake at the Reform UK leader. After initially explaining that she “just felt like it,” Bowen added cut down the nationalist leader in just a few sentences.

“He doesn’t stand for me, he doesn’t represent anything I believe in, or any of the people around here,” she told the BBC. “He doesn’t represent us, he’s not from here.”

Bowen now faces assault charges, but I’m confident that she won’t have trouble raising money for her legal defense. What a hero.

🛂 👎 Profiles in courage: President Biden on Tuesday signed an executive order intended to drastically reduce the number of people who cross into the United States through the southern border.

The order gives Biden the power to “shut down” the border — or in practice, make it virtually impossible for a migrant to claim asylum and deport them ASAP — any time the number of crossings exceed 2,500 on a given day. The border would be permitted to “open” again when the number of crossings falls below 1,500 per day.

For context, there have been an average of 3,700 crossings per day during Biden’s presidency, while there hasn’t been a day with fewer than 1,500 crossings since July 2020. Unless this order suddenly dissuades well over half of migrants who would otherwise have crossed the border, it’s going to essentially be permanent.

If the policy sounds familiar, it’s because it is a significant chunk of the ill-fated bill put together Congress earlier this year and essentially the same exact policy as a 2018 executive order issued by Donald Trump and blocked by a federal judge. Shortly taking office, Biden reversed a number of other immigration policies that Trump put into place in 2018, calling them a “moral and national shame.”

The change of heart is very obviously a reaction to negative poll numbers, which have been driven by a real crisis further inflamed by conservative fear-mongering. It should not have come to this; for several years now, Democratic mayors and governors have been calling on the federal government to expedite work permits and other aid for migrants, with little response from the White House. Now, five months until the election, Biden is hoping a crackdown will win over the plurality of voters who for three months running have named immigration as the issue that most concerns them.

With many immigrant and Hispanic organizations incensed at the White House, it’s a gambit that will only succeed if it manages to change the narrative or at least quiet the relentless drumbeat of criticism from Republicans and conservative media. Early returns aren’t great: the only story on FoxNews.com regarding federal immigration policy last night was about a congressman allegedly named “Chip Roy” barking at AG Merrick Garland about a DOJ lawsuit over Texas’s refusal to stop drowning migrants.

🙏 😀 Vindication: Journalists and many liberals spent Tuesday poking fun at an undecided voter who told pollster Frank Luntz and the New York Times that Trump’s inability to pull off a bribe to a porn star made him seriously question his fitness to be president.

Such glib mockery is a function of a misplaced sense of superiority that afflicts so many members of the DC political press corps, but that’s nothing new. Proximity to power does that to people. The reality is that this is how most Americans assess politics, especially when it comes to candidates with whom they are encouraged to have a parasocial relationship.

Most Democratic leaders don’t really seem to understand how people outside the bubble engage with the reality show of government, which is why I wrote this treatise on Sunday about why Democrats should be rushing to mock Donald Trump for being a pitiful little sex pest who was too big of a loser to not get caught paying off a porn star.

As a reminder, I’m available for hire as a media and political strategist.

😡 🗡️ Disappointment: Like so many progressives here in New York and beyond, I was once fooled into believing that former Rep. Mondaire Jones had any firm principles beyond the belief that Mondaire Jones should be in Congress.

On Monday, Jones officially endorsed George Latimer in his bitter primary campaign against Rep. Jamaal Bowman, completing one of the most nakedly cynical political transformations in recent memory.

Let’s rewind: When he first ran for Congress in 2020, Jones, who previously served in the Obama DOJ, positioned himself in a crowded primary as a bold, action-oriented progressive who rejected corporate money and championed government reforms. What’s more, his personal story was just as compelling: Jones was raised by a single mother in Section 8 housing, graduated from Stanford and Harvard Law, and aimed to be the first openly gay Black man in Congress.

That he wound up sharing that historic distinction with Rep. Richie Torres would prove to be grimly ironic.

I got to know and enthusiastically supported the 2020 version of Mondaire Jones, which included raising money for his primary campaign via this very newsletter. Both he and Bowman were part of a fresh new generation of progressive New Yorkers in Congress, having vanquished old incumbents who sat far to the right.

Jones’s first term rewarded that faith, as he delivered on his promise to push Democrats past their mealy-mouthed stupor, in part through his work on promoting Supreme Court expansion. Then New York got a crappy new Congressional map and DCCC chair Sean Patrick Maloney decided to jump the line and run in Jones’s district in Rockland County. Progressive outrage ensued, but Maloney didn’t budge, and the resources at his disposal convinced Jones to run elsewhere.

Several sources told me back in 2022 that he considered running in a primary against Bowman in NY-16 that summer, but polling nixed that idea, so he instead bolted to a district in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, nowhere near his home.

(Side note: In his endorsement of Latimer, Jones had the audacity to call himself “one of the most popular Democrats in the Hudson Valley,” which is a bizarre self-assessment for a guy who deemed himself not popular enough to win a primary in any part of the Hudson Valley just two years ago.)

Jones wasn’t going to win the race in NYC, either, and he siphoned off just enough votes from popular progressive Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou to hand the district to uber-wealthy Levi’s heir Dan Goldman. Niou, who we endorsed after she helped take down disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, really took it on the chin in that race, as she was also the target of nasty, misleading ads paid for Goldman’s real estate and AIPAC supporters.

This time around, Jones is running against GOP Rep. Mike Lawler in a district much closer to the one he originally represented, and has turned himself into an ardent backer of Israel’s war in Gaza, which he cited as the main reason he’s backing Latimer against Bowman. Latimer is the beneficiary of millions of dollars in AIPAC spending, while Jones has taken more than $300k from the right-wing, pro-Netanyahu lobby group over the past number of years.

Crucially, however, AIPAC has already endorsed Lawler, who this spring teamed with none other than Richie Torres on a gross bill threatening sanctions against colleges with anti-genocide protests.

Exactly what Jones is getting out of this endorsement is a bit murky, but he’s angered all his old allies and put his entire political career on the line, so congrats to him on that. He also earned his place as a prime example of why I have largely stopped raising money for candidates running for federal office and now focus instead on movements and organizations designed to build long-term infrastructure and power for people, not politicians.

🚘 ⛔ Speaking of NY disappointments: New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced today that she was indefinitely delaying the long-awaited and desperately-needed congestion pricing scheme that would have been the biggest change to public transportation since the subway replaced the elevated rail line.

The plan would have charged drivers a $15 toll to drive south of 60th Street in Manhattan, with exemptions for cabbies, delivery trucks, and other critical services. It was expected to dramatically reduce traffic and air pollution in the city while bringing in $1 billion a year for long overdue investments in public transportation. As is her wont, Hochul offered up a half-baked, cynical explanation for her decision, which amounted to a slap in the face to an array of advocacy groups in pursuit of support from more conservative suburban voters who have never backed her.

In this instance, Hochul said that congestion pricing would have taken a toll on the city’s economic recovery from the pandemic and hurt working class New Yorkers. Reality does not support either of these excuses: New York’s economy has fully recovered, as Hochul declared in this March release, while just 4% of outer-borough New Yorkers drive into Manhattan with any regularity.

If there’s any economic motivation for Hochul here, you can find it in her lamenting of the occupancy rates of corporate office buildings, which are owned by her biggest donors.

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