Morning all. Before we begin a few reminders - Donald Trump has the worst polling of any President in his first 100 days ever. He is in negative territory on almost every issue, including immigration (meaning he has no easy road back). Trump allies just lost big leads and got beat in Australia and Canada. The economy is slowing, prices are rising, his “big, beautiful bill” is struggling, he keeps losing in court again and again and again, his public performances in recent days have been alarming, and the circle of defiance is growing and becoming more ambitious.
In a major blow to Trump yesterday the GOP’s #1 Senate recruit, Georgia Governor Kemp, announced he would not challenge Senator Ossoff next year.
Friends, while he continues to break things that will be very hard to repair, he is also much weaker today. It’s why we have to keep working as hard as we can to further degrade him and loosen his rancid grip on our politics.
Federal Judge Sides With Allison Riggs In North Carolina - From The AP:
Disputed ballots in the still unresolved 2024 race for a North Carolina Supreme Court seat must remain in the final count, a federal judge ruled late Monday, a decision that if upheld would result in an electoral victory for Democratic incumbent Allison Riggs.
U.S. District Judge Richard Myers agreed with Riggs and others who argued it would be a violation of the U.S. Constitution to carry out recent decisions by state appeals courts that directed the removal of potentially thousands of voter ballots they deemed ineligible. Myers wrote that votes couldn’t be removed six months after Election Day without damaging due process or equal protection rights of the affected residents.
Myers also ordered the State Board of Elections to certify results that after two recounts showed Riggs the winner — by just 734 votes — over Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin. But the judge delayed his order for seven days in case Griffin wants to appeal the ruling to the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
In my interview with Allison Riggs a few weeks ago she did express confidence - justified for now - that she would prevail once the case moved to Federal court. We will now see if Griffin appeals to the 4th Circuit this week. This was an important win in what has been a very ugly attempt by the Rs to steal a North Carolina Supreme Court. Thanks to all of you who have donated to the NC Dem Party to help them cover the costs of this ongoing litigation and get the Party ready for a big election cycle. We’ve raised almost $50,000 for this effort in the last few months and I spoke to NC Dem Chair Anderson Clayton last night and she expressed her gratitude of us once again being there for her and the good people of North Carolina. Let’s savor this win today all - it is a good one!
New Pod On The Youth Vote - Yesterday I sat down with fellow Substacker Rachel Janfaza to talk about what happened with young people in the 2024 election and what Dems need to do now to improve our standing and get back to our traditional levels of support. A recording and a transcript of our Live talk is above. Rachel’s Substack is called The Up And Up and she is a Gen Z focused researcher and consultant, and a Gen Zer herself.
It was a great discussion and I hope you get a chance to watch in the coming days. My bottom line - 1) when you don’t listen to and engage parts of your coalition they can wander 2) younger Gen Z, particularly young men, have wandered from us, and many were never there in the first place 3) Trump’s significant decline with young people in recent polling gives Dems a chance to both win folks back and turn Trumpy youth to us 4) If we want to succeed we will need to put young people at the center of everything we do, understanding that given how our coalition is currently structured we cannot win without a strong youth performance every two years.
In our talk we reference my New Republic essay calling on Biden campaign to build a youth campaign within the campaign; my 7 big takeaways memo which talks about getting on the right side of opportunity, the necessity of us developing a big reform agenda and returning to partisan voter registration, particularly with young people; this CIRCLE analysis of the 2024 youth vote; and I also send along the latest Harvard IOP poll of 18-29 year olds.
Here’s is last week’s Economist/YouGov Trump job approval data. He is 32%-53% with 18-29 year olds. In his first week in office it was 48%-43%. He has lost 26 pts with young people over these terrible first 100 days.
G. Elliott Morris has a related analysis from this same Economist/YouGov data today which shows Trump’s biggest declines from coming from “disengaged” voters:
This gets to something Rachel and I discuss in our talk - that the youth and Hispanic voters - low political info, deeply impacted by COVID, big consumers of social media - who broke to Trump have significantly soured on him. Morris writes:
In the 2024 election, Donald Trump gained a surprising edge from an unlikely group: Americans who typically don’t vote. According to a New York Times analysis, these low-turnout voters backed Trump by a double-digit margin, flipping the script from prior years when non-voters leaned Democratic. This wasn’t just a quirk of the horse-race polls; Campaign operatives, analysts, and post-election surveys all pointed to the same conclusion: The less you followed politics, the more likely you were to vote for Trump.
But now that he's president again, something’s shifted.
New polling shows that the very voters who powered Trump’s return to office are now abandoning him. And if that trend holds, it could upend assumptions about how much campaign messaging and elite discourse really matter. Because it turns out the people who don’t read the Times, don’t watch the Sunday shows, and don’t care about the policy details... still care when the economy sours and their lives get harder.
This is the story of the disengaged voter: why they showed up for Trump, why they’re turning on him now, and what that tells us about political accountability in the era of the “engagement gap.”
A lot of interesting stuff in here to chew on but the bottom line is that Democrats have a new opportunity to reach voters critical to our future success and we need to seize it.
I Am Going Live at 215pm ET Today With Rob Shapiro - Rob returns to the Hopium community to discuss his new Washington Monthly essay, Trump’s Perfect Storm That Could Sink The American Economy. I referenced Rob’s new essay in yesterday’s post on the budget-busting reconciliation bill, and it will be a good primer for anyone wanting to go deeper on how Trump’s policies are endangering our economy and forcing Americans to pay more and get less. You can join at 215pm ET by clicking on this link, heading to the Hopium Events page or following the instructions on our Housekeeping page. If you can’t make it live I will be sending out our talk via email later this afternoon.
Dems Make Trump’s Crypto Corruption A Big Focus Today - From a must read story in the NYT today (gift link), Trump Crypto Deals Provoke Senate Backlash And Calls For Investigation:
Senate Democrats are demanding changes to cryptocurrency legislation pending in Congress, responding partly to growing evidence that the Trump family is using its connections and President Trump’s power to profit from crypto trading.
The pushback intensified late last week after a closed-door meeting among Senate Democrats in which Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic leader, told colleagues they should not commit to voting for the so-called GENIUS Act, a bill backed by the crypto industry.
For months, the bill had appeared to be gliding toward passage, with support from both parties, and it was scheduled for a procedural vote this week. But in the meeting, Senate Democrats expressed concern that the legislation would directly benefit the Trump family’s crypto business, citing reporting by The New York Times.
Among the concerns the senators raised, according to lawmakers, is that the Trump-affiliated crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, recently secured a deal to take $2 billion in deposits from an Emirati venture fund backed by the government of Abu Dhabi, as The Times reported last week.
“It’s a selling of influence, a conflict of interest, just a massive form of corruption we haven’t witnessed,” Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, said in an interview, echoing comments he said he made at the meeting. “And it needs to be ended.”
And…
Representative Sam Liccardo, Democrat of California, who supports stablecoin legislation, said the recent moves by the Trump family have frustrated crypto executives who have been pushing Congress to finalize the bill.
“I’ve increasingly been hearing concern in Silicon Valley from crypto industry leaders — deep discomfort with how Trump has wrapped this industry into a kleptocratic scheme managed by his sons,” Mr. Liccardo said.
Even some Senate Republicans and longtime crypto advocates have expressed concerns about the efforts by Mr. Trump and his family to profit from crypto. “This is my president that we’re talking about, but I am willing to say that this gives me pause,” Senator Cynthia Lummis, Republican of Wyoming, told NBC News last week.
This new Dem focus on exposing Trump’s unprecedented corruption is moving Washington one step closer from talking about his “not following the law,” “losing cases in Court,” “his lawlessness” and this beauty from the NYT today “For Trump, the Constitution Is a Hindrance as He Pushes for Deportations” to talking far more directly about the many, many crimes he has committed and continues to commit every day.
In that spirit, let’s delight that a newly declassified memo from the Intelligence Community contradicts the main rationale for Trump’s clearly illegal and unconstitutional rendition of legal residents to his Salvadoran Gulag:
A newly declassified memo released on Monday confirms that U.S. intelligence agencies rejected a key claim President Trump put forth to justify invoking a wartime statute to summarily deport Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador.
The memo, dovetailing with intelligence findings first reported by The New York Times in March, states that spy agencies do not believe that the administration of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, controls a criminal gang, Tren de Aragua. That determination contradicts what Mr. Trump asserted when he invoked the deportation law, the Alien Enemies Act.
“While Venezuela’s permissive environment enables TDA to operate, the Maduro regime probably does not have a policy of cooperating with TDA and is not directing TDA movement to and operations in the United States,” the memo said.
The memo’s release further undercuts the Trump administration’s rationale for using the Alien Enemies Act and calls into question its forceful criticism of the ensuing coverage. After The Times published its article, the Justice Department opened a criminal investigation and portrayed the reporting as misleading and harmful. The administration doubled down a month later after similar coverage in The Washington Post, citing the disclosures in both articles as a reason to relax limits on leak investigations.
I still believe Democrats should be sending criminal referrals to the DOJ to document the Trumpian crime wave of the past few months. Crimes are being committed, daily, and we need to say so.
Now, let’s get to work…..
I am in the process of refashioning our recommended actions and campaigns, but leave you with this sketch of where we are headed:
We link his terrible tariffs with his even more terrible reconciliation bill, and work to undermine both of them, together.
We keep fighting to get Dems to more aggressively open up that Second Front, pen a Letter to America, introduce and debate state and local “articles of condemnation” and commit to owning July 4th this year. We have to firmly cement our identity as patriots and theirs as betrayers.
We develop and lean in hard to a big comprehensive argument against their multi-pronged and barbaric assault on our health, our public health system, science, research and academic freedom. I am calling this our Third Front.
And strongly recommended these two campaigns to support today:
1 - Help Abigail Spanberger Win Virginia - Virginia will be one of the big battlegrounds of the November, 2025 elections and we have a great candidate for Governor, Abigail Spanberger. Watch my interview with Abigail, donate, volunteer, and learn more here. Given how many federal employees live in Virginia, this race is also now on the front linesof the Trump/Musk assault on the federal government.
We’ve raised more than $89,000 so far towards our June 30th goal of $250,000 - thank you all. Let’s keep working it for Abigail!
2 - Support The Hopium House 7 - We’ve begun our work to help flip the House next year by supporting and shoring up the 7 newly-elected battleground House Dems we helped elect last year. Catch our interviews with Reps Derek Tran, Janelle Bynum and Tom Suozzi and give to all 7 through a single donation on our new ActBlue page. Learn more about this important effort here.
We’ve already raised over $70,000 towards our $200,000 June 30th goal - thank you all!
Keep working hard all. Proud to be in this fight with all of you - Simon
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