Kicking off the swing district deep dive
Plus, a big win in Ohio and social innovation emerges
Welcome to a Sunday night edition of Progress Report.
I spent a fair amount of the weekend working hard on conceptualizing, planning, and constructing new sections and features for the newsletter, a task made easier by the terrible weather that pounded New York over the past two days. (It’s easier to tell yourself that you can’t go out and do something fun when it’s raining, after all.)
Tonight, we’ll take a look at one of the new election-focused segments that I plan to grow and turn into information-dense features as we head into election season. Let me know what you think!
Progress Report aims to shine a light on the news, injustices, and political battles that the major media ignores. It’s a second full-time job, and the late nights of work are only sustainable with the support of readers like you. With the media industry in meltdown, you can play an important role in keeping truth front and center ahead of the biggest election in modern American history.
As if failing to stop serial failure and sex pest Donald Trump from being elected president wasn’t bad enough, Democrats finished the 2016 election locked out of power all over the country. Republicans controlled 68 legislative chambers and held trifectas in 25 states, gigantic margins that owed in part to aggressive gerrymanders and the indifference of the national Democratic Party. It was a bleak era.
Three election cycles later, grassroots activists have put Democrats either in charge of or sharing power in half a dozen key swing states. The margins in many legislatures are perilously thin, so heading into this fall’s elections, Democrats find themselves at the precipice of either further expanding their power or being usurped at the worst possible time.
The changes wrought by Democratic trifectas should sell themselves — look at the progressive seachange in both Michigan and Minnesota — but neither competence nor progress have ever guaranteed much of anything in American politics. There’s a solid chance that Donald Trump returns to the White House next year, and if that happens, states will have to serve as a bulwark for reproductive rights, education, healthcare, civil rights, and democracy itself.
Down-ballot races, for state legislature and statewide offices, need all the attention they can get. So going forward, Progress Report will spotlight new races every week, with a focus on races that feature progressive candidates or incumbents. For space considerations, we’re doing one here, but it’ll get longer going forward.
Pennsylvania
Office: State Senate District 15
Location: Harrisburg and suburbs
Incumbent: Republican
Previous margin: 3.2% (in 2020)
Chamber control: GOP, +3 seats
The Breakdown: Already a top-tier race under the state’s previous legislative map, the combination of favorable new district lines and a retiring GOP incumbent make this central Pennsylvania seat a prime target for a Democratic flip.
Sen. John DiSanto once pledged to retire after serving two terms, and whether it was a campaign gimmick or not, the promise came in handy late last year when things began to unravel for him. In October, the outspoken conservative briefly became a national laughingstock for posting a creepy old man tweet about Olivia Rodrigo in an Apple commercial. A week later, Democrats landed their top recruit, who was ready to hammer DiSanto for his ardent opposition to reproductive rights. The cranky incumbent announced his retirement in December.
His exit should still make things a bit easier for that top Democratic recruit, Rep. Patty Kim, who is the overwhelming favorite going into next week’s primary. She won’t struggle for name recognition, having worked as a TV news anchor in Harrisburg before winning a seat on the city council, where she served two terms in office.
Kim has spent the past ten years in the General Assembly, emerging as a leader in the fight to strengthen public schools (which will be critical with a voucher-curious Democratic governor) and the top sponsor of bills to raise the minimum wage.
Following Up…
⚖️ 🗳️ City councilwoman Shayla Favor won a decisive victory in the Democratic primary for prosecutor in Franklin County, OH.
Featured in Progress Report a few weeks ago, this race was effectively a referendum on three decades of police brutality in and around Columbus, where officers never face consequences for shooting and killing Black people.
Favors ran on a platform that included pursuing holistic criminal justice reform and youth diversion programs for local residents and holding cops accountable for improper use of force.
Her leading opponent, Anthony Pierson, is a long-time prosecutor who was seen as far too cozy with state Republican leaders and part of the culture of police impunity. Should she win the general election in November, as anticipated, Favors will become the county’s first Black prosecutor and its first female prosecutor. [source]
🏫 📄 Activists in Arkansas are making swift progress in their campaign to qualify a constitutional amendment that would protect public education.
On an accelerated timeline after being forced by the state’s attorney general to submit and resubmit ballot language for their constitutional amendment, the folks at For AR Kids report that they are optimistic about obtaining the petition signatures required to get their proposal in front of voters in November.
As I outlined in a newsletter feature published last month, the amendment would require any private or charter school that accepts government vouchers to meet the same standards as public schools. At the moment, the school privatization law signed by Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders places no requirements on religious and for-profit schools, which tend to teach insane curricula and/or target and rip off low-income families.
The amendment would also guarantee all children in Arkansas the right to a quality public education and require school districts to provide universal access to early childhood education and special needs services. In a state essentially run by the Walton family, who have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into school privatization efforts, it would be revolutionary. [source]
Housing
📏 🏘️ Denver opened its second micro-community last week for unhoused residents.
The community, located in the Overland Park section of the city, consists of 60 “tiny homes” and a community center where residents can receive services like job training, mental health treatment, and addiction counseling. The community is part of Mayor Mike Johnson’s effort to provide shelter and stability to the city’s growing homeless population.
La Paz was built over the objections of local residents, who also complained about the nearby homeless encampment that the tidy, city-run community will replace. One gets the sense that they really just don’t like poor people. [source]
💵 🏠 Philadelphia is running a pilot program that gives rent-burdened residents cash instead of housing vouchers.
And this may blow your mind, but it turns out that giving working people money to help pay their bills and purchase necessities is not only a moral policy, it’s actually far more effective than forcing them to navigate the nightmare of bureacracy.
The parameters are pretty stringent — recipients must make no more than 50% of the median local income and have a kid aged 15 or under at home — but in a city where people have waited more than a decade to get a Section 8 voucher that landlords often reject, there were plenty of candidates. As direct cash subsidies become more popular, expect this program to pop up in other places, too. [source]
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