Progressive resolutions for 2025

Engaging with people, power, and a new project

Welcome to a New Year’s Day edition of Progress Report.

I hope you enjoyed the holidays and got some downtime to recharge over the past week or so. The year is off to quite a start, with the terror attack in New Orleans and this ridiculously bleak and on-the-nose scene captured today in Las Vegas, which I have titled Blade Runner 2025.

Woof.

In any case, now that we’re headed back to work ahead of the Trump 2.0 trifecta, it’s as good a time as any to make some plans for the next year. Tonight, I’m running down some of what’s in store for Progress Report, in an incomplete list of resolutions that wouldn’t be a bad mission statement for the progressive left more generally.

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Populist Progressive Media Resolutions for 2025

When I started this newsletter back in late 2017, Donald Trump was seen as a unique political phenomenon and thus something to be dealt with through a tweak in political strategies. Now, on the eve of his return to the White House, Trump should be seen less as a freak occurrence than a byproduct of broader cultural and economic forces, necessitating a more dramatic and comprehensive shift in American politics, governance, and journalism.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve given a fair bit of thought to how I can contribute to such a dramatic change in direction and what the most useful version of Progress Report could look like. The newsletter won’t ever stop evolving, and things could always change significantly, but for now, here are some of the ideas and plans that I’ve got in store for 2025.

Find and support more working class candidates: Running for office has never been more expensive or time-consuming, which gives an outsized advantage to the wealthy and well-connected. One study I reported on this year found that just 1% of lawmakers currently serving in state legislatures either currently hold or most recently held jobs that are traditionally considered working class professions — an all-time low for state capitals yet far more than in either house of Congress.

The irony is that studies have shown that working class voters prefer candidates from working class backgrounds when they’re presented as viable options — one recent controlled test found respondents voting for them by 6.4 more points. This year, the broader electorate also preferred Democrats who focused on pro-worker policies.

Just imagine what a real competitive budget could have done for Dan Osborn, the union pipe-fitter and former Kellogg’s factory worker who came within single digits of unseating Nebraska Republican Sen. Deb Fischer and outran VP Kamala Harris in the state by 14 points.

Scoop: Populist Dan Osborn will run for office again

Working class lawmakers may not have uniform politics, but they understand and give voice to the material concerns of the communities they represent in ways that most wealthy politicians simply cannot. Democrats ostensibly learned this the hard way in 2024, when working class voters of all ethnicities left the party in droves, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they have any real plan or intention to seriously address the problem with more than changes to “messaging.”

So, it’s up to outsiders to force the issue within the Democratic Party, which is still ideologically the best imperfect vessel for working and middle class candidates who will fight for the interests of working and middle class communities.

A year of city and county elections should lend itself to finding more such candidates, and I’ll work to spotlight and possibly raise money for as many as possible. My work covering the labor movement should also help me find and encourage potential pro-union candidates, and Osborn’s new PAC could prove important, too.

The right wing has spent the past number of years infiltrating school and election board races, getting their ideologues in on the ground floor. This needs to be the populist progressive response.

Cover more labor battles: It’s no coincidence that our long national decline has coincided with the diminishment of organized labor. Neoliberalism produces boom and bust cycles that have weakened the union movement, deepened class divides, blown a hole in Americans’ standard of living, and burned away our sense of solidarity. The good news is that after decades of lukewarm (and even below water) feelings toward labor, Americans now overwhelmingly approve of unions and see them as key to reasserting their rights in the workplace and society writ large.

Over the past four years, I’ve spent more time than almost any reporter in the nation speaking with workers in labor unions and those seeking to join them, learning about the challenges they face in the workplace and at home. There has been a serious uptick in union organizing and strikes, and Americans have almost uniformly supported even the most inconvenient walkouts and strikes.

Nationally, news coverage has largely been concentrated on the biggest campaigns and actions at the biggest corporations: Last year, it was the Teamsters negotiating with UPS, the UAW striking the Big Three automakers, and the Hollywood writers and actors stopping production for months and months.

This year, workers at brands with cult-like followings won big elections (Disneyland) and a first contract (Apple Store); 32,000 Boeing production workers walked out for nearly two months; Kaiser Permanente was hit with more than 10,000 walkouts; and last month, workers at more than 300 Starbucks stores and ten Amazon warehouses hit the picket line.

The public rallied behind these campaigns, and labor has to use that goodwill to supercharge its work. In other words, unions must organize and strike exponentially faster in order to really shift the balance of power in this economy. For us, that means more coverage of the under-the-radar campaigns, organizing done in less traditionally yeoman industries, and a close attention to the grinding fights that fall out of the public eye as major employers use scabs and other tactics in an attempt to wait out workers.

Regardless of how little national attention they might be receiving, these actions matter to the workers involved, they matter to the non-union workers who will be impacted, and they matter to the companies who will have to scramble to save face and perhaps negotiate if they’re called out in public.

In covering these campaigns more closely, it will also force politicians of both parties to choose sides and show their true colors. The bipartisan competition to claim the mantle of representing working people can’t just be rhetorical, especially as the courts and Trump administration take aim on unions over the next few years. If the public is exposed to these fights, there will be that much more pressure on judges and politicians to at least pretend as if they care about them.

Keep the pulse on local issues: This past summer, I spent a week in Northern California, covering a unique battle over something called the East Solano Plan.

Technically a proposed ballot initiative, it was more like an existential battle for the future of a region and society writ large, with unconventional allies: farmers, land developers, conservationists, artists, local business owners, military vets, peace activists, Democratic legislators, and Republican mayors formed a coalition to defeat a proposal for a private new city on land swindled by ultra-wealthy tech investors from Silicon Valley.

You very rarely see the Farm Bureau and organized labor on the same side of an issue, but the coalition wasn’t based on ideology or partisan politics. Instead, as is so often the case in the world beyond ornate capitol buildings and cable news studios, it was all about the balance and imposition of power.

While our elections have become more nationalized than ever, the issues that most significantly impact people’s day-to-day lives very often defy neat partisan ideology or explanation.. Access to water in the Southwest, the rigged utilities and insurance markets in Florida, public transportation funding in the Northeast, data centers in the Midwest, the dire lack of housing in mountain states, infrastructure investments in urban areas, the proliferation of warehouses in the Pacific Northwest — these are all complicated issues that don’t often get the attention or fixes they deserve.

The decline of local and regional media has made it increasingly difficult to keep track of these kinds of stories, so it’s no wonder that people are consistently shocked by how other Americans respond to poll questions and who they support in elections. By using reporting to better understand what’s happening in different communities, we’ll be able to empower those fighting for justice and support the right candidates instead of simply imposing ourselves on others.

Push state Democratic leaders to be better: To be clear, for as important as it is to approach local issues with an open mind, that doesn’t mean surrendering our principles, embracing agnosticism, or giving cover to cowardly and corrupt politicians.

Some issues are simple, some solutions are obvious, and there are plenty of proven policies that Democratic lawmakers should be gearing up to pass in states where they control at least two branches of government. Many have moved over the past years on reproductive health, LGBTQ+ rights, secular education, and voting rights, but there is a lot more that needs to get done.

With the federal social safety net likely to be shredded and workers’ rights on the chopping block, blue states need to shore up their Medicaid programs, pass paid family and sick leave, ban abusive labor practices like captive audience meetings, and push for minimum wage increases in places where some moderate Republican legislators have shown interest in joining in. They also need to invest heavily in housing, and fund public education.

Some have moved more efficiently on these things than others, and I’ll be working with progressive lawmakers and advocates to push the stragglers over the finish line and expose the Democrats who kill important pieces of legislation.

We’ll reward the lawmakers in Colorado who pressure Gov. Jared Polis into signing laws that secure majority rule for union elections and call out any in Maryland that try to stop a ban on captive audience meetings. New York Democrats who further undermine universal 3-K and congestion pricing will be forced to explain themselves. Trying to stop a wealth tax that pays for public goods in Washington State will lead to serious questions.

Be merciless with Republicans, even when they win: Americans may have voted for Trump by a narrow margin, but it’s become clear that many didn’t believe that he’d do the things that he explicitly promised to do.

GOP states are lining up to slash Medicaid, further restrict reproductive rights, impose Christian nationalism on public school students, and crack down on community leaders. These are unpopular ideas that Republicans must be made to own, and I’ll be in touch with locals to ensure that the creeps get named and blamed.

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