Founded by Judd Legum in 2005, the site's reports were regularly discussed by mainstream news outlets and peer-reviewed academic journals.

[2][5] In its early years, ThinkProgress included a daily newsletter that contained a recap and analysis of major political news and the blog Wonk Room, which was published until 2011.

The site was then divided into sections covering climate, economy, health, justice, LGBT, world, culture, sports, politics and features.

[2] Shakir, who led the 2020 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, now heads (together with Pitney) More Perfect Union, a labor-focused news outlet that he describes as "ThinkProgress for a digital age.

[16][17] In 2017, Michael Goldfarb, founder of the conservative newspaper The Washington Free Beacon and its parent company, the Center for American Freedom, said he modeled them on ThinkProgress and CAP.

[24] The same year, Blow excerpted ThinkProgress research on the effectiveness of drug screening of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families recipients in an analysis of the political rhetoric of poverty.

[9] In 2011 a report in The Guardian by Ewen MacAskill, Julian Borger, Jon Boone and Nicholas Watt on U.S. policy toward Afghanistan excerpted a ThinkProgress interview with Senator Barney Frank.

[27] Similarly, a 2012 Washington Post article cited ThinkProgress research showing that Crossroads GPS failed to register as a nonprofit organization in Virginia.

[29] In 2017 Fareed Zakaria, in a Post opinion piece, cited a ThinkProgress compilation of policies that candidate Trump pledged to implement on his first day as President.

[2][32] In 2017 ThinkProgress published the disciplinary records of the New York City police officer who put Eric Garner in a fatal choke hold.

"[46] Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times said that the article "provided no evidence that the money generated overseas had been used in United States campaigns.

"[47] In 2015, Glenn Greenwald wrote in The Intercept that CAP officials pressured ThinkProgress staff into placating the Israeli government and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in their Middle East reporting, while noting that CAP had cited strategic interests for its stance: "The clear and overwhelming record of the literally hundreds of articles and policy papers from the Center for American Progress and ThinkProgress demonstrates our longstanding support both for Israel and the two-state solution to the Middle East peace process as being in the moral and national security interests of the United States.