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Abdul El-Sayed ran for governor of Michigan in 2018, emphasizing his progressive views and endorsement from Senator Bernie Sanders. He didn’t gain much traction and ultimately lost by more than 20 percentage points in the Democratic primary to Gretchen Whitmer, who was backed by the party’s center-left establishment. Eight years later, El-Sayed, now seeking a U.S. Senate seat, is running the same kind of campaign. But this time, he’s effectively tied in polls with the establishment’s favorite, Representative Haley Stevens, and could win the August 4 primary. Candidates often do better in their second bids for office. But El-Sayed’s strong performance is emblematic of broader trends. Progressives, after struggling in 2022 and 2024 in primaries against more centrist Democrats, are in the midst of an electoral revival. And they are breaking through not just in very blue areas but in purple ones, such as Maine, Michigan, and California’s Central Valley. Why? Because the Democratic establishment has made some huge blunders, and the party’s left wing has made some smart tactical adjustments. Put all of that together, and the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party is alive again, with progressives winning key primaries around the country and positioning themselves to potentially capture the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028. We’re now a decade into intense primary battles between the Democratic left and center-left, with both sides having strong and weak periods during that time. Sanders’s surprisingly strong campaign against Hillary Clinton back in 2016 reinvigorated the Democratic left and inspired a spate of other progressive challengers to more centrist Democrats. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the most prominent of the numerous Sanders-aligned progressives who defeated more centrist Democrats in 2018 and 2020. But centrist Eric Adams’s win in the 2021 New York mayoral primary was the first of a string of major defeats for progressives. Two years ago, Representatives Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman, who had been elected in 2020 as part of the initial progressive wave, were defeated in primaries by opponents who got heavy support from centrist organizations. Centrist Democrats successfully painted progressives as ignoring practical issues like crime and damaging the Democrats’ national brand by pushing overly liberal ideas. They also were shrewd in fighting the intraparty war, targeting progressives like Bush who had controversies around them unrelated to their policy stands. So how have progressives come back? In large part because of own goals by the Democratic establishment. Zohran Mamdani was greatly helped by city’s center-left backing a candidate (Andrew Cuomo) who was lethargic on the campaign trail and had to resign the governorship in shame after being accused by numerous women of sexual harassment. Graham Platner is the Democratic Senate nominee in Maine because the party establishment backed a candidate (Janet Mills) who was lethargic on the campaign trail and almost 80 years old, annoying Democratic voters who are leery of older candidates after Joe Biden’s failed 2024 run. Peggy Flanagan, the progressive candidate in Minnesota’s Democratic Senate primary, is leading in part because her centrist opponent, Representative Angie Craig, stupidly voted for a Trump-backed anti-immigration bill, angering the state’s liberals. In nearly all of these races, the progressive candidates can straightforwardly condemn Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, while centrist donors insist that the candidates they support take pro-Israel stances that are out of touch with Democratic voters. Broadly, the Democratic establishment has discredited itself with the party base, with massive electoral (2024) and policy (the Gaza war) mistakes. So endorsements from centrist leaders such as Joe Biden, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Chuck Schumer no longer carry much weight and arguably hurt centrist candidates more than they help them. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, is so toxic in liberal circles that it tries to hide its role in backing centrist candidates, thereby limiting AIPAC’s effectiveness. A candidate such as El-Sayed can brush aside the establishment’s claims that he is unelectable in a general election because the center-left’s political acumen is no longer trusted by voters after it lost the White House, Senate, and House in 2024. “When you have 70, 75 percent of the Democratic base saying, ‘We don’t agree with what Netanyahu’s doing in Gaza,’ but you have members of your party who are still voting to send arms to that government and who are telling you that the issue is complicated, when you’re seeing children being blown up … you start to question them not only on that issue but on other issues, as well,” Mamdani adviser and longtime Democratic Party operative Patrick Gaspard told me on a Right Now episode last year. At the same time, the progressives have sown the seeds of their recent successes. They have smartly changed their rhetoric. Mamdani and numerous other progressive candidates deleted their tweets calling for defunding the police and have broadly stopped calling for police reforms. In terms of policy, that’s disappointing. The police in America deserve much scrutiny and accountability. But this shift is shrewd politics. Progressives are no longer fighting on an issue where public sentiment is against them. Leftist candidates still support Medicare for All, free college, and other big expansions of government programs, but they fixate on those ideas a bit less than a decade ago, perhaps aware that even voters who agree with those proposals doubt they will ever happen. Instead, the left these days leads with an anti-billionaire, anti-Washington populism, along with more incremental affordability proposals. Candidates such as Flanagan and California House hopeful Randy Villegas decry the growing power of billionaires and call for banning members of Congress from selling stocks. Both of those positions are extremely popular with the public. Progressives have also gotten savvier and more ruthless in their campaign strategies. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and New York Governor Kathy Hochul are as centrist as Representative Dan Goldman and even more powerful. So why did New York progressives opt against aggressive primary challenges to Jeffries and Hochul while focusing attention on taking down Goldman? Because Goldman is in a very progressive district and therefore easier to beat. Progressives, while still decrying the outsize role of money and big donors, are creating their own super-PACs, aware that they can’t win races if they are vastly outspent. Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders, and Mamdani often endorse the same candidates, creating a kind of progressive crescendo behind their choices. In Nebraska, populist candidates are running as independents, realizing they can’t win under the mantle of the Democratic Party in places where the party is super unpopular. None of this guarantees progressive success this November or in the future. Mamdani could fail as mayor. Platner could be hit by another scandal, and he and other progressive candidates could lose in November. It will still be extremely hard for Ocasio-Cortez, Representative Ro Khanna, or another person closely associated with the party’s progressive wing to win the Democratic presidential nomination. All that said, in the days after the 2024 election, when party strategists were blaming progressive causes and groups for the losses, I was deeply concerned that the Democratic Party would move decisively to the right. It hasn’t. Instead, progressives have led the fight against Trump, forced the party’s establishment to admit its failings in the Biden years, and reinvented their own strategies in winning ways. A Muslim man named Abdul, backed by Bernie Sanders and calling for a new kind of politics in America, could be the party’s candidate in Michigan. Progressives are making progress.

Monday’s batch of orders brought a rare bit of good news at the Supreme Court. The justices announced that they will hear Kian v. Florida next year, setting the stage for the court to strike down Florida’s Jim Crow–era law allowing six-member criminal juries.The Sixth Amendment requires, among many other things, that criminal trials be conducted before an “impartial jury.” In nearly every state, this jury consists of 12 members of the community where the alleged crime was committed. But in a handful of jurisdictions, states use fewer jurors to more easily secure convictions.Hamed Kian, the defendant in this case, is a chiropractor in Jupiter, Florida. State officials suspended Kian’s license in 2021 while they investigated allegations of sexual misconduct against him. Kian allegedly continued to treat patients in the years that followed, leading state prosecutors to bring five counts of practicing chiropractic medicine with a suspended license.Under Florida law, trials for capital offenses are held before a 12-person jury. Defendants who face noncapital felony charges, however, are instead prosecuted before a six-person jury. One of those smaller juries convicted Kian on all five charges. He was sentenced to one year in prison and five years of probation.On appeal, Kian sought to overturn his conviction by arguing that the Sixth Amendment required him to be tried before a 12-member jury. Forty-four states in the Union currently impose that requirement for all felony trials. Florida and five other states—Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Massachusetts, and Utah—allow at least some trials to be held before juries with fewer than 12 members. No state allows juries with five or fewer members.In 2022, an Arizona man asked the Supreme Court to review his conviction of felony offenses by an eight-member jury on Sixth Amendment grounds. While the court declined to do so, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh publicly indicated that they had voted to review his case. Gorsuch also wrote a solo dissent where he forcefully argued that the court should have taken up the case.Twelve, Gorsuch argued, was not some arbitrary number. By the time the Framers adopted the Sixth Amendment in 1791, their English ancestors had upheld the right to a 12-member jury for nearly four centuries. (Other accounts date the 12-member jury even further back, to around the enactment of Magna Carta in 1215.) As a result, founding-era Americans understood “the right to a trial by jury for serious criminal offenses meant a trial before 12 members of the community—nothing less.”Florida’s deviation from this legal norm came as federal troops withdrew from the South, heralding the end of Reconstruction. Kian noted that the Florida legislature first enacted a six-member jury law in February 1877, one month after President Rutherford B. Hayes ordered the military’s withdrawal. “The jury-of-six thus first saw light at the birth of the Jim Crow era as former Confederates regained power in southern states and state prosecutors made a concerted effort to prevent blacks from serving as jurors,” Kian told the justices in his petition for review.Historians have long noted that Southern Redeemers used a variety of subjective legal tests to eliminate Black civic and political participation, both at the ballot box and in the jury box. Along with this historical evidence, Kian pointed out that Black jury participation in Florida became so rare in the Jim Crow years that state newspapers treated it as remarkable and newsworthy on the rare occasions when a Black juror was actually empaneled.The Supreme Court is well aware of this general history. In 2020, the justices struck down another Jim Crow–era jury restriction in Ramos v. Louisiana. Two states, Louisiana and Oregon, allowed nonunanimous jury convictions for felony offenses. This allowed states to convict defendants even if one or two members of the jury voted to find them not guilty. (Though Oregon was not technically a Jim Crow state, it is well established by historians that the Ku Klux Klan played a key role in the restriction’s adoption in the 1930s.)Oregon’s nonunanimous jury law had been previously upheld by the Supreme Court in the 1972 case Apodaca v. Oregon. But Gorsuch, writing for the Ramos majority, rejected what he described as the “functionalist” reasoning of the Apodaca justices, where they looked to the rule’s “function” in “contemporary society.” Gorsuch instead adopted an originalist approach to require jury unanimity in all felony trials.“When the American people chose to enshrine that right in the Constitution, they weren’t suggesting fruitful topics for future cost-benefit analyses,” he wrote in his Ramos decision. “They were seeking to ensure that their children’s children would enjoy the same hard-won liberty they enjoyed. As judges, it is not our role to reassess whether the right to a unanimous jury is ‘important enough’ to retain.”When the court declined to hear the 2022 case involving juries with fewer than 12 members, Gorsuch took the same approach. “For almost all of this Nation’s history and centuries before that, the right to trial by jury for serious criminal offenses meant the right to a trial before 12 members of the community,” he wrote. “In 1970, this court abandoned that ancient promise and enshrined in its place bad social science parading as law.”That 1970 case was Williams v. Florida, where the court upheld Florida’s six-man jury law as a constitutionally permissible change to the long-standing tradition of 12-member juries. “That mistake,” Gorsuch explained, “continues to undermine the integrity of the Nation’s judicial proceedings and deny the American people a liberty their predecessors long and justly considered inviolable.”Kian’s appeal received a favorable hearing from a Florida appeals court that reviewed his conviction. At the same time, that court concluded that it was bound by the Supreme Court’s earlier holding in Williams, even though the precedent’s reasoning had been severely undermined by the court’s 2020 ruling in Ramos. The appeals court effectively signaled to the justices that they hoped to be overturned by praising Ramos, when “the light of originalism began to [peek] out from the darkness of functionalism.”Florida, for its part, had urged the justices to maintain the status quo. The state claimed in its brief that Kian had made “no serious attempt to show that overruling Williams is warranted under traditional principles of stare decisis.” Florida also warned that overruling Williams “would imperil thousands of criminal convictions in Florida and five other states that for more than 50 years have relied on its rule.” Though the state could not provide exact numbers on how many Floridians had been convicted by six-member juries since the 1970s, it noted that “roughly 5,000 criminal convictions are currently pending on direct appeal.”Those numbers would likely pose little impediment for the Supreme Court to overturn Williams when it hears Kian’s case next term, however. When the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Ramos six years ago, the ruling took effect for future trials and those that had not yet exhausted their appeals. In a follow-up case, however, the court declined to apply it retroactively, meaning that finalized criminal convictions remained intact.It is always a fool’s errand to predict exactly how the Supreme Court will decide a case. One subtle sign of Kian’s confidence is that he and his lawyers declined to file a reply brief to Florida’s brief that urged the court not to take up the case, as if they had already said everything they needed to say. The stage is now set for the Supreme Court to further strengthen one of the great bulwarks of American liberty—in the few states, at least, that have gotten away with diminishing it for so long.

The nation’s ‘Special Envoy for the Shield of the Americas’ went on TV this weekend to confuse South and Central America.

The investigations involve the taxes of the California governor's wife and also target his former chief-of-staff, who recently pleaded guilty to a fraud scheme.

Americans who listen to partisan podcasts and influencers are more likely than others in their political party to believe that citizens with “radical views” should be able to (nonviolently) protest the government, per a new survey.

Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries may only win a small majority, but his party still doesn’t fear the discharge petition.

Bush, an outspoken critic of Israel, launched a primary challenge last fall for what’s now the sole remaining safe blue seat in Missouri.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said his party is going to play hardball on the Trump administration’s request for more defense spending.

Now that Donald Trump has reached a ceasefire with Iran, the scrutiny of it has been brutal, making it obvious that he got nothing of significance. In a rambling monologue to reporters, Trump excoriated Barack Obama’s Iran deal for making billions in funding available to the Iranians. But this is actually a self-own: Trump’s own arrangement uses a very similar mechanism, opening up funds as an incentive to get Iran to agree to constraints on its nuclear program later. As Tom Nichols, a staff writer at The Atlantic, says on today’s episode, Trump is “doing it exactly the way Obama did it.” And that’s after Trump also waged a needless war that cost us tens of billions of dollars, depleted our stockpiles, killed some Americans and many Iranians, strained our alliances, and wrecked the global economy. Nichols discusses his new piece arguing that the U.S. capitulated to Iran, explains how Trump left us worse off than before, and walks us through what will happen next, with Trump in a weakened state. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.