1 Down, 3 More To Go! More Notes On What Happened, Contesting The Right's Info Superiority And What Comes Next

Thanks to everyone who has already given to Abigail Spanberger!

Good morning all. A reminder that Hopium is back to 5 days a week during this post-election, rest and recover, Holiday period. So my next post will be on Monday. I’ve left you plenty of stuff to chew on below if you need to check in over the weekend. In the coming weeks expect more What Happened, What Comes Next discussions, a Simon/Tom Bonier debrief, conversations with the leading candidates for DNC Chair and much, much more!

Now, let’s get to it on a cold and snowy Friday in DC:

Trump’s Outrageous 4 Is Now 3: Gaetz Goes Down, Growing Trouble for Hegseth and Gabbard - Still asking folks to call their Senators and Representative to let them know your dissatisfaction with Trump’s pick of Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and Robert Kennedy, and to inform them of your expectation that they will leave it all out there on the playing field to block these profoundly dangerous nominations. We should be demanding that our party leaders do everything they can to block them, and build a national campaign to encourage other Americans to join us. We may not win, but we can grow our networks and power, weaken the impulsive, idiotic Trump for these reckless choices, and make it clear that the ferocious opposition is going to stand and fight.

Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal yesterday was a big win for our efforts to block these terrible picks. Congratulations all! I am also very grateful to those of you who’ve self-reported that you have called your Senators and House Members, and to those who have contacted the White House asking President Biden to order the FBI to begin background checks into Trump’s nominees immediately.

The case against Pete Hegseth got far more serious yesterday, as a newly released police report sure suggests he raped a woman in a Monterey, CA hotel room. The rapist-in-chief’s efforts to normalize sexual assault while perhaps predictable remains shocking and unacceptable - and another reason we have to keep fighting.

There are also growing concerns from Republican Senators about Tulsi Gabbard, as we all hoped. From Punchbowl News, a DC-insider publication:

Former Hawaii Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence, is on record calling for the U.S. government to “drop all charges” against Edward Snowden, wanting to repeal key intelligence-gathering tools and sometimes embracing Russian talking points regarding the wars in Syria and Ukraine.

That’s even before examining Gabbard’s foreign policy views, which are far outside the mainstream of American political discourse — and even further away from the center of gravity in the Senate Republican Conference.

It’s presenting a unique challenge for Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee. That panel — which is responsible for processing Gabbard’s nomination — is stacked with hawks on both sides of the dais.

Trump’s choice of Gabbard is in keeping with his desire to completely overhaul the federal bureaucracy. But GOP senators are already indicating they’ll be interested in probing Gabbard’s controversial and often outright hostile posture toward the very intelligence apparatus she’d run if confirmed.

The Snowden praise is particularly troubling to lawmakers, the vast majority of whom believe the NSA leaker caused irreparable damage to U.S. national security. Snowden is now a Russian citizen.

This is news: Republican senators have privately discussed their interest in viewing Gabbard’s FBI file, according to three sources familiar with the conversations. This is done for each Cabinet nominee, but the implication is that the documents could reveal previously unknown information about Gabbard, including possible foreign contacts.

For now, Republicans are treating Gabbard like every other Cabinet nominee, starting off with enormous deference to Trump and what they see as his mandate to govern. That means refraining from public criticisms of Trump’s nominees.

Yet key senators are making clear that their deference may not last forever. Here’s Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), an Intelligence Committee member:

“I start out saying, OK, this is an individual the president wants on his team. But now let’s talk about information that maybe the president didn’t have, or information that comes up, and at that stage do we advise the president to look elsewhere or do we offer our consent?”

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), another Intelligence Committee member, said he has “no doubt that she’s a patriot,” but he wants to question Gabbard on her posture toward Russia. Interestingly, Cornyn gave a floor speech this week praising Trump’s national security nominees by name, but he didn’t mention Gabbard.

When asked about Gabbard’s FISA opposition, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who also sits on the Intelligence panel, called it “an essential tool” for national security but noted that “people’s views can change over the years as they learn more.”

Collins added that Gabbard is “a nominee that illustrates the importance of a full background check, a public hearing, and the constitutional role of the Senate.”

1 down, 3 more to go. We need to keep fighting everyone.

Update On The House and Senate - After a recount, the PA Senate race was called for Bob Casey’s opponent last night, giving the Republicans a 53 seat majority next year. The final margin in the race was 16,000 votes out of almost 7m votes cast. Yes, another reminder that our work in these races really does matter.

In the House Derek Tran grew his lead yesterday in CA-45, and Adam Gray has almost caught up in CA-13! Let’s keep working the ballot curing process folks. We have two more House seats to win!

Here’s where our 15 endorsed House candidates stand today:

• Flips (4) - Whitesides (CA-27), Gillen NY-4, Riley NY-19, Bynum OR-5

• Too Close To Call/Still Counting (2) - Gray CA-13, Tran CA-45

• Losses (9) - Shah AZ-01, Engel AZ-06, Salas CA-22, Rollins CA-41, Bohannan IA-1, Vargas NE-02, Jones NY-17, Altman NJ-07, Stelson PA-10

While the House officially went to the Rs last Wednesday, I remain very proud of the good we’ve done, together, this cycle. We made deeply strategic investments and got important wins in a tough year in AZ, NC, NE, WI and critical House races across the country. Of the 6 House seats Dems flipped this cycle, our community aggressively backed 5 of them - George Whitesides CA-27, Tom Suozzi NY-3, Laura Gillen NY-4, Josh Riley NY-19 and Janelle Bynum OR-5.

There are still ballot curing opportunities for Gray and Tran with Grassroots Democrats HQ. We need to keep working it people! Sign up to help keep curing ballots for both here.

What Happened, What Comes Next - Our approach here has been to go slow, listen and learn, and be full of more questions than answers. Here are some initial things I’ve put out:

• Notes on 2024 And What Comes Next (11/20/24) - In a new detailed post and comprehensive video released on Wednesday I offer my latest thinking about what happened in 2024 - the ugly and the encouraging.

• In this post and video I offer my heartfelt thanks to the members of this community who left it all out there on the playing field this cycle.

• I’ve written a series of related post-election posts on the need for us to get louder here, here, and here. Both the Trippi and the McGowan/Pfeiffer conversations below also speak to this urgent need, and exciting opportunity.

To help us learn from others throughout the family, I’ve launched a new What Happened, What Comes Next discussion series. Here are the first four of those talks, along with 2 relevant segments from my fall Closing Strong series with Tara McGowan and COURIER Newsroom:

• Rep. Abigail Spanberger - On Winning The Virginia Governors Race in 2025. Learn more | Volunteer | Donate

• Anderson Clayton - On Our Impressive Downballot Wins in North Carolina

• John Della Volpe - On Trump’s Gains With Young People

• Joe Trippi - On The Power Of Networks And The Need To Build Our Own

From Closing Strong:

• On The Need For Pro-Democracy Media - With Tara McGowan and Dan Pfeiffer.

• Beyond MAGA Creators - Russia’s Influence On The Republican Party Runs Deep With Stewart Stevens and Jiore Craig.

I’ve also set up a thread for paid subscribers to offer their thoughts on what this wonderful and plucky community should do next. I’m grateful for the many comments we’ve received so far. Weigh in if you can in the coming days.

Going On Offense And Getting Louder, Much Louder - Finally, on this Friday before Thanksgiving, I return to something I wrote about in the immediate aftermath of the election. While a loss like 2024 came for many small reasons, there were a couple of big ones. To me the failure of Future Forward, our SuperPAC, to define and disqualify Trump, the ugliest, most criminal, and most extreme candidate for President ever early, in the spring/summer/fall, was the biggest mistake of all.

Look at this data from a new post-election poll from Navigator Research. Trump had better favs/unfavs with the “swing” voters who determined in the election at the end. How in the world was that possible given all that Trump had done, proposed, is? It’s a sign of the failure of our campaigns, and the success of theirs.

Here’s what I wrote the Thursday after the election:

…… Been doing a lot of thinking about my 2022 Two Elections take that postulated there were two elections in 2022 - a bluer one inside the battleground, a redder one outside. The reason the battlegrounds were bluer in 2022 the theory goes was due to our financial and organizational advantage (all of you) that allowed us to control the information environment and push our on the ground performance to the upper end of what was possible. However, where we did not have those campaigns, and the right maintained information superiority, we fell behind. This trend was most acute in large Dem states like CA and NY, where we saw a huge Dem drop-off in performance.

We are seeing some of that same dynamic this time. While the nation moved about six points to the right from 2020 it moved less in the battlegrounds where we deployed our big campaigns and where the Dem Senate did too. But this year we once again saw drop-off in big Dem states where we did not have competitive campaigns. To me all this means two things:

• We may have to start running noisy, spectacle filled campaigns in every state every election cycle or expect drop-off, underperformance

• We have to build a far better permanent center-left based media ecosystem to compete with what the right has built. As powerful as the right’s propaganda effort has been, it got more powerful with the addition of Twitter this year and the rightward movement of some legacy media. It will become powerful still when Trump is back in the White House. There is great urgency to this work.

We have a loudness problem on our side that simply must be addressed strategically across the entire party in every state and across the country. Our muscular campaigns allow us to close the info and loudness gap with the right every two years. And while our rigorous targeting allows us to concentrate our firepower and be competitive, we have to do more to be competitive and win the national conversation every day, something all of our hyper-targeting of media markets and narrow persuadable groups doesn’t do for us. We have to be speaking every day to all parts of our coalition, and not just a handful of swing voters and their concerns in a few battleground states. For if we don’t do this, our campaigns will end up always playing defense in a right-constructed frame, that, among other things, discourages us from talking about all the good we do as a party - for right-adjacent groups never believe any of that. All they know is the bad - high inflation, trans, the border, crime - and thus the campaign and data ecosystem tells us not to even try to challenge it. It’s too baked in. Over time this means we never get to make the case for us which is one reason why no one knows all the good Biden-Harris had done. For right-adjacent swing voters don’t believe it, and thus even though our economy today is arguably stronger than it has been in 60 years, we spent the general election talking about the harms of inflation rather than our success in getting to the other side of it and orchestrating a soft landing.

Look at this data from last week’s Economist/YouGov tracking poll. The US has had more jobs created under Biden than any four year period in US history. Only 19% of independent voters think jobs are increasing right now, and a whopping 80% say there is no job growth or jobs are decreasing (34%). So the way our campaign data ecosystem works is that a candidate would be told not to talk about the growing economy for our target voters don’t believe it. Even though it is true, and no one will know it is true unless we tell them.

………..

My point here is that at the core of our go-forward strategy has to be an understanding that we must challenge and contest the right-infused national discourse far more aggressively - change people’s understandings, go on offense, create greater 24/7/365 capacity, not hold ads until late but go up early - or our campaigns will always be living inside a right-constructed narrative structure which elevates them and denigrates us. We have enough money to do it. If we don’t we should not expect to win.

Here is how the Cook Report summarized why we did so well in the battleground Senate races:

Democrats’ early money advantage and ability to define their opponents helped them win four Senate seats in Trump-won states.

We need to be loud and proud as I say here, loud and proud. Not timid, micro-targeted and late for then we are letting the other side dictate the terms of the debate - and that’s how they win even with the ugliest candidate for President in our all our history.

Keep working hard all. Proud to be in this fight with all of you - Simon