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According to the survey, 67 percent of progressives support President Biden stepping aside as the Democratic nominee, with 32 percent indicating that they are less likely to vote for the President following last Thursday’s debate
On the heels of last week’s presidential debate, Our Revolution, the largest grassroots-funded progressive political organizing group in the United States, is releasing the findings of a sweeping new survey of more than 17,000 progressive Democratic voters across the country.
The Our Revolution polling results were first reported this morning by POLITICO Playbook.
The respondents, a subset of the organization’s grassroots network of approximately 8 million supporters in all fifty states, were surveyed via email in the 72 hours immediately following last Thursday’s debate.
Responses from 17,410 Our Revolution supporters reveal that:
Last November, political scientists from Stony Brook University and the College of William and Mary conducted an extensive survey of the Our Revolution network to better understand the composition of the organization’s support base. According to findings, the vast majority (80 percent) of Our Revolution supporters identify as Democrats, with three-fourths of respondents reporting that, beyond just voting, they contributed money, canvassed, or otherwise directly participated in electoral activities on behalf of Democratic candidates for House, senate, or local races in the 2022 midterm elections.
Despite this very high level of civic participation, overall, progressive members of the organization expressed lukewarm views of the Democratic Party, rating it at 56 on a 0-100, negative-to-positive scale.
Our Revolution will reclaim democracy for the working people of our country by harnessing the transformative energy of the "political revolution." Through supporting a new generation of progressive leaders, empowering millions to fight for progressive change and elevating the political consciousness, Our Revolution will transform American politics to make our political and economic systems once again responsive to the needs of working families. Our Revolution has three intertwined goals: to revitalize American democracy, empower progressive leaders and elevate the political consciousness.
"It is unthinkable and irresponsible to release technologies capable of destabilizing critical systems and then worry about the fallout afterward," said one expert.
Watchdog group Public Citizen is raising alarms after tech giant Google on Monday revealed that a group of criminal hackers used artificial intelligence to detect a previously unidentified software vulnerability.
As reported by The New York Times, Google said that it had "high confidence" that the hackers used AI to discover and exploit the vulnerability.
While Google said that the attack had been thwarted, the Times noted that the company "did not say precisely when the thwarted attack happened, whom it was targeting, or which AI platform the hackers used."
While the discovery of so-called "zero-day vulnerabilities" were once a rare occurrence, the proliferation of AI models has made them much easier for hackers to detect. In fact, AI software vendor Anthropic earlier this year said that it had developed a model that was so good at exploiting these vulnerabilities that it would not be releasing it publicly.
John Hultquist, chief analyst at Google Threat Intelligence Group, said in an interview with Cyberscoop that this kind of AI-assisted attack "is probably the tip of the iceberg and it’s certainly not going to be the last" to occur.
“The game’s already begun and we expect the capability trajectory is pretty sharp,” Hultquist explained. “We do expect that this will be a much bigger problem, that there will be more devastating zero-day attacks done over this, especially as capabilities grow.”
JB Branch, AI governance and technology policy counsel at Public Citizen, said the attempted AI exploit once against showed how reckless Big Tech has been in aggressively pushing this technology out the door.
"Cybersecurity experts are sounding the alarm, yet AI companies continue racing to release increasingly powerful models with little regard for the societal consequences," Branch said. "It is unthinkable and irresponsible to release technologies capable of destabilizing critical systems and then worry about the fallout afterward."
Branch also said it was well past time for Congress to step in and slap strict guardrails on the development of AI.
"We need enforceable AI regulations that require rigorous safety testing, independent review, and meaningful oversight before these systems ever reach the public," he said. "Regulators cannot remain in a perpetual game of catch-up while Big Tech gambles with the safety and stability of modern society."
While calls for more AI regulation have grown in recent months, Silicon Valley elites are planning to spend massive sums of money in this year's midterm elections to prevent candidates who support AI regulation from winning public office.
Leading the Future—a super political action committee (PAC) backed by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and other AI heavyweights—is spending at least $100 million to elect lawmakers who aim to pass legislation that would set a single set of AI regulations across the US, overriding any restrictions placed on the technology by state governments.
The White House budget proposal, said one expert, "would slash WIC’s fruit and vegetable benefit, leaving low-income pregnant women and new moms with only $13 per month to buy fruits and vegetables."
The head of the US Department of Agriculture said Monday that she is "proud" to be part of a Trump administration initiative purportedly aimed at promoting maternal health and wellbeing.
But President Donald Trump's budget proposal for the coming fiscal year would do the opposite by deeply cutting fruit and vegetable benefits for new and expecting mothers. If enacted, the White House's budget would reduce monthly fruit and vegetable aid from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) from $52 to $13 for low-income mothers.
"Your budget proposal would slash WIC's fruit and vegetable benefit, leaving low-income pregnant women and new moms with only $13 per month to buy fruits and vegetables," Katie Bergh, a senior policy analyst at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), wrote in response to a social media post by USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins, who said she is "proud to be part of the Trump administration’s major push delivering REAL support for expecting and new mothers."
Rollins, who has an estimated net worth of roughly $15 million, was among the top administration officials and lawmakers who took part Monday in a White House event touting "what the Trump administration has done to advance maternal health and support motherhood."
Absent from the event was any discussion of the administration's ongoing assault on food aid, which has had a direct impact on mothers across the country. NBC News on Monday reported the story of an Arizona mother of two young children who "should be exempt" from the 2025 Trump-GOP budget law's expansion of work requirements for recipients of federal nutrition assistance.
"She described being caught in a monthslong paperwork back-and-forth with state employees since February, when her benefits failed to arrive," the outlet noted. "Unable to reach anyone by phone, she finally decided to show up in person at the office in Surprise. On the morning she arrived at 7 am, her second visit that week, she had a backpack full of paperwork she was told she needed to provide to verify her income and expenses to have her benefits restored. But after waiting for four hours to speak with someone, she was told she needed more documentation."
"This administration is taking healthy foods away from children and mothers most at risk for nutritional deficiencies."
The budget proposal that Trump released in early April would strip around $1.4 billion in fruit and vegetable benefits from roughly 5.4 million parents and young children, according to a CBPP analysis. The new White House budget marks the second consecutive year the president has pushed for cuts to WIC fruit and vegetable benefits.
Congressional Republicans are attempting to enshrine the White House's proposed WIC cuts into law through the annual appropriations process, calling for $200 million in total reductions in WIC spending—with most of the cuts coming from fruit and vegetable benefits.
Georgia Machell, president and CEO of the National WIC Association, said last month that “these cuts break with the Trump administration’s support for WIC during the 2025 government shutdown and directly contradict the administration’s stated goal to ‘Make America Healthy Again.’"
"WIC is a proven public health investment during the most critical developmental stages: pregnancy, infancy, and early childhood," said Machell. "By slashing the fruit and vegetable benefits and not ensuring sufficient program funding, this administration is taking healthy foods away from children and mothers most at risk for nutritional deficiencies."
"This plan is short-sighted, hypocritical, and, if passed by Congress, will harm American families," Machell added.
"In its eagerness to short-circuit reactor safeguards, the Trump administration is once again doing what it does best—demonstrating a complete disregard for the law," said the head of Beyond Nuclear.
A coalition of advocacy groups on Monday took aim at President Donald Trump's nuclear power plans, including a recently proposed rule that would allow developers using federally approved reactor designs to bypass required safety reviews, which the organizations called "ill-advised and contrary to law."
"In its eagerness to short-circuit reactor safeguards, the Trump administration is once again doing what it does best—demonstrating a complete disregard for the law," said Linda Pentz Gunter, executive director of Beyond Nuclear, in a statement.
"But nuclear technology is too inherently dangerous to operate as an outlaw," she stressed. "Ignoring those dangers will put millions of Americans at risk of another catastrophic nuclear accident."
Beyond Nuclear and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service (NIRS) have submitted multiple formal comments to the administration, on behalf of overlapping coalitions, blasting its ongoing nuclear policymaking, which has been guided by a series of executive orders signed by the president last May.
The first coalition comments focus on the US Department of Energy allowing firms that build experimental nuclear reactors to seek exemptions from legally required environmental reviews. That filing was submitted in early March, a month after DOE announced the "categorical exclusion for authorization, siting, construction, operation, reauthorization, and decommissioning of advanced nuclear reactors for inclusion in its National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) implementing procedures."
Then, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission last month unveiled a proposed rule to expedite NRC reviews of commercial nuclear power plant applications involving reactor designs already approved by DOE or the Department of Defense (DOD)—which Trump has dubbed the Department of War. That prompted more comments from Beyond Nuclear, NIRS, and allied groups last week.
"Along with the DOE's environmental 'free pass' policy, the whole 'expedited licensing' regime the administration is attempting to set up appears to be illegal," NIRS executive director Tim Judson, who co-authored the recent comments to the NRC, said Monday.
"The White House is trying to create a 'regulatory tunnel' around NRC's safety regulations," he warned. "That would mean DOE's biases and obviously false assumptions about the safety of nuclear power plants become the new normal, exposing the public to unacceptable dangers to our health and safety."
"And while the law allows the DOD to build its own nuclear reactors," Judson added, "it does not allow the NRC to skip safety reviews for civilian nuclear plants just because they use the same designs. The military routinely exposes its personnel to dangers that civilians are supposed to be protected from."
The coalition's latest filing details how the administration's actions are "inconsistent" with the Administrative Procedure Act, Atomic Energy Act, Energy Reorganization Act, and NEPA, "as well as the constitutional requirement for due process in a democratic society." It also emphasizes that nothing in Trump's orders "can excuse" the alleged legal violations.
"Fifty years ago, the Atomic Energy Commission was abolished because they became too much of a promoter and lost the confidence of Congress and the public over safety," Paul Gunter, director of the reactor oversight project at Beyond Nuclear, explained Monday.
"The NRC was established to provide a regulator that prioritizes safety and is obligated not to take shortcuts for a production agenda," he continued. "Instead, half a century later, we are on the same dangerous collision course, casting aside the NRC in favor of the DOE, which doesn't have the experience or the staff to get the industry in line with safety and security. This capitulation to the Trump agenda could lead to the NRC being abolished altogether, because nobody will have confidence in them."