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Don’t Listen to the Corporate Media; Progressive Candidates Are on a Roll
The Times’ repeated attempts to twist reality to fit a narrative depicting the collapse of progressive politics is evidence that just the opposite is true.
Jul 20, 2025
On July 15, Adelita Grijalva won the Democratic primary for Arizona’s special election to fill the 7th congressional district seat. Grijalva will now go on to almost certain victory in the September election to fill the vacancy left by her late father, Raúl, who died in March.
Grijalva, whose father was a former chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, ran on a progressive platform advocating for the construction of affordable housing, rights for trans people and other members of the LGBT community, and a recognition of equal rights for Palestinians and Israelis. She was endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), as well as by a slew of left-leaning organizations and labor unions.
For The New York Times, though, Grijalva’s win was evidence of a seemingly unrelated phenomenon: the limits of Zohran Mamdani’s brand of politics. Baffingly, coverage of a special election in Arizona, in which the favorite candidate of the progressive ecosystem claimed a decisive victory, began with this sentence: “The Mamdani momentum withered in the deserts of southern Arizona on Tuesday night.”
The author of the piece, Jack Healy, went on to draw a false equivalence between Mamdani and another candidate in the race, Deja Foxx, whose age—Foxx is 25, while Mamdani is 33—apparently, de facto, aligned her with the Mamdani wing of the Democratic Party. Never mind that Grijalva and Mamdani shared scores of endorsers and substantial overlap in their platforms. For the Times, Grijalva’s victory was yet more evidence of Mamdani’s flailing candidacy, personal shortcomings, and general unfitness for office.
Where voters see a leadership vacuum at the head of the party, progressives are taking the reins and building creative and forward-thinking campaigns that actually challenge entrenched billionaire power and the Trumpist fascism that it enables.
Healy’s article continues a shocking trend from the Times and other mainstream media outlets that has taken hold since Mamdani’s somewhat-upset victory over Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s June mayoral primary. The Times has reported breathlessly on the specifics of Mamdani’s college applications; penned editorials entreating him, for the millionth time, to take a more accommodationist line on Israel; and run sham non-endorsements that have veered into self-parody to such an extent that the newspaper’s behavior has sparked satire sites.
The Times’ repeated attempts to twist reality to fit a narrative depicting the collapse of progressive politics is evidence that just the opposite is true: Once again, progressive policies and candidates are on a roll. Grijalva and Mamdani’s wins came in two distinctly different districts. Mamdani won in the ultradiverse megalopolis that sits as the center of the United States’ cultural and economic power, while Grijalva won her primary in a mixed rural and urban district that partly borders Mexico and is majority Latino. Taken together, these wins put the lie to an oft-circulated idea in politically centrist circles: that progressive policy can only win in young, urban areas.
While Tuesday’s primary results in Arizona do nothing to discredit Mamdani’s victory in New York last month, there is a political dynamic that is implicated in Mamdani and Grijalva’s convincing wins: the unpopularity of the centrist wing of the Democratic Party. Surveys conducted since U.S. President Donald Trump’s win in 2024’s presidential election point to high degrees of dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party and its leadership, including among its own constituents. Party leaders have been repeatedly criticized for failing to adequately address the crisis of Trump’s early second term and for being incapable of formulating a compelling counternarrative that can lure disenchanted voters back to the Democratic Party. And, the party has repeatedly doubled down on its stalwart support for Israel’s “right” to wage an ongoing genocide in Gaza, despite polling that shows that that position puts its at odds with the majority of its base.
It should be no surprise then, that voters are feeling more drawn to the wing of the party who isn’t afraid to buck party orthodoxy on issues like affordability, immigration, and Israel. Where voters see a leadership vacuum at the head of the party, progressives are taking the reins and building creative and forward-thinking campaigns that actually challenge entrenched billionaire power and the Trumpist fascism that it enables. While corporatist Democrats are busy working behind the scenes to undermine Mamdani in the general election in November, they might be better served by taking a step back and putting a finger to the wind.
If Democratic leaders are hell-bent on continuing to ignore the preferences of their base, it may be up to the party’s progressive wing to save the party from itself. Zohran Mamdani’s refreshing win can be the first of many victories for progressives in the era of the second Trump administration. Whether the party establishment is ready to embrace this new political reality remains to be seen.
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Labor-Backed Coalition Launches Working-Class Effort to Flip 35+ House Seats in 2026
"Working people deserve leaders who will fight for them, not grovel at the feet of their billionaire donors," said Maurice Mitchell of the Working Families Party, one of the groups involved in the new coalition.
Jul 16, 2025
A coalition of dozens of labor groups and other progressive activist organizations has launched a new $50 million initiative to flip the U.S. House of Representatives in 2026 with a coalition of working-class voters.
The political action committee, Battleground Alliance PAC, announced Wednesday that it will seek to flip at least 35 Republican-held districts for Democrats by mobilizing voters angry about the Trump administration's assault on the social safety net and authoritarian attacks on civil liberties.
The groups will target their efforts toward mobilizing voters who have been hit the hardest by the Republican agenda.
"These are parents who will lose healthcare for their kids, families struggling after [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] cuts, seniors not being able to afford their medication, people struggling with higher utility bills, and workers who've watched billionaires get tax breaks while their wages stay flat," the group said Wednesday. "They're not just participating, they're at the center of leading this effort to take back control and make their voices heard at the ballot box next November."
The coalition is attempting to build upon the successes of Battleground New York, which mobilized progressive voters in 2024 to flip back many seats lost to Republicans during the previous cycle. Amid the daily outrages of President Donald Trump's second term, they believe that success can be replicated nationally.
"People are angry for a reason," said Stephanie Porta, campaign manager for the Battleground Alliance. "They've seen their rights stripped, their wages stagnate, their bills skyrocket, their healthcare attacked—and they're done waiting. This isn't about the usual D.C. politics. This is about the majority of Americans saying: enough is enough."
Among the groups taking part in the alliance are the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Working Families Party, Planned Parenthood Votes, Indivisible, and MoveOn.
The announcement of Battleground Alliance came on the same day that the Congressional Progressive Caucus outlined its major priorities for 2026 in a briefing to reporters.
"Working people in America are getting screwed by corrupt politicians and big corporations that are driving costs up and keeping pay and benefits down," said the caucus's chair, Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas).
Casar and his colleagues introduced four "task forces" that "go directly at those big problems facing Americans: fighting corruption and corporate greed in order to lower costs and win better pay and benefits."
The Battleground Alliance is taking a similar approach, focusing on the material effects of the Trump agenda on working people.
"GOP members of Congress betrayed their constituents when they voted to kick 17 million Americans off their health care," said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party. "Working people deserve leaders who will fight for them, not grovel at the feet of their billionaire donors. We're ready to organize in districts all across the country to kick out members of Congress who lied to their constituents and voted for this disastrous budget."
The group is planning to pour $1 million into the most competitive districts in the country, targeting Republicans who voted for Trump's massive budget legislation.
Some of the Republican targets it has already singled out include Rep. David Valadao, whose district in California's San Joaquin Valley is majority Latino and has one of the highest Medicaid enrollment rates in the country; and Rep. Ryan Mackenzie, whose Allentown, Pennsylvania district now has 25,000 people at risk of losing food stamps as a result of the law.
"Working people are done watching politicians in Washington hand out favors to the wealthy while our communities struggle to afford care, housing, and food," said April Verrett, president of SEIU. "Through 2026 and beyond, we will continue to organize in places that they've tried to ignore because that's where real change begins."
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Sanders Says Billionaire Effort to Crush Mamdani Rooted in Fears of Nationwide Progressive Wave
"They are worried that his campaign is an example of what can happen all over the country."
Jul 11, 2025
Independent U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday reaffirmed his support for Democratic New York City mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani, a fellow democratic socialist facing fierce opposition from deep-pocketed establishment figures who fear the broad nationwide appeal of his people-over-profit agenda.
Faced with the growing possibility that Mamdani would win the June 24 primary, Wall Street bankers, corporate executives, real estate developers, mega-landlords, and others rushed to dump money into disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo's campaign coffers. Now that Mamdani is the Democratic nominee, they're pouring tens of millions of dollars into an anti-Mamdani war chest, despite not even agreeing on which candidate to back in November's mayoral election.
In a Thursday interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour—who noted that Sanders' Fighting Oligarchy tour "has been drawing record crowds"—the Vermont senator said that policies like "giving massive tax breaks to billionaires and cutting healthcare and education and nutrition from working-class families [are] not popular."
While acknowledging that "mainstream Democrats" have been unable to galvanize opposition to Republicans' pro-billionaire, anti-working class agenda, Amanpour pressed Sanders about what he would tell New Yorkers who say that Mamdani "has never run anything, and he says, free buses, and... is he antisemitic or not?'"
Watch Sanders' response:
"First of all, understand, he's going to have the entire establishment, the oligarchy, the billionaires coming down on his head, not only because he's demanding that the wealthy and large corporations in New York City start paying their fair share of taxes, they are worried that his campaign is an example of what can happen all over the country when you bring people together to demand the government that works for all of us and not just a few," the senator said. "So, they really want to crush this guy."
"You have billionaires saying quite openly, 'We are going to spend as much as it takes to defeat this guy.' You have Democratic leadership not refusing to jump on board a campaign where this guy is the Democratic nominee," Sanders added. "So, most importantly, I'm going to do everything I can to see that Zohran becomes the next mayor of New York."
Some Democrats have done more than refuse to support their own party's nominee. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) falsely claimed last month that Mamdani had made references to "global jihad" and speciously argued that "globalize the intifada"—a call for Palestinian liberation and battling injustice—is a call to "kill all the Jews."
Freshman Congresswoman Laura Gillen (D-N.Y.) also falsely accused Mamdani of "a deeply disturbing pattern of unacceptable antisemitic comments."
Congressional progressives including Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), André Carson (D-Ind.), and Lateefah Simon (D-Calif.)—the four practicing Muslims in the House of Representatives—last month condemned what they called the "vile, anti-Muslim, and racist smears from our colleagues on both sides of the aisle."
Despite the attacks against him, Mamdani is leading Cuomo—who is now running as an Independent—by 10 points in a Slingshot Strategies poll of more than 1,000 registered voters published earlier this week. Mamdani also leads Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa by 21 points and scandal-ridden incumbent Mayor Eric Adams by 24 points.
Observers note that establishment Democrats' reservations about backing Mamdani seem to be fading amid the strength of his campaign. As Democrats including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) hold out on endorsing their own party's nominee, critics argue it's time to follow other lawmakers like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Jerrold Nadler, Adriano Espaillat, and Nydia Velázquez—all New York Democrats—and endorse Mamdani.
"Mamdani won a record-setting primary victory, and unions, grassroots Democratic groups, and savvy elected officials are rushing to back him," The Nation's national affairs correspondent, John Nichols, wrote Friday. "Now it's the establishment's turn."
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