About Progressive Kick

Progressive Kick is a national progressive SuperPAC & 527, focused on elections and incumbent accountability. We target the United States Congress and state legislators.

In 2014, we helped several strongly progressive Democrats win their primaries. In the US House race in North Carolina’s 12th district we were the only progressive PAC in the USA to help Alma Adams become the only African American woman to represent North Carolina in Congress. Others wrote off her race as unwinnable. We helped defeat a minion of the predatory payday loan industry in Phoenix’s barrio, electing Martin Quezada to the Arizona State Senate. And we helped David Moon emerge out of a nine person primary to become both the first Korean-American elected to the Maryland state legislature and the founder of the Maryland state legislature’s Progressive Caucus.

The general election was tough. Collaborating closely with our allies National Nurses United we spent over a million dollars in close but unsuccessful governors’ races in Maine, Wisconsin, Michigan and Kansas; coming reasonably close but failing to defeat Republican incumbents in all four cases. We were defeated in these races due to the drop off in Democratic base turnout. But we did help oust a conservative governor by a razor thin margin in Alaska, even as the rest of the country was engulfed in a red tide.

In 2013, we helped defend the open congressional seat IL-02 from the NRA with our IE, defeating two National Rifle Association-endorsed Democrats in the primary and helping to elect progressive Robin Kelly.

In 2012, we identified 6 rock star progressives running viable races for state legislature in swing districts and assisted in electing Tammy Baldwin to the U.S. Senate. We were excruciatingly close to winning all seven of our races! We were instrumental in helping Dems win back control of the Minnesota House, Oregon House & Colorado House!

Past projects in 2011 include teaming up with Working Families Win on a donation-matching program which raised over $10,000 for the Iowa Senate special election. Progressive Democrat Liz Mathis won her race with 56% of the vote, allowing Democrats to retain control of the Iowa Senate. We also worked with EMILY’s List over the summer on a donation-matching program which raised over $60,000 for the Wisconsin Senate recall candidates. Five of the six Democratic challengers running in the Wisconsin recall elections were progressive women — and two won their elections. We teamed up with the Democratic Party of Wisconsin in April on a donation-matching program to raise over $20,000 for signature gathering expenses for the Wisconsin Senate recall.

In 2010 we ran a program called Win Big by Thinking Small!, which was a donation matching contest for state legislative races in key redistricting battleground states. This built off a donation-matching program we ran in Virginia in 2009, Virginia’s Progressive Kicks. In 2008 we ran an ad on Oklahoma TV spotlighting Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe’s horrifying voting record betraying brave young Americans risking their lives in Iraq & Afghanistan, and launched a website spotlighting Iowa Congressman Leonard Boswell’s voting record on key issues, and showing how much money Boswell has raised from various types of interest groups.

Who We Are

  • We are an organization of pragmatic progressives, dedicated to construction of a society that values the needs/rights/responsibilities of all of its members-from the most powerful to the least. Since the most powerful are already being taken care of, our capacity building focuses on the rest of us.

Why We’re Kicking Around

  • No single institution in the world has as much power and influence over people’s lives as the United States Congress, except perhaps the American Presidency. The President of the United States is subject to tremendous scrutiny. But many people don’t actually know what activities our Congressional representatives (as well as state legislators) engage in-allegedly in our name. So we have chosen to illuminate the murky and often completely opaque behavior of these lawmakers-both within the US Congress and on a State level.

What We Do

Our activities include:

  • Spotlighting the betrayal of citizens’ interests by elected office holders on both the Congressional and State levels. We inform & capacitate citizens to make more intelligent decisions about their relationship with their Federal and State governments.
  • Exploring 21st Century Technologies for use as innovative new tools, we reach people who are often not reached by conventional messaging technologies &/or reach people in more cost effective ways.

How We Do It

  • Understanding people from a firm grounding in the political demographic terrain of the United States. We possess detailed data down to the State Legislative district level around the USA and are developing more all the time.
  • Identifying areas where a significant discrepancy exists between the voting record of a Member of Congress and the desires of his/her constituents, by accessing the most encompassing searchable database of Congressional voting records extant.
  • Mounting issue education efforts, which we infuse with both the political demographic data that we possess and our knowledge of individual lawmakers.
  • Pioneering new ways of reaching people, we use a variety of 21st century communications technologies to bring messages to people who otherwise wouldn’t receive conventional political messaging at all (don’t watch broadcast television/don’t have land-line telephones/aren’t English speakers etc) as well as those who would otherwise tune out conventionally delivered messages.
  • Engaging with citizens in exciting ways on issues that are important to them, using all of our different tools and expertise.