Jordan Zakarin has a singular alchemy for spotting the rot in American politics long before national headlines catch up. Years before major outlets decoded the shadow machines quietly stalling progress in state capitals, he was already on the ground elevating the best candidates he could find and shining a light on the worst PACs and candidates in the shadows.
Now, as direct democracy and down-ballot battles become the central arena for protecting basic rights, his work is more essential than ever. If you want to understand the critical, undercovered races that will actually shape the future of the country, you need to be reading Progress Report. It’s the definitive download for the fights where we can make the most difference.
To understand exactly how the forces of “moderation” give cover to the far right, you only have to look at the interparty battle that brought him into the fight.
In 2010, Andrew Cuomo became governor of New York and immediately built something worse than a machine: a shadow one. He backed a breakaway group of state senators calling themselves the Independent Democratic Conference, and for most of a decade, they caucused with Republicans rather than their own party. Democrats held what should have been a commanding majority in both chambers of the state legislature. They controlled neither. The legislature moved only when Cuomo wanted it to move — gay marriage when it served him, a minimum wage fight when it didn’t cost him anything. For years, this was New York’s Democratic Party: the worst version of itself, run by a man who preferred a Republican Senate he could blame to a Democratic one he’d have to answer to.
Jordan watched this happen up close, years before most national reporters could locate Cuomo’s actual record. Before he ran Progress Report, he was an entertainment reporter who got bored with celebrity beats around 2016 and decided Republican politics was stranger material. By 2018, he was covering Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s primary challenge as if it mattered, which, in retrospect, looks obvious and, at the time, seemed like a bet almost nobody serious was making.
I asked him directly whether New York’s Democratic Party is actually different now, or just differently arranged.
“It’s being forced to change,” he told me. It’s not choosing to.
The 2018 wave that ousted IDC members like Jeff Klein also elected the legislators who pushed Cuomo left on paid family leave and bail reform — right up until sexual harassment findings and the state’s undercount of nursing-home deaths during Covid ended his governorship in 2021. Cuomo’s machine is still running the same plays. It spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to bury Lindsey Boylan, his first accuser, in a city council special election. She lost. Last month, in the primary—still on the ballot due to weird New York stuff but not even campaigning—she lost again… by just six points.
Jordan saw New York’s rot early enough to name it, and he’s already building the tools for the version of this fight that’s about to hit every other state.
FlipTheSeats.org exists because the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act’s protection against racial gerrymanders this spring, a ruling Zakarin correctly clocked as making state legislatures matter more than they have in a decade. He took the sprawl of Ballotpedia’s raw data and narrowed it to the races that are actually winnable — within 10 to 15 points of the 2024 result, state by state, incumbent and challenger and district attached. Michigan Democrats hold a one-seat state Senate majority and need four state House flips to match it; the site tells you exactly which four.
OnTheBallot.news tracks the ballot-initiative fights that direct democracy has become, because Congress is stuck and most state legislatures are gerrymandered, bought, or both. Missouri Republicans are trying to gut the citizen-initiative process itself before voters can defend the abortion rights and Medicaid expansion they already won at the ballot box. Nebraska is pushing a four-fifths threshold to undo citizen-passed laws, direct retaliation for a legislature that gutted a voter-approved minimum wage increase —“wage theft” by another name. Montana collected more than 50,000 signatures for a measure barring “artificial persons” — corporations, PACs, unions — from political donations.
OnTheBallot.news offers an antidote for voters seeking real truth about how politics affect their lives rather than algorithmic summaries built to please billionaires. Instead, it’s an engine of what people should care about now, without getting lost in the personality and propaganda that often shape campaign drama.
New York didn’t fix itself because Cuomo had a change of heart. It changed because people like Zakarin kept naming what was actually happening, kept showing up in the primaries, and kept building the next tool before anyone asked for it. If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere — but only if we do the work to get these tools into more people's hands, heads, and hearts.
I really enjoyed talking to Jordan, who is smart, funny, and ridiculously well-informed. And I’d like to make it a regular thing. Be sure to follow and subscribe to Jordan Zakarin’s Progress Report so it’s worth his precious time.
Thank you Richard Hogan, MD, PhD(2), DBA, CI Carlson, Musings on Interesting Times, and many others for tuning into my live video with Jordan Zakarin! Join me for my next live video in the app
