2024 Is Not 2016 Or 2020, Today Is An Important Harris-Walz Filing Deadline, Tom Bonier Joins Us Wednesday
Friends, we have now raised $1m for the House candidates most likely to flip their red seats blue - amazing work everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Happy Saturday all. Needed a slow day today so my usual Saturday post will be coming tomorrow, Sunday. For today I send along a link to two events we have coming up this week, some things for you to chew on this weekend and our usual pitch for our Hopium-backed candidates and state parties. Note that today is the last day to give to Harris-Walz before their August filing period closes. So if you are thinking about making one more donation to them today would be a very good to do so.
And don’t forget - it’s 10 days until the next debate, and 20 until early in person voting begins!
Hopium Weekend Fare - For your listening and viewing pleasure this weekend:
Guided By Love Of Country - My new in-depth presentation on the 2024 Election
My new interview with Sue Altman, our great candidate in NJ-07
One polling note……you often hear commentators talk about Trump overperforming public polling in 2016 and 2020 which means we need to be up by 3-4-5 points or more in the polls to win. That may have been true in 2016 and 2020, but it is core to our understanding here that everything in American politics changed with Dobbs, it was a before and after moment, and that:
Republicans have underperforming public polls in races of all kinds all across the country since Dobbs. We’ve been overperforming public polls not them.
Trump underperformed - not overperformed - public polls in his primary elections, sometimes by a big number.
The fascists underperformed public polls in the recent European and French elections, and the right got blown out in the UK.
Every election is unique, not like any other. I think comparisons to 2016 and 2020 are unhelpful, for Trump 2024 is now an insurrectionist, a rapist, fraudster, traitor, felon, and the man who stripped the rights and freedoms away from the women of America. He is far more degraded, diminished and extreme. Just as I wrote in what became a very prescient 2021 essay, 3 Reasons Why 2022 Will Not Be 2010, I believe, deeply, that 2024 will not be 2020 or 2016. I think it is far more likely that Trump underperforms than overperforms public polling, and that we end up kicking his ass this November.
Tom Bonier Joins The Hopium Community Wednesday Night at 7pm - My good friend and super smart data guy Tom Bonier will be joining us live next Wednesday night at 7pm. Tom will be joining us to talk about two new tools his team at TargetSmart are releasing in the coming days - one that tracks changes in voter registration across the country and another, TargetEarly, which will track the early vote.
We are going to use this event to review the analytical process Tom and I used to get the 2022 election right, and apply that same approach to this election. Tom will be coming with fresh and encouraging voter reg data from across the country, and we will also be spending time discussing why Voting on Day 1 is so important, and why we should all be working to win this election in October and not on Election Day.
Register for our event here. It’s going to be a good one! For those who cannot make it live a recording will be shared here on Hopium.
Thursday, 730pm ET - Postcard and Phonebank for George Whitesides (CA-27) - So we are back at it Thursday for an evening of work for George Whitesides, our terrific candidate in CA-27. House candidate from New York, Josh Riley. You can register for our event here, and note when doing so you can now select which breakout room you want to join. We have trainings for both activities live each evening, and for those who are more experienced you can a select a breakout room without training and just get to work. Visit here to learn more about ordering postcards for these events. Each week we will be reaching our to core Democratic voters and encouraging them to Vote on Day 1 and letting them know when early in person and mail/drop box voting begins in their states.
Most weeks we will hear directly from the candidate at the beginning of our session, just a few minutes after 730pm, so plan on joining us on time each week. At the end of each session, after we’ve done our work, I will be providing a 10 minute overview of the current national political landscape. I will also be joining each breakout room and saying hello and thank you to everyone. So in addition to helping out on Thursdays you will be getting live political updates from the ground and from Washington, DC.
To prep for Thursday watch my interview with George. You can learn more about him, donate or volunteer too. If you want to make a single donation to all 11 of our courageous candidates working to flip the House this November you can do that here. I’m excited to announce that we have now raised more than $1 million for our candidates since we began this campaign to help take back the House a few months ago. Thank you all. Time and again when the Hopium community is called, you have answered, powerfully.
These Thursday night events have become really fun, a great way to hangout each week, and we get a lot of work done. Hope you will join us this week and take one more action to ensure Hakeem Jeffries is the one standing behind President Kamala Harris when she gives her first State of the Union Address next year.
Supporting Hopium-backed Candidates and State Parties, Working From Joy - In the spirit of not letting up, “doing something” as Michelle Obama said and leaving it all on the playing field as Gov Walz has encouraged, I again make my pitch for the candidates and state parties we’ve been working for this year. A week ago Saturday I offered an in-depth post on the strategy behind our candidate and state party endorsements, including our Presidential battleground “check” and “checkmate” strategy. 21 days to go before early in voting begins everybody - time to get to work!
Harris-Walz!!!!!! - $896,000 raised, $1m goal - Donate | Volunteer | Merch | The Harris-Walz YouTube Channel - Let’s get to $1m people!
Winning The House - $943,000 raised, $1m goal - Donate | Volunteer | Learn More. Watch our recent discussion with Leader Hakeem Jeffries. To go deeper catch one of our interviews with our great candidates - Janelle Bynum (OR-5), George Whitesides (CA-27), Kirsten Engel (AZ-06) Will Rollins (CA-41), Laura Gillen (NY-04), Rudy Salas (CA-22), Josh Riley (NY-19), Tony Vargas (NE-02), Adam Gray (CA-13) and Sue Altman (NJ-07).
North Carolina - $423,000 raised, $500,000 goal - Donate | Volunteer | Learn More | Be sure to watch my interview with NC Dem Chair Anderson Clayton
Arizona/Ruben Gallego - $337,000 raised, $400,000 goal - Donate | Volunteer | Learn More | Be sure to watch my interview with Ruben Gallego
Nebraska/Blue Dot - $153,000 raised, $175,000 goal- Donate | Volunteer | Learn More | Be sure to watch my interview with NE Dem Chair Jane Kleeb
Here are ways you can do even more:
Commit to Vote on Day 1 and get everyone you know to join you. Early voting begins in three states on September 20th - just 21 days away!
Watch my With Dems presentation on the greatness and goodness of the Democratic Party and this six minute video on the incredible stakes in this election.
Help grow the Hopium community. Use this link to encourage others sign others up. You can gift a subscription to a friend or student here and get group rates too. If you have changed credit cards or moved you can you update your payment information or check your renewal status follow these instructions from Substack. Let’s keep our community growing the Hopium flowing!
Proud to be in this fight with all of you. The election we all wanted is within our grasp now. Let’s keep working hard and win this thing, together - Simon
What are we all doing this Labor of Love for your country weekend? I'm running canvasses and hosting a voter registration at a local event. Gotta make sure NC crosses over to Blue from purple. Let's go!!
Simon, also worth noting that nearly all pollsters altered polling methods after 2020 to correct for the Trump over-performance in 2016 and 2020. The idea here was to capture the “hidden Trump voters” in the data and to reduce weighting for certain Dem constituencies.
There is a great article out there (sorry, not in position to link) in which Sienna, the NYT pollster, explains how it now (starting after 2020) includes data from folks who don’t complete the entire poll survey and how it now using different weighting in its polls. Apparently, Sienna discovered that the vast majority of incomplete surveys came from Trump voters who actually did vote and excluding the top-line responses from those incomplete surveys caused significant poll error. Same on Emerson. It revamped its polls significantly after 2020 and there is an article out there in which the head data person for Emerson explains such. These are just examples. Polling methods were altered across the board after 2020.
This ties into your comment about Dem over-performing in 2022 and forward. Good chance the polling outfits overcorrected, especially given the Dobbs effect.