“As an adjudicated insurrectionist, Trump is an illegitimate president according to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and therefore every official act as president will be illegitimate.”
–Mike Zonta, co-editor of OccupySF.net
The 14th Amendment states: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any state, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any state legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any state, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
Call your Congressperson and your U.S. Senators at (202) 224-3121
The report shows how employees at Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan helped to hide Epstein’s activities because he was a load-bearing part of their ‘wall of cash.’
Bankers only flagged transactions retroactively in 2019, after authorities arrested Jeffrey Epstein on federal sex trafficking charges. Credit: Jon Elswick/AP Photo
Key executives at Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase routinely ignored the suspicious activities of convicted child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein because he was among their most profitable clients, paying millions in fees and holding influence over other wealthy people, according to a new investigation released on Tuesday by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR).
The cover-up should prompt lawmakers to strengthen anti–money laundering laws and pass new legislation to hold individual bankers accountable, said Wyden, the ranking member on the Senate Finance Committee. The Oregon senator used his report on the multiyear investigation to put the financial services industry on notice that he’s preparing to do just that.
“My investigation showed conclusively that the bankers who served Jeffrey Epstein and his ultra-wealthy friends were far too motivated to protect their cash cow, and had far too little respect for the law,” Wyden told the Prospect via email.
The report looked at thousands of suspicious activity reports, or SARs. Those are confidential documents that banks and other financial institutions must file with the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or FinCEN, the U.S. Treasury’s financial intelligence division, when they identify unusual transactions. Executives have 30 days to file a SAR when they suspect things like money laundering or payments to terrorists.
According to Wyden’s report, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank, and JPMorgan Chase failed to do so for millions of dollars in cash withdrawals that had “no clear business purpose.” Instead, bankers let them ride, and together facilitated more than $1.4 billion worth of suspicious wire transfers over two decades—transactions they only flagged retroactively in 2019, after authorities arrested Epstein on federal sex trafficking charges.
The transactions they hid “included thousands of wire transfers, major withdrawals of cash, payments to women and girls.”
The report names specific bankers who worked for at least one of the three named banks: Paul Barrett, David Brigstocke, Mary Casey, Stephen Cutler, John Duffy, Mary Erdoes, Jane Heller, Jeff Matusow, Paul Morris, Justin Nelson, Stewart Oldfield, Jes Staley, and Karen Weiss.
Staley, a top JPMorgan executive at the time, is the only banker among the group who has faced any consequence for helping Epstein maintain his human trafficking ring; he was forced out as CEO of Barclays. “The rest of the bankers named in this list have faced no known financial consequences or regulatory discipline and remain employed in extraordinarily lucrative positions at JPMC, Bank of America and elsewhere,” the report states.
The transactions they hid “included thousands of wire transfers, major withdrawals of cash, payments to women and girls, and correspondent banking in high-risk foreign jurisdictions (including Russia),” the report states. “They also include tens of millions in payments to his conspirator and convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.”
Deutsche Bank and Bank of America both take their legal obligations seriously, spokespeople for both banks said. The Deutsche spokesperson added that the company regrets its past relationship with Epstein, has cooperated with investigations, and has been “transparent in addressing deficiencies and investing in strengthening our control environment in parallel.” Bank of America, meanwhile, “did not facilitate wrongdoing,” the spokesperson said.
A JPMorgan spokesperson failed to respond to a request for comment on the record.
WYDEN TOLD THE PROSPECT that he is “proposing a set of changes to put some teeth into the law so that elite bankers are held accountable for covering up for the Epstein class.” The forthcoming legislation will introduce a new level of accountability that banking executives would face for failing to report suspicious transaction activity, as the bankers who protected Epstein did. It would require senior managers to sign annual attestations confirming that accounts of high-net-worth clients comply with anti–money laundering laws; impose higher fines or prison sentences for individual bankers who fail to promptly report suspicious activity to the Treasury Department; and claw back bonuses paid to executives responsible for violating the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA). It would also require bank executives to disclose to the Treasury Department every time they fire a client for suspicious financial activity or restrict a client’s cash withdrawals or wire transfers.
The legislation will specifically target activity that suggests a bank’s client may be engaged in human trafficking. It would require banks to conduct a greater level of screening for bank accounts that individuals open for unrelated people younger than 25 years old, and require a client to submit to an interview when they want to open an account for a woman younger than 25 years old in another country. And it would encourage professional consequences for participating in human trafficking by giving federal agencies the authority to revoke certain registrations and licenses to accountants and attorneys.
This type of enforcement regime could have provided legitimate accountability in the Epstein case, Wyden believes. He argues that JPMorgan’s termination of Epstein as a client in 2013 illustrates that they knew something was wrong. But the fact that executives waited until 2019 to report more than 5,000 suspicious wire transfers worth well over $1 billion merits further attention. He notes a detail in a legal filing showing that between 2009 and 2014, JPMorgan gained $8.1 million from Epstein “in fees alone,” and was one of the bank’s largest clients.
Wyden’s report also details multiple instances in which powerful figures used their positions to obstruct his investigation. In one glaring example, he described CBS suppressing an interview he did with former 60 Minutes correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi in March. That was five months after David Ellison, a Trump ally and child of billionaire Larry Ellison, took over CBS through its parent company Paramount and appointed right-wing pundit Bari Weiss to run the network.
New legislation will specifically target activity that suggests a bank’s client may be engaged in human trafficking.
Wyden discussed his SARs investigation with Alfonsi, and possible consequences for banks, as part of a larger segment on the conduct of Wall Street bankers and the government of the U.S. Virgin Islands. But Weiss fired Alfonsi once Ellison took over. “David Ellison’s handpicked partisan lieutenant killed the segment and fired the lead reporter on the piece,” Wyden told the Prospect.
The experience gave Wyden “a first-hand view of how the far-right takeover of corporate media is protecting predators and standing in the way of justice … Blocking corporate media consolidation and supporting independent media is absolutely vital to defending our democracy and getting justice for ultra-wealthy criminals.”
A spokesperson for CBS did not respond to a request for comment.
MILLIONAIRE TREASURY SECRETARY Scott Bessent is likewise working to stymie Wyden’s SARs investigation, according to the report. Bessent rejected three requests from Wyden to give the Senate Finance Committee copies of Epstein’s bank records, while simultaneously making public statements that the records were “sitting there” and that Treasury’s only job was “simply to collect the reports,” which is a false representation of the department, given that it routinely investigates and fines financial institutions for failing to promptly report suspicious transactions.
Bessent’s fellow Republicans have joined in on undermining Wyden, including Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), who claimed Democrats were stonewalling “efforts to crack the Epstein trafficking ring wide open” while simultaneously rejecting Wyden’s request to support his subpoena of Epstein’s bank records.
Blackburn, who faces a primary election for governor of Tennessee tomorrow, did not respond to a request for comment.
In addition to proposing new legislation, Wyden recommends the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve, and Comptroller of the Currency open investigations into how banks handled Epstein’s accounts and that the Department of Justice open criminal investigations into banks and Epstein’s associates, including his lawyer Darren Indyke and his accountants Richard Kahn and Harry Beller. The current House Oversight Committee investigation should consider subpoenas for the individual bankers named in the report, Wyden argued. And Bessent should turn over all the SARs banks have filed in relation to Epstein.
“The pattern of transactions through Epstein’s accounts was well outside the ordinary course of business. All of the Wall Street banks financing Epstein’s activities knew, or should have known, that his transactions were suspicious,” the report states. “By failing to do exactly what the Bank Secrecy Act requires, these Wall Street bankers enabled unspeakable harm to hundreds of Epstein’s victims.”
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Whitney Curry Wimbish is a staff writer at The American Prospect. She previously worked in the Financial Times newsletters division, The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey. Her work has been published in multiple outlets, including The New York Times, The Baffler, Los Angeles Review of Books, Music & Literature, North American Review, Sentient, Semafor, and elsewhere. She is a coauthor of The Majority Report’s daily newsletter and publishes short fiction in a range of literary magazines. She can be reached on Signal at wwimbish.07. More by Whitney Curry Wimbish
Next Tuesday’s Senate primary in Minnesota pits another Indivisible-backed fighter, Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan, against another establishment-backed moderate flush with outside cash. Let’s make sure people power wins out again.
This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine.If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
It wasn’t the job opportunities that brought him to Harlem. Had he been white, Asa Philip Randolph, then 21 years old, had the kind of background that would have ensured gainful employment when he moved north from Florida in 1911: a stellar academic record, parents who’d made sure he knew not just his Bible but Shakespeare and other classics, an orator’s voice, a quiet though commanding presence, Victorian manners, a moral seriousness.
Randolph understood this meant little to nothing in New York’s job market for Black Americans, where he got work—more accurately, gigs—as a janitor and occasional waiter. That’s not why he’d come to Gotham. He’d come to exercise his acting chops in Black amateur theater clubs; to study politics, economics, and public speaking at City College; and, soon after his arrival, to immerse himself in the socialist movement, then at its Debsian apogee. His minister father disapproved of his acting proclivities. But Randolph found an outlet for his talents on the street corners and soapboxes of Harlem, preaching socialist gospel to Harlem’s Black working class.
Randolph was to remain a socialist soapboxer for the next 60 years, during which he did more to advance the rights and interests of Black Americans than anyone else in the half-century between the heyday of W.E.B. Du Bois and the emergence of Martin Luther King. He also had more impact on America’s laws and social policies than any other avowed democratic socialist in the nation’s history, though we must hope, as Randolph surely would, that the wave of socialists who’ve emerged in the past decade will eclipse him.
Randolph used his ability to rally his supporters to make lasting change for Black America.
During his early soapboxing, Randolph met another young Black socialist, Chandler Owen. The two of them “took up residence in the New York Public Library,” says historian Eric Arnesen, where they read Marx, political economy, history, and sociology. In early 1917, they founded and co-edited The Messenger, a monthly magazine that in bold type proclaimed itself to be “The Only Radical Negro Magazine in America.” It vehemently opposed U.S. participation in World War I, pointing out that if democracy was truly at stake, that was a battle that needed to be fought at home. In 1919, U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer labeled the magazine “the most dangerous of all the Negro publications.”
As if Randolph and Owen weren’t already in hot water, they embarked on a national anti-war speaking tour of Black communities. They were arrested in Cleveland and charged, like socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, with subversion. Amazingly, the presiding judge looked at the two twentysomethings and apparently concluded that they were some crazy Black kids who didn’t understand what they’d been talking about. He gave them a lecture and sent them home, not realizing that home was The Messenger’s Harlem office.
IT WASN’T JUST THE WAR against which The Messenger railed. It was capitalism; it was Tammany; it was the Republicans who campaigned in Harlem as Lincoln’s party while doing nothing for Black citizens; it was Black churches that preached submission or accommodation; it was Du Bois’s support for World War I; and in the 1920s, it was Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa movement, which for many Harlemites combined an assertion of Black pride with a weakness for spectacle and a de facto surrender in the struggle for equality on American soil.
Besides writing and editing The Messenger, Randolph also organized fledgling unions of New York’s elevator operators (almost entirely Black) and Virginia’s Black shipyard workers. Both ventures failed, but in 1925, five Pullman porters called on him to talk about forming a union. In the decades following the Civil War, George Pullman had founded a company that both manufactured passenger railcars and staffed them with servants to meet the travelers’ many needs. That task, he decided, had to be performed with cheerful servility, to which end he employed an all-Black workforce, initially former slaves who’d worked in the homes, not the fields, of their enslavers. Few companies were hiring them at all, and Pullman quickly became the largest employer of Black people in the U.S., remaining so until the late 1930s.
By 1925, it was mostly a younger generation of Black workers who staffed the cars, but the same cheerful servility was required of them, which came complete with low pay and the requirement to work all hours depending on passengers’ needs or whims. (Many porters worked up to 400 hours per month.) Travel broadened the porters’ horizons, even with all the restrictions they encountered at every stop, but nothing broadened the porters’ rights or narrowed their hours or raised their wages. Pullman had established a company-controlled union which provided nothing to improve the porters’ lot. It also deployed a small army of spies to ensure that no real union would arise to challenge it.
A. Philip Randolph talks to newsmen at the Capitol after leaders of the March on Washington met with congressional leaders, August 28, 1963. Credit: AP Photo
Randolph accepted the challenge to head a real union, named the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, riding the rails himself to persuade prospective members with his eloquence and demonstrable commitment. The company’s main mode of union suppression was simple termination: The company fired roughly 800 porters who its spies reported were union supporters.
In 1926, however, the porters became the unintended beneficiary of federal legislation. That year, Congress passed the Railway Labor Act, giving collective-bargaining rights to railroad engineers, conductors, and brakemen—all of whom had all-white unions that avidly enforced their color lines. But the act failed to exclude porters; in 1926, hardly any congressmen even knew there was an effort to unionize them. That opened a door for Randolph and his members, though fear of company reprisal still made unionization a slog.
It took the New Deal for unions to start growing again. Still, few expected the porters to dislodge the company’s “union” with their own. But in 1935, the government conducted an election between the company union and the Brotherhood, and the Brotherhood won by a vote of 5,931 to 1,422. Not since Reconstruction had Black Americans won anything of comparable significance; the Black press rejoiced and hailed Randolph as the pre-eminent Black leader of the day. Even greater recognition followed in 1937, when the Pullman company, after two years of hoping the union could be dislodged, abruptly agreed to the union’s proposals for pay and hours and signed a contract.
By 1940, as the specter of war loomed over America, the government boosted funding for production of arms and aircraft (in which the U.S. was singularly lacking). Suddenly, the rather small corporations that built planes—Lockheed, Douglas, North American, Boeing—were growing exponentially. By January 1941, they employed 107,000 workers, of whom just 240 were Black. Randolph met with President Roosevelt, who said he’d encourage the companies to hire more Black workers, but committed himself to nothing further.
Joined by the union’s gruff vice president, Milton Webster, Randolph boarded a southbound train to meet with various porter locals. The two sat in silence as they contemplated how to persuade FDR to compel the companies to integrate. Finally, Randolph said, “I think we ought to get 10,000 Negroes and march down Pennsylvania Avenue and protest against the discriminatory practices” of the aircraft and other arms companies.
At the time, there’d been no mass protests in Washington since the “Bonus Army” of World War I veterans had demanded immediate payment of their veterans’ benefits in 1932—the pit of the Depression. (President Hoover had deployed the U.S. Army to dispel them.) Marches on Washington to promote lasting policy changes—much less Black marches on Washington, which practiced Jim Crow segregation in virtually all its public facilities—were unheard of. But Randolph and Webster’s visits to Northern state locals yielded so much enthusiastic support, far beyond the members of their union, that by late spring, more than 100,000 Black people had pledged to march, alarming the administration.
Two of Randolph’s most prominent and most liberal white allies—first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia—tried in vain to get him to stop the march, and then compelled him to hold another meeting with FDR. “What was your class at Harvard, Phil?” asked Roosevelt, turning on his fabled charm. Randolph responded by noting his regret that he wasn’t a Harvard man, and told FDR that the Black community had been galvanized and could not be dissuaded from marching, absent an executive order requiring defense contractors to cease racial discrimination in hiring and establishing a Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce it. Roosevelt acceded, and Randolph then called off the march. Nonetheless, he led a series of mass rallies in major cities for several years thereafter to both mark and publicize this epochal change. And Black citizens, by the thousands and then the millions, moved from the South to Northern and Western cities for the jobs now open to them in defense plants—a demographic shift with huge implications for the nation and its politics.
BY THEN, RANDOLPH WAS RECOGNIZED as the pre-eminent champion of the Black American cause, with the Amsterdam News proclaiming him “ranked along with the great Frederick Douglass.” He used his ability to rally his supporters to make more lasting change for Black America.
As mentor to the emerging postwar generation of Black radicals, he presided over the conception and planning of the first Freedom Rides (integrated bus rides through the Jim Crow South) in 1946, alongside Bayard Rustin and future CORE leader James Farmer—though the plans weren’t carried out until 1961. In 1948, as Congress considered establishing a peacetime draft, he announced he’d counsel young Black men to resist the draft through a campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience unless the armed forces were desegregated. As he had with Roosevelt, he met with President Truman, who responded with indignation—before realizing that the movement of Black people to Northern and Western states in response to Randolph’s previous campaign meant that desegregating the armed forces could actually help him win some swing states in the upcoming 1948 election. Truman then signed the desegregating executive order, and in the final week of his come-from-behind re-election campaign became the first president ever to hold a campaign rally in Harlem.
The Messenger was an early, radical magazine that Randolph co-founded; by the 1960s, he graced newsweekly covers and met with presidents like JFK (below). Credit: Black Liberation History Archive/Marxists’ Internet Archive; Library of CongressCredit: UPI/Cecil Stoughton/White House/John F. Kennedy Library
Randolph not only incubated the careers of Rustin and Farmer, but helped hone the political talents of many members of the Brotherhood. One of them, E.D. Nixon, became the leader of the NAACP in Montgomery, Alabama, whose Jim Crow regime, he believed, was vulnerable to the kind of nonviolent confrontational tactics that Randolph had used. Several local Black citizens had provoked arrest by refusing to comply with a requirement on city buses to move to the back, but Nixon declined to call a boycott, until in 1955 he found and deployed a model resister named Rosa Parks. Nixon then dragooned the new minister at the city’s largest Black church—26-year-old Martin Luther King Jr.—to lead the campaign. Randolph’s tutelage continued to shape campaigns.
In late 1962, Randolph told Rustin it might be time to mount a March on Washington. Factory employment was dropping due to increased mechanization, causing Black unemployment to rise. The 1958 elections had greatly increased the number of liberals in Congress, and following the 1960 election, there was again a Democrat in the White House. Moreover, civil rights campaigns in Southern cities against pervasive segregation looked to be hitting a wall. So Randolph announced a march, focused on the provision of jobs that would arrest the urban Black descent into poverty, boosting the prospects of white workers as well.
Then King’s campaign for equal rights in Birmingham, Alabama, exploded as television news showed the local police turning dogs and fire hoses on teens and children who were demonstrating for a decent, desegregated life. President Kennedy was compelled to call for federal legislation striking down racial discrimination in public facilities. “It was a magnificent speech,” Randolph said, “but it was, unfortunately, made rather late.”
King and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, then agreed to participate in Randolph’s march, and both the NAACP and the Urban League cautiously agreed to join as well, despite their general aversion to public demonstrations. (NAACP chief Roy Wilkins demanded that Rustin—a liability, he said, for having once been a communist, however briefly, and for still being gay—be removed as the march director. Randolph responded by proclaiming that he’d chair the march himself but keep Rustin as its organizer, to which the boxed-in Wilkins felt compelled to agree.) Kennedy called in the leaders to meet with him in June and, like Roosevelt and Truman before him, asked that they not hold the protest. For the third time, Randolph responded by telling a president that the forces were in motion and could not be deterred.
The march, of course, was a historic success, creating such momentum that the Civil Rights Act that passed the following year went beyond Kennedy’s proposal to include a prohibition on discrimination in hiring—a broader version of the policy Randolph had secured, temporarily, during World War II.
Still a dedicated socialist, Randolph welcomed the Great Society’s War on Poverty, while seeking to remedy its inadequacies by having progressive economists devise the “Freedom Budget” in 1966, which demonstrated how government-backed full-employment policies could truly eliminate American poverty. These policies, of course, have yet to be enacted.
Randolph died in 1979, until his final years still residing in a modest Harlem walk-up apartment. While his life and work have never been totally forgotten, they’ve fallen through the cracks of historical memory. A modest statue of him can be found in Washington’s Union Station, where porters once staffed the railcars. No monument truly reflects the impact of his work and the egalitarian decency it bestowed—provisionally, of course—on his country.
Herewith, then, a modest suggestion: The next time that Democrats control the federal government, they should rename Union Station—that majestic, Daniel Burnham greeting hall of all who come to Washington by rail—after the man who both championed rail workers and led those who flowed through it to march on Washington for justice. The A. Philip Randolph Station.
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State Senator Scott Weiner proposed naming the Bay Bridge’s Yerba Buena Tunnel after local folk icon, the late Emperor Norton, who first conceived of the idea of connecting SF and Oakland more than half a century before the bridge came to be.
The proposal to officially name the Bay Bridge’s Yerba Buena Tunnel after the late Emperor Norton builds on years of efforts to honor the eccentric San Franciscan. As the Chronicle reports, state Senator Scott Wiener introduced a resolution Tuesday, with Assemblymember Catherine Stefani joining as a co-author. If approved by the Legislature, Caltrans would estimate the cost of new signage and install it after privately raised funds cover the expense.
Joshua Abraham Norton, who famously declared himself “Emperor of the United States” and “Protector of Mexico,” arrived in San Francisco during the Gold Rush era as a wealthy businessman, but lost his fortune after a failed attempt to corner the rice market. After falling from high society, he reinvented himself as Emperor Norton in 1859, issuing elaborate decrees that newspapers eagerly published and turning his fictional reign into a citywide phenomenon.
SFist’s Joe Kukura described Norton as “a Gold Rush-era bon vivant who combined the local-legend cult-following magic of Frank Chu, the crassly effective media manipulation of Donald Trump, and the inexplicable cultural staying power of a Kardashian to be the most talked-about San Francisco socialite of the [city’s] earliest years.”
According to the Chronicle, Norton’s declarations ranged from abolishing Congress and political parties to advocating for a bridge between San Francisco and Oakland, the latter of which came to fruition 56 years after his death. Despite the absurdity of his title, Norton became a beloved local figure known for speaking out against anti-Chinese discrimination and promoting ideas of peace and inclusion.
“Emperor Norton was a San Francisco original,” Wiener said in a statement. “At a time when Chinese Californians were being targeted with exclusion and harassment, he stood up against hate and preached inclusion. At a time of war, he stood against violence and hostility.”
The effort traces back more than a decade to the Emperor Norton Trust’s 2013 petition seeking to add “Emperor Norton Bridge” as an honorary name for the entire Bay Bridge, a campaign that drew roughly 7,000 signatures. About a year ago, the trust shifted its focus to the currently unnamed Yerba Buena Tunnel, which founder John Lumea told the Chronicle was a more practical proposal after years of building support from local organizations before approaching lawmakers and eventually securing Wiener’s backing.
The proposal has received endorsements from groups including the Imperial Council of San Francisco, the Chinese Historical Society of America, and the California Lodge No. 1 of Free and Accepted Masons. Under the resolution, the Legislature would have the authority to officially name the tunnel. Caltrans would then estimate the cost of new signage, with the Emperor Norton Trust expected to raise private funds to pay for and install the signs if the measure passes.
In 2023, former Supervisor Aaron Peskin renamed a Financial District alley after him. Peskin previously attempted in 2004 to rename the entire Bay Bridge in Norton’s honor.
Norton died in 1880, and his funeral was reportedly attended by 10,000 mourners, with an estimated 30,000 taking part in the procession. He was originally buried at the former Masonic Cemetery before his remains were moved to Woodlawn Memorial Park in Colma, when the city’s cemeteries were relocated in the early 1900s.
Note: The post was updated with clarifications regarding funding for the tunnel and Caltrans’s role in the official naming. Additionally, the Yerba Buena Tunnel does not currently have an “official” name, so the wording throughout has been changed from “renamed” to “named.”
Populist Abdul El-Sayed shocked the Democratic Party establishment by beating an incumbent Congresswoman for a Senate nominating contest, despite being outspent nine to one. What comes now?
There is a rebellion afoot in America. Last night, there was a Senate primary election in Michigan, and while there are frequent elections these days to choose candidates for political parties, this race was generally understood by political insiders as the most important contest in terms of setting the economic and political direction of the Democratic Party. And the anti-monopolist side narrowly won.
The candidates were a doctor and public health official named Abdul El-Sayed, and a Congresswoman named Haley Stevens, who had worked for Obama during the auto rescue. Stevens was the candidate of the establishment, endorsed by the Governor, the incumbent Senator (Gary Peters), and Senate Majority leader Chuck Schumer. She had $60 million of outside corporate or AIPAC spending, perhaps the largest amount ever spent in Michigan, a nine to one advantage. Her argument was that a moderate was best-equipped to oppose Trump, while pressing for incremental change and retaining traditional U.S. relationships in the Middle East.
El-Sayed, by contrast, ran on Medicare for All and getting money out of politics, as well as ending U.S. funding for Israel. He frequently used the slogan, “Money out of politics, money in your pocket.” And that platform was enough to overcome the immense wealth and prestige put on the line against him.
There were a number of similar outcomes in other races last night; two Democratic socialists won primaries in Michigan as well, one toppling the incumbent Congressman Shri Thanedar.
And these results, especially El-Sayed’s win, are quite shocking. One thing has always been true about the Democratic Party in my experience over the last twenty years, and that is that Democratic leaning voters have tended to support their Democratic leaders. They rarely vote out incumbents, and they usually pick the safe moderate choice endorsed by party leaders and establishment publications like the New York Times.
But since 2024, that dynamic has changed. Democratic voters are angry and want something different. So far this year, four incumbent Democratic House members have lost to challengers. It had been rare enough for even one to lose, and usually beating an incumbent required immense amounts of focus and money. This time, an incumbent Colorado Democratic Senator, John Hicklooper, almost lost to a challenger who barely ran a campaign. So this shift is a big deal.
The current framing of the political insider class is to characterize the wins as emanating from the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA. And there’s a reason for that; Bernie Sanders is a DSA member, and he’s been endorsing a number of the challengers, including El-Sayed. But El-Sayed is not actually a socialist. He is, by his own words, an anti-monopolist. Here’s a response to a question in the New Yorker in which he was asked about his political philosophy, in which he says just that.
Abdul, your name has been connected quite often with the kind of left-leaning energy in the Party—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders, Zohran Mamdani. And yet you have not joined the Democratic Socialists—the D.S.A. Why not?
Too much of a scientist, I guess. I’m a capitalist who reads about capitalism. And when you read about capitalism, it is very clear, even to the originators who coined the idea, that the biggest risk to capitalism was not going to be government regulation, as much as the corporatists want you to think it is. It was always going to be monopoly. And we know that hyper-capitalism tends toward monopoly. We also understand that that happens in part because, when a corporation gets big enough, it has enough power to start “rent seeking,” which is a fancy way of saying influencing government action to protect its own interests. And that’s the place we are right now in capitalism. I think small business is amazing. I think it’s a really efficient way to move capital into the areas where it can be really efficient to create a lot of jobs. I’m just not a socialist. And so I want capitalism to work the way it was supposed to work, not the way that the corporations tell us it’s supposed to work.
Seven months ago, El-Sayed released a video about frozen food giant Sara Lee’s acquisition of Chef Pierre pies. Michigan grows about 70% of the country’s tart cherries, so the consolidation of food processing companies like Sara Lee hit the farmers. El-Sayed’s main point was that the underlying increases in groceries Americans are facing are a result of corporate power, the mergers that increase the pricing power of the processed food giants. The story he is telling, from money in politics to mergers, is about the excesses of corporate power.
And while a lot of his approach has been boiled down to “Medicare for All,” he has taken a broad position against hospital mergers, and supports Elizabeth Warren’s and Josh Hawley’s Break Up Big Medicine Act, to take apart companies like UnitedHealth Group, CVS and giant drug wholesalers. There is a real coherence here, at least on policy.
Part of his platform in the agricultural space is to cap subsidies to big farms, and to move Federal funding away from the corn/soy standard and towards specialty crops. He also supports a national right to repair law.
A touchstone issue, for El-Sayed and the insurgents across the board, is an intense focused on ending U.S. funding and military support for Israel, a parallel in some ways of how the right criticized Joe Biden as focused on Ukraine instead of problems at home. When El-Sayed, the son of Egyptian immigrants, was framed as hostile to American foreign policy interests, he took an America First approach, arguing that he wanted taxpayer money from people in Michigan spent in Michigan.
While there is a lot of commentary about this race, a year ago, very few people would have predicted that El-Sayed would have won the primary. But that was also true about Zohran Mamdani in New York City, and he had a shocking upset victory last summer against a similarly better funded and supported establishment candidate, Andrew Cuomo.
There’s still the general election, but political insiders on both sides of the aisle, whatever they might say publicly, think there’s a wave coming against the GOP. So these primary wins are more important than simple political contests. They show that the Democratic voting base wants a different political economy framework, and that means Democratic candidates next cycle, including Presidential candidates, will try to appeal to them using some of the same arguments that these insurgents used.
To put it differently, the Democrats are undergoing some of the same changes that happened to the GOP. Donald Trump in 2016 represented a break from the old Bush corporatist approach. But Democrats at the time did not do a rethink.
Joe Biden invited some populists into his administration, recognizing that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren had pull in the party. But Democrats by and large continued with the Obama-era attitude that big tech was mostly benign. And the important stuff, at Treasury, the Fed, and Commerce, was still run by Wall Street. For instance, the most important economic official, private equity baron Jay Powell, was appointed to run the Federal Reserve by Trump and then reappointed by Biden.
Moreover, populists had to clothe their agenda in technocratic garb, pretending that it was consistent with the social issue-focused Wall Street philosophy determining the big stuff. The health care antitrust work did not mesh with the lack of interest from Biden policymakers at the Health and Human Services Department. The industrial policy didn’t deliver the jobs and was at cross-purposes with high financing costs meant to tamp down on inflation.
The result was incoherence. Working people felt left behind. The number of billionaires in America doubled due to Biden’s Federal Reserve, while Wall Street and Silicon Valley elites were furious over antitrust policy and consumer protection choices
The cause of this incoherence was the politics. Primary voters, and thus the political leaders in Congress, did not consider economic questions meaningful. They were too in thrall to supporting their leaders funded by big business. And so the Democratic Party, from mayors to Congressional leaders to the White House, just did not prioritize the problem of corporate power.
But after the 2024 electoral fiasco, the primary voters themselves are in revolt. And so the question is whether this time, the politics and the voters will support an actual attempt to constrain corporate power. If the voters do care, then so will the politicians. What insurgent victories suggest is that the attitude of voters is changing. That is not just a result of anger at their own leaders, but also a result of changes in the economy. They are hostile to big tech and data centers, and feel cheated as the cost of living goes up.
Moreover, the transformation on the right, as it turns out, has not taken. Trump has made some changes from the Bush era, but he still prioritizes Wall Street and wars in the Middle East. The result is that he is running into the same buzzsaw of every incumbent presiding over a dislikable status quo. Change elections have become routine. In 2006, 2008, 2010, 2014, 2016, 2018, 2020, 2022, 2024, and likely 2026, one or both houses of Congress changed parties. That’s twenty solid years of “throw the bums out.” Trump broke a lot of norms, but he didn’t break that one.
At some point, someone will get elected and deliver. Perhaps it will be this set of populist Democrats. I can see the outlines of a new and much better society they might create, but I also have my doubts that they will be able to figure out what levers to pull. Regardless, what we learned last night is they will likely get their chance to try in the next few years.
Thanks for reading! Your tips make this newsletter what it is, so please send tips on weird monopolies, stories I’ve missed, or other thoughts. And if you liked this issue of BIG, you can sign up here for more issues, a newsletter on how to restore fair commerce, innovation, and democracy. Consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this work, or if you are a paying subscriber, giving a gift subscription to a friend, colleague, or family member. If you really liked it, read my book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.
People always talk about how great it was that Washington only served two terms. I think he had to be convinced to run a second time.
ChatGPT:
Yes. By the end of his first term, George Washington was tired of politics and eager to retire to his home at Mount Vernon. He had intended to step down after four years.
Several factors persuaded him to seek a second term in 1792:
The young United States was deeply divided, especially between the supporters of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson.
Many leaders feared that Washington’s retirement might destabilize the new government, which was still finding its footing under the Constitution.
Close advisers—including Hamilton and Jefferson, despite their disagreements—urged him to stay because they believed he was the one person trusted by nearly everyone.
Washington reluctantly agreed to run again and was unanimously reelected by the Electoral College.
By the end of his second term, however, he was determined to retire. In 1796 he declined to seek a third term and published his famous George Washington’s Farewell Address, in which he warned against excessive political partisanship and permanent foreign alliances.
So the short answer is yes: he had to be persuaded to run for a second term, and he did so more out of a sense of duty than personal ambition.
In her words, Frances Perkins, the first woman cabinet secretary, ‘came to Washington to work for God, FDR, and the millions of forgotten, plain, common workingmen.’
This article appears in the August 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine.If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here.
The Asch Building was on fire.
Frances Perkins had been in New York for two years, having moved from Philadelphia to work for the New York Consumers League. On Saturday afternoon, March 25, 1911, the 30-year-old social reform advocate had joined friends for tea in Greenwich Village. During the meal, they heard fire trucks and rushed in the direction of the sirens at Washington Square.
They found the top three floors of the ten-story building engulfed in flames. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, the manufacturer of the button-up blouses prized by the era’s working women, occupied those floors. The International Ladies Garment Workers Union workers had protested conditions at the factory two years before. They’d been fired by the owners and replaced with immigrant laborers.
The firemen’s longest ladder only reached the sixth floor.
They had been holding until that time, standing in the windowsills, being crowded by others behind them, the fire pressing closer and closer, the smoke closer and closer. Finally, the men were trying to get out this thing that the firemen carry with them, a net to catch people if they do jump … they couldn’t wait any longer. They began to jump … the weight of the bodies was so great, at the speed at which they were traveling that they broke through the net. Every one of them was killed, everybody who jumped was killed. It was a horrifying spectacle.
The 146 victims were mainly young immigrant women from Tsarist Russia, Central Europe, and Italy. A fire escape had collapsed. Others died trying to escape through the elevator shafts. Fearing thefts by their underpaid workers, the owners had the factory doors bolted and locked. When they were able to enter, firemen found skeletons and bodies mutilated by the inferno.
Perkins reflected later that “the New Deal was born that day.”
For the city and the state, the Triangle fire was the September 11th of the 20th century. New York’s Democratic legislative leaders Assemblyman Al Smith and state Sen. Robert Wagner headed the Factory Investigating Commission probing the disaster. Perkins, a familiar face working in Albany, was the chief investigator. The group met every Saturday morning for four years. The commission exceeded its fire safety regulations mandate, proposing reforms on hours and wages, child labor, and sanitary issues in factories.
The owners were acquitted of manslaughter. They received $400 for each victim through their insurance policy and paid $75 to the families of the victims.
In 1933, Franklin Roosevelt selected Frances Perkins as his secretary of labor, the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet.
The trauma of the 1911 fire deeply affected her. Amanda Hatch is the executive director of the Frances Perkins Center, a cultural organization affiliated with the family’s homestead in Newcastle, Maine, which was designated a national monument in 2024. “Her grandson wrote about his memory of visiting his grandmother when he was a child, and one of the first things they did were fire drills,” Hatch says. “She would show him where the rope ladder was, and how to attach the rope ladder to the second-floor window.”
BEFORE PERKINS ARRIVED IN WASHINGTON, her professional journeys took her to Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York. Her experiences in those three cities crystalized Perkins’s understanding of the problems of urban workers and informed her real-world solutions to assist the men, women, and children working in dangerous conditions for starvation wages and living in squalid, crowded, and disease-prone tenements.
After graduating from Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts in 1902, Perkins went to Chicago for a teaching job and volunteered over her three-year sojourn at Hull House, the settlement house established by the social reformers Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr.
Hull House was an early multi-service center where immigrants on the Near West Side could locate not only employment listings, but child care, legal information, and other assistance. Addams, who in 1931 went on to become the first American woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize, activated Perkins’s interest in social work and was a key mentor throughout her career.
Perkins’s sisterhood of mentors imbued her with the superpowers she drew on in the White House. “They were really embedded in the community and had experiential knowledge of what they were talking about,” says Judy Whipps, a Grand Valley State University professor emerita of philosophy and interdisciplinary studies.
“I thought I ought to give my life to the poor,” Perkins wrote in 1939 while secretary of labor (right). Credits: AP Photo; Frances Perkins Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University
Perkins left Chicago in 1907 for the Philadelphia Research and Protective Association, where she took on rescuing immigrants and Southern Black women and girls from sex traffickers. After earning her master’s degree in economics and sociology from Columbia University in 1910, she joined Florence Kelley, another Hull House alumna, at the New York Consumers League.
The New Englander gained entrée to the glamorous world of fine homes, country getaways, and cultural events enjoyed by progressive, upper-middle-class New Yorkers. But she was never wealthy. Her parents moved from Maine to Boston, where she was born in 1880, and from there to central Massachusetts, where her father opened a stationery company. She married Paul Wilson, another nonprofit professional, in 1913. Unusually for that time, Perkins kept her own surname. The family’s finances disintegrated after Wilson developed bipolar disorder and was frequently hospitalized. Their only child, Susanna, also experienced mental illness.
Perkins first met Roosevelt at a tea dance in New York City in 1911. Roosevelt was basically a “prince” of the Hudson Valley aristocracy: “There was nothing particularly interesting about the tall, thin young man,” she wrote in her best-selling 1946 memoir, The Roosevelt I Knew.
When Perkins lobbied New York legislators on a plan that would guarantee women a 54-hour workweek, Roosevelt wasn’t curious about it. But “Big Tim” Sullivan, a notorious veteran of the corrupt Tammany Hall machine, was. His 14-year-old sister had had to work, and he put his shoulder to the bill. “[Big Tim] was real,” Perkins told a New Yorker interviewer in 1933. “You didn’t have to show him statistics on the incidence of fatigue poisoning to make him understand that a girl’s back aches if she works too much.”
When FDR was elected governor in 1928, Perkins had already held state labor department positions. The outgoing governor Al Smith had just lost the presidential election, and Roosevelt asked her to serve as the state industrial commissioner, running the entire labor department. Smith had warned him that men would have problems with a woman. “Al’s a good, progressive fellow,” Roosevelt said, “but I am willing to take more chances. I’ve got more nerve about women and their status in the world than Al has.”
PERKINS’S SELECTION AS THE PRESIDENT’S secretary of labor was a bold stroke in 1933. But Perkins initially resisted, reminding Roosevelt that turf-conscious labor leaders would be irate seeing her running their department; if he was intent on a woman, someone with a union track record would be better. When that didn’t work, she thought that if she insisted on very ambitious, politically dicey conditions (ones that would actually dent the 25 percent unemployment), the new president would think twice:
In broad terms, I proposed immediate federal aid to the states for direct unemployment relief, an extensive program of public works, a study and an approach to the establishment by federal law of minimum wages, maximum hours, true unemployment and old-age insurance, abolition of child labor, and the creation of a federal employment service.
She warned him it was all borderline unconstitutional. “Well, that’s a problem,” Roosevelt said, “but we can work out something when the time comes.”
Like her three liberal colleagues in FDR’s inner circle (Harry Hopkins, Henry Wallace, and Harold Ickes), Perkins came to Washington with specific ideas about how to tackle the Great Depression. But the president left the details to them. Said Perkins, “The notion that the New Deal had a preconceived theoretical position is ridiculous.”
Derek Leebaert, author of Unlikely Heroes, a study of FDR and his “four lieutenants,” credits the social reformer’s “brain power” for her ability to survive the Roosevelt White House. “It was her determined preparation for any meeting, which is why nobody would cross her in a cabinet meeting, because she was always superbly prepared,” says Leebaert. “One of the very first things she did was assemble a group of young high-powered lawyers, most from Harvard Law, to serve as legal advisors to the Department of Labor.”
Perkins confronted relentless misogyny. She kept “Notes on the Male Mind,” a folder of observations about her colleagues. To appear less threatening to the men, she adopted a maternal aura, wearing longer skirts, pearls, and a three-cornered hat. She sat with the cabinet wives at social functions and only spoke in meetings when FDR asked.
If not for Perkins, Social Security, as Americans understand the program today, would not have been created.
After the March 1933 inauguration, Harry Hopkins, who headed New York’s relief efforts, came to Washington with a plan to graft some of the ideas that had worked in the state’s successful Temporary Emergency Relief Administration onto a federal appropriation of grants-in-aid to serve as immediate unemployment relief to the states. He couldn’t get in to see the president on his own—Perkins made the meeting happen.
By mid-May, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration had been signed into law. “One sees that it provided a substantial stimulus to the revival of industry,” Perkins wrote, “by creating purchasing power in a class previously destitute, and that it had a tremendous effect on raising the standards of living of the poorest and lowest paid people.”
Even before the relief programs were launched, Perkins had been thinking long and hard about what came to be Social Security. She never really took credit for her accomplishments and was content to let FDR shine. However, it is an undisputed fact that if not for Perkins, Social Security, as Americans understand the program today, would not have been created. Though the first private pension plan had been launched by American Express in 1875, most workers toiled until they couldn’t. The modern concept of retirement did not exist.
Roosevelt gave Perkins the freedom to develop the program. Since a relief plan was already in progress, FDR wanted to make clear that the goal was to assist Americans during future periods of unemployment and address the problems of “unprotected” old age. And he wanted it for everyone, not just factory workers. He also aimed to keep the two programs separate from the relief programs to avoid having conservative opponents label them as “the dole.” He’d wanted to add health insurance to the mix, but groups like the American Medical Association were dead set against it.
Perkins first lobbied Congress, where there was support for both old-age and unemployment insurance. She branched out to speak across the country. As she tried to figure out how to fund these mammoth programs, Supreme Court Justice Harlan Stone provided a bit of unsolicited advice at an event: “The taxing power of the Federal Government, my dear; the taxing power is sufficient for everything you want and need.” She took this intel back to her working group as the premise for creating a viable fund for the benefits. They figured out that aid to the poor and dependents could come out of federal appropriations that the states could match.
She decided that to fund old-age insurance, both employers and workers would be taxed to contribute to a fund that would distribute monies to eligible employees at age 65, who had paid into the fund. One of the drafters of the plan said they wanted a “life-long series of contributions.” “We decided that equal contributions by employers and employees were necessary, with the government contributing a third share as an offset to the assistance costs to be saved.”
Perkins in the crowd as President Franklin Roosevelt signs the Social Security Act into law, 1935. Credit: Frances Perkins Collection, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University
AS WORLD WAR II UNFOLDED, Perkins took risks on immigration issues well beyond Roosevelt’s political comfort zone. The Immigration Act of 1924 established a system of national origin quotas to exclude specific racial, ethnic, and religious groups (chiefly, Jews and Catholics). At that time, the State Department issued visas and the Labor Department enforced immigration laws.
Brutal immigration tactics aren’t new. In Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts to Aid Refugees From Nazi Germany, historian Rebecca Brenner Graham explains that federal labor officials in the 1930s ramped up deportations, initially targeting Mexicans in raids conducted along the southern border, complete with patrols by the KKK and other vigilantes. Boardinghouses and other locations were also singled out. Perkins laid off Labor Department old-timers in the hope of steering remaining employees to help new arrivals rather than seizing and deporting them.
Pressures to admit new Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany or extend visas of people already in the United States led to conflicts with State Department officials. However, the secretary managed to save hundreds of Jewish children despite congressional and bureaucratic opposition. The president allowed her to extend visas for up to 15,000 German Jews. But overall, Roosevelt kept the United States on the sidelines of the crisis.
Perkins ran into more trouble when she prohibited the deportation of longshoreman union head Harry Bridges. The Australian immigrant had led a successful general strike in San Francisco in 1934 and built one of the nation’s most militant unions. Right-wing congressmen called for her impeachment, and in 1939 she defended her decision before the Committee on Un-American Activities. Roosevelt dodged making any statements of support for the stances she took.
Congressional Republicans failed to blunt the New Deal by attacking Perkins, but her political cachet faded though she remained at the Labor Department through June 1945. She wanted to resign right after FDR’s January inauguration, his fourth. Even with the war winding down, Roosevelt didn’t want to think about that. “Frances, you have done awfully well,” FDR told her the day before the ceremony. “I know what you have been through. I know what you have accomplished. Thank you.” By mid-April, the president was dead.
Frances Perkins beat the system for countless forgotten, common working Americans, then and today. She died 20 years after FDR in 1965.
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Gabrielle Gurley is a senior editor at The American Prospect. She covers states and cities, focusing on economic development and infrastructure, elections, and climate. She wins awards, too, most recently picking up a 2024 NABJ award for coverage of Baltimore and a 2021 Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication urban journalism award for her feature story on the pandemic public transit crisis. More by Gabrielle Gurley
Michigan Democratic candidate for Congress Donavan McKinney speaks at The People V. The Powerful rally at the Detroit Opera House on July 18, 2026 in Detroit, Michigan, along with Democratic candidate for Senate Abdul El-Sayed.
(Photo by Sarah Rice/Getty Images)
“The Democratic establishment threw everything it had at Abdul El-Sayed,” said one podcaster. “If he wins, the reverberations will be felt far outside of Michigan.”
Voters in five states are going to the polls Tuesday to cast ballots for US House and Senate candidates, including several who aim to continue a recent streak of progressive victories that—as Colorado democratic socialist Melat Kiros said after she won her own primary race last month—will send a message to “both parties, to Donald Trump, and to the entire country.”
Major races in which progressives are hoping to beat corporate-backed, centrist Democrats are set to be decided in Missouri and Michigan, and observers have pointed to unprecedented outside spending on the primaries—including more than $100 million that’s been poured into races by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) as public support for Israel plummets—as clear evidence that the political establishment views left-wing challengers as formidable opponents.
With AIPAC taking an outsized role in funding a number of centrist primary campaigns this election cycle, the results Tuesday night are expected to reveal whether the lobby group can continue to influence elections and US policy regarding Israel, while a growing number of Americans view Israel negatively following nearly three years of its US-backed assault on Gaza.
Dan Pfeiffer, a former Obama administration staffer who co-hosts the podcast “Pod Save America,” said that with the Democratic establishment particularly throwing its weight behind pro-Israel US Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) in the race between her and progressive former public health official Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s US Senate race, Tuesday will be “the culmination of one of the most heated and expensive Democratic Senate primaries in history.”
“The Democratic establishment threw everything it had at Abdul El-Sayed,” said Pfeiffer. “If he wins, the reverberations will be felt far outside of Michigan.”
The Michigan Senate race is arguably the most high-profile race taking place Tuesday, but in a number of House districts in the state and elsewhere, progressives are vying for seats in Congress in hopes of increasing the number of Democrats who would use their power to advocate for programs like Medicare for All and universal childcare and against massive Pentagon budgets and US aid to Israel.
Key races include:
State Rep. Donavan McKinney (D-11) vs. US Rep. Shri Thanedar (D-Mich.)
McKinney, a former labor organizer, is running to unseat Thanedar in the state’s 13th District, and recently notched endorsements from the Democratic Socialists of America and Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.). Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) have also thrown their support behind McKinney.
The state lawmaker’s website states that he is running “because I’ve lived through the same bull**** as you my whole life, right here at home in Detroit.” He calls his city “the poster child for communities in need of the Green New Deal,” pointing to lead-polluted water and “some of the most polluted air in the country.”
He has also pushed to ban utility monopolies and government contractors, calling Thanedar “our multimillionaire congressman who bought this seat with his own money,” and had pledged to defeat “the corporate and right-wingsuper PACs that will spend millions to support” Thanedar.
According to Punchbowl News, Thanedar is “heavily self-funding” his campaign and, along with the pro-cryptocurrency group Protect Progress, has spent $4.6 million on TV ads.
McKinney has also pointed to Thanedar’s campaign funding from Detroit’s unpopular energy utility company, DTE, and from AIPAC. According to The Intercept, “two-thirds of the money Thanedar raised in the last quarter came from AIPAC, which collects money from multiple donors and funnels it to the pro-Israel group’s preferred candidates… Less than a quarter of those donors listed Michigan as their state of residence.”
Thanedar “was in the minority of House Democrats who voted against cutting $3.3 billion in military aid to Israel from a State Department spending bill” last month, The Intercept added.
In his “closing message” on Tuesday, McKinney told radio show host Dean Obeidallah that he doesn’t “have any special interests pulling the strings.”
“My special interest is the people of the mighty 13th District, and instead of continuing to send our taxpayer money to fund genocide and send it for bombs and weapons to kill families and children, or to start wars in Iran and spend over $1 billion a day on average, my focus is going to be taking those resources, our taxpayer money, and bringing it back home for people who need it the most,” said McKinney.
— SiriusXMProg.bsky.social (@SiriusXMProg) August 4, 2026
Organizer William Lawrence vs. Retired Navy SEAL Matt Maasdam vs. Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Bridget Brink
Lawrence has also been endorsed by Sanders, Tlaib, and a number of progressive groups in his race in the state’s 7th District, where he and the two moderate candidates seek to oust US Rep. Tom Barrett.
Some polls have shown the progressive co-founder of Sunrise Movement in the lead by as many as six percentage points, but other recent surveys have shown Brink in the lead.
Lawrence has touted his energetic grassroots campaign, announcing on Monday that 864 volunteers had knocked on 100,000 doors in the district, which includes Lansing and the surrounding area.
Yesterday we knocked our 100,000th door. We've built a grassroots operation unlike anything Mid-Michigan has seen before.
864 volunteers got us here, and we're just getting started. We will hit even more by November to beat Barrett. pic.twitter.com/WDZJ7gYPDl
Lawrence has focused heavily on the push to build nearly 80artificial intelligence data centers in communities in Michigan. President Donald Trump has demanded a deregulated approach, and people in towns and cities across the country have rallied against the facilities, arguing the massive water and energy consumption of data centers makes them undesirable additions to their communities.
Lawrence has joined Sanders and US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in calling for a nationwide moratorium on the construction of new data centers. In one campaign ad he was seen at a farm, saying, “Tech billionaires want to turn this field into a massive data center that’ll jack up our energy bills and ruin our home values… I’m running for U.S. Congress because I’ve never been afraid to stand up to corporate power.”
Some in the Democratic establishment attacked Lawrence recently over comments he made in 2024 in which he said older Black leaders in the party have worked to defang “the white left.” He apologized for the remark.
At a rally ahead of the primary, Lawrence told supporters that the campaign has “continued climbing” despite the attacks.
“And that’s because there are real human beings in this campaign who are having real conversations, and that is cutting through the lies and the bullshit,” he said.
Our campaign has continued to surge despite the millions of dollars in attacks misrepresenting my record.
We've built real relationships with our neighbors that the dark money outsiders can't buy with lies.
In the state’s most closely-watched race, El-Sayed has taken direct aim at Stevens for benefiting from tens of millions of dollars in AIPAC money as he has run on the slogan, “Money out of politics, money in your pocket, and Medicare for all.”
Stevens has been endorsed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who has come under fire this election cycle for other endorsements including that of Maine Gov. Janet Mills in the New England state’s Senate race, with progressives arguing Schumer has backed establishment candidates and ignored the energy around Medicare for All, taxing billionaires, and ending aid for Israel among the party’s base.
Ben Rhodes, another former Obama staffer, said Monday that the party leadership “decided to back Haley Stevens in part out of fear of Abdul and the future he represents.”
El-Sayed is an outspoken advocate for Medicare for All, but Stevens has appeared eager to center his identity as a Muslim American in the race, joining the centrist think tank Third Way in attacking him for campaigning with commentator Hasan Piker, an outspoken critic of Israel, and claiming last week that El-Sayed wants “to blame all of [his] problems on Jewish Americans.”
The latter comment was widely condemned as “race-baiting.”
El-Sayed closed his primary campaign out Tuesday with an ad featuring several of his high-profile endorsers as well as grassroots supporters.
“We need to talk about who we are and affirm what we’re willing to fight for, and that’s exactly why this movement is resonating with so many,” said Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.).
Time to vote, Michigan! For the many. For money out of politics. For money in your pocket. For Medicare for All. pic.twitter.com/e64Y9A4wuH
Numerous polls in recent weeks have shown El-Sayed far ahead of Stevens, particularly among younger voters.
Drop Site News highlighted a number of other Michigan races in which progressives are running, including organizer Abbas Alawieh in the 2nd state Senate district and Sanders-endorsed Eboni Taylor in the 3rd state Senate district.
Former US Rep. Cori Bush vs. Rep. Wesley Bell
In Missouri’s 1st District in St. Louis, former US Rep. Cori Bush is running for a second time against Rep. Wesley Bell, who defeated her in the 2024 primary after nearly two-thirds of his campaign funding came from the United Democracy Project (UDP), a super political action committee affiliated with AIPAC. The group allocated more than $100 million toward defeating candidates that supported Palestinian rights and opposed US military funding for Israel that year.
Bush told Politico recently that this year’s election is no different.
“One of us is of the people, by the people, and for the people,” Bush said in a recent interview. “The other one is paid for by AIPAC.”
According to AdImpact, UDP has again spent more than $3 million on advertising in the primary.
While Bell has a clear financial advantage, he lacks the “grassroots army” Bush has, The Intercept recently reported, as well as voter engagement. The former county prosecutor has not shown up to several candidate forums.
Polling in the race has been scarce; a survey released in February that was sponsored by Bush’s campaign showed Bell ahead by four points, with 17% of respondents undecided.
Jessica Montgomery, co-chair of the St. Louis DSA chapter, told The Intercept that voters in St. Louis are likely to show “buyer’s remorse” regarding Bell in Tuesday’s election.
He voted along with 74 other Democrats to “thank” US Immigration and Customs Enforcement in June 2025, when Trump was beginning his violent mass deportation campaign
“There’s a lot of very progressive voters in St. Louis who don’t like the fact that he voted to thank ICE,” Montgomery told the outlet. “I think they want someone who will be more adversarial and will fight back against the Trump administration.”
Bush said Monday that her opponent “is backed by billionaires, MAGA money, and AIPAC. But our movement is backed by the people.”
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