Democrats get hyped as GOP plans to steal votes
DeSantis gets owned
Welcome to a Wednesday night edition of Progress Report.
It’s probably safe to assume that most people reading this newsletter have been watching this week’s Democratic National Convention, whether live on TV or via social and YouTube clips. For my part, I’ve tuned into most of the major speeches, which means that I’ve been tricked into surrendering far more of my evenings than anticipated to what have been unbelievably long pep rallies each night.
Save for the first evening, which featured prominent labor leaders and frequent broadsides against wealthy elites and greedy corporations, this has been a relatively substance-free event, focusing instead on maintaining the good vibes of the past month. Aside from a few total bomb jobs, like New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s amateur open mic host routine, there hasn’t been any particular standout speech.
One of the things I like a lot about Tim Walz is the fact that he talks like a normal person instead of attempting some soaring rhetoric in search of their own breakthrough.
Far too many speakers have spoken in what I’ll call sermon-esque tones, trying to emulate Obama or a civil rights leader. Most don’t have the charisma for it, but that hasn’t discouraged them from trying to use the moment as a springboard.
People need to feel hope and inspiration, which I think can be contagious in events like this one, but I’d like to see more ground-level empathy, acknowledging how difficult things are right now for so many people. Political gatherings are always a little cringe, but watching elites party can feel off-putting.
Still, it’s an enormous production and has largely gone off without any problems, as far as I can tell. That’s a testament to the staff that had to reimagine the convention in just a month’s time, and as always, I’m more interested in them more than the celebrities. Would love to see the workers on the stage on Thursday night!
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. Every paid subscription makes it easier for me to comp one while becoming sustainable.
More incentive: Tonight’s newsletter has more stories than I’d like about GOP attacks on people’s right to vote, so let’s lead off with some hope for the future, courtesy of Chuck Schumer.
Yesterday, the Sen. Majority Leader from New York told reporters at the DNC in Chicago that should Democrats retain control of the Senate, he’s going to set his immediate targets on nuking the filibuster to save democracy.
“One of the first things we want to do is what we did first last time, but I think we’ll have more success and that’s democracy, dealing with voting rights, dealing with Citizens United, dealing with reapportionment,” he said. “There were probably 35 Democrats who were willing to change the rules on that issue. We got it up to 48. Of course, Sinema and Manchin voted no. … Well they’re both gone.”
Schumer does not sound all that broken up about losing the two obstructionist former Democrats from his caucus, and it probably helps that Rep. Ruben Gallego has pulled ahead of MAGA-huffer Republican Kari Lake in the race for the seat that Sinema is vacating. Democrats are almost guaranteed to lose Manchin’s seat in West Virginia, so their chances of hanging on to the Senate likely pivot on Sen. Jon Tester’s re-election campaign in Montana.
Georgia: County officials across Georgia are begging the state Board of Elections to stop making so many major changes to election administration rules with less than two months to go before early voting starts. The once-nonpartisan and technocratic state Board of Elections is now controlled by Trump-approved Republicans, who have done little to hide their political sympathies.
Just this week, the board approved a rule that will make it far easier for conservative officials to delay and refuse to certify elections, which in Georgia is a true nightmare scenario. The legislature and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger have also made it far easier to challenge voter registrations and set people up to be purged en masse, which has already been happening in Georgia for a while now.
If there’s any doubt about the intent behind these actions, just look to the RNC’s involvement in a lawsuit over the purging of 1000 registered voters in the state, which the New Georgia Project, one of Stacey Abrams’s organizations, alleges were done illegally. The lawsuit also sues the state over SB 189, the voter suppression law that made so many challenges and purges possible.
Alabama: At least Georgia Republicans are following the law (albeit their own, recently passed laws) when it comes to purging voters.
Alabama Secretary of State Wes Allen announced last week that he was ordering county registrars to purge 3,251 citizens from the voting rolls because they were at one point given noncitizen IDs. This is how you know that these people don’t actually want to encourage legal migration or “following the rules” — being issued a noncitizen ID invariably precedes being granted citizenship, becoming eligible to vote, and getting a passport.
Beyond the fact that these voters are more than likely citizens and therefore eligible to vote, Alabama law requires any major systematic changes to voter eligibility to be completed before a 90-day freeze leading up to the election. While Allen is clearly unconcerned with the law, a coalition of civil rights organizations wrote him a letter this week reminding him of his legal obligations and threatening to sue if he does not withdraw his purge order.
The letter also makes a series of other demands, including the list of the voters that Allen wants to purge (presumably to monitor their status and protect them).
Ohio: Maybe Wes Allen is simply trying to catch up to Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who has been purging voters at a furious clip this year, highlighted by a statewide disenfranchisement of 155,000 people in one fell swoop last month. He also ordered a separate purge of 500 voters who were allegedly non-citizens… except, shocker, his order ignored strict protocols and targeted naturalized citizens.
Florida: Seven months after Gov. Ron DeSantis’s attempt to ride puritan parental hysteria to the White House crashed and burned, he’s bottomed out back home.
Floridians by and large rejected the cranky governor’s hand-selected school board candidates, signaling an exhaustion with the culture wars that have torn communities apart. Thus far, voters have rejected 11 of the 23 candidates endorsed by the governor, with six headed to run-off elections later this year.
The losses include some major humiliations in the Tampa-St. Petersburg region, where DeSantis backed four Moms for Liberty candidates who got demolished after running expensive, groomer-obsessed campaigns against incumbent board members. Outside groups spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to attack the incumbents as too liberal and prop up the conservative challengers, only to see their chosen culture warriors go down by as many as 40 points.
Most significant was the ousting of Sarasota County school board chairwoman Karen Rose, a Moms for Liberty diehard who helped to unleash chaos on the district, including the firing of its superintendent and an explosion of homophobia, after winning her seat in 2022.
The one disappointment on the night came in Duval County, home to Jacksonville, where Republicans flipped the school board. It’s a step back after Democrats won the most recent Jacksonville mayoral election and indicates that constant vigilance is required when battling zealots who are backed by deep-pocketed organizations that exist entirely to poison and take control of American culture.
Arizona: The state Supreme Court cleared the abortion rights amendment for the ballot on Tuesday when it tossed a hackneyed lawsuit by anti-choice activists over the amendment’s wording.
This is a much-welcomed win for abortion rights advocates, who were dealt a small setback earlier this week when the conservative-dominated high court ruled that an informational pamphlet sent to voters could include the term “unborn human being” in is description of the amendment.
Not that the state Supreme Court, which generally comes down hard on progressive ballot measures, really had much of a choice on this one, given the sheer popular support for the amendment: pro-choice activists collected a record 823,685 petition signatures, of which 577,971 were verified by the state.
Utah: Last month, the state Supreme Court struck down Republicans’ legislative gerrymander, ruling that the process violated a fair redistricting amendment passed by voters in 2018. But rather than take the loss and agree to allow a new, fair map to be drawn, GOP legislators have instead declared war on the citizens’ amendment process altogether.
On Wednesday, Republicans convened a special session of the legislature and voted to advance a constitutional amendment on ballot initiatives. Now, Utahns will have the opportunity to give the legislature cart blanche to change and repeal voter-passed amendments for any reason, which would render the process all but useless and open the door to single-party rule.
Why would Utah voters go for that? Well, Republican legislators are trying to convince them that the amendment system as it stands is a weak spot that represents “an existential threat to the values, culture and way of life that define our state.” If the insinuation isn’t obvious enough for you, the GOP also said that “Utah now faces the risk of becoming like California, where large sums of outside money influence laws that do not reflect the values of our citizens and undermine our cultural integrity.”
Read: unbelievably wealthy socialists, gays, and people of color could destroy the white conservative Mormon way of life.
Georgia: I think it’s clear at this point that Gov. Brian Kemp simply does not want working class people to have health care, because there is no other way to explain his insistence on maintaining the onerous work requirement that essentially sunk his so-called Medicaid expansion from the moment it launched.
New Jersey: Meanwhile, up north in the Garden State, Gov. Phil Murphy just announced that he has put $100 million in unused federal funds toward buying up the medical debut of mostly lower-income residents. All told, 50,000 New Jerseyans will have their medical debt automatically expunged, with no work requirement or even application required.
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
You can also make a one-time donation to Progress Report’s GoFundMe campaign — doing so will earn you a shout-out in the next weekend edition of the newsletter!