The Justice Democrats Go Broke!

Progressive lawmakers abandon controversy SuperPac.

Progressive SuperPac is laying off workers.

Just over six years since its founding, however, Justice Democrats’ opposition is more organized while its mission is more muddled and its coffers depleted. Faced with a shortage of funds, the group laid off nine of its 20 staff members in mid-July, a move that took many prominent progressives by surprise.

The group started by two former 2016 staffers of Bernie Sanders' Presidential Campaign and two controversial leftists helped elected members to the House.

Justice Democrats is an American progressive political action committee and caucus founded on January 23, 2017, by two leaders of Bernie Sanders's 2016 presidential campaign, Saikat Chakrabarti and Zack Exley, as well as political commentators Kyle Kulinski and Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks. The organization formed as a result of the 2016 United States presidential election and aspires "to elect a new type of Democratic majority in Congress" that will "create a thriving economy and democracy that works for the people, not big money interests". The group advocates for campaign finance reform (reducing the role of money in politics) and endorses only candidates who pledge to refuse donations from corporate PACs and lobbyists.

The Justice Democrats cost the Democratic Party some crucial seats in several swing states. Their "hostile takeover" plan led to Mandela Barnes, Tim Ryan, Cheri Beasley and Val Demings losing.

Kulinski and Uygur are no longer part of the group and have become critics of it. Alexandra Rojas became the organization's executive director in May 2018.

During the 2018 elections, Justice Democrats ran 79 progressive candidates against Democrats, Republicans and Independents in local, state, and federal elections. The seven Justice Democrats candidates who won their electoral congressional races in 2018 were Raúl Grijalva, Pramila Jayapal, Ro Khanna, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib.

The group endorsed considerably fewer candidates in 2020 than in 2018, a move its communications director defended as a strategy to focus its resources on the most promising candidates. Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, and Marie Newman were elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2020.

In 2022 the group's success continued to decline. Greg Casar and Summer Lee were elected to the House, while Newman lost her reelection in the Democratic primary after facing an investigation by the House Ethics Committee