Almost Three Months In, Some Sunday Notes On Where We Are And The Path Forward

Let's send lots of love to Governor Josh Shapiro and his family today......

Happy Sunday all. On the weekends I try to disengage from the day to day a bit, take a step back, and reflect both on where we are and where we need to go. As we discuss here in the age of Trump it’s easy to fall into “chasing the new,” as part of his strategy is to “flood the zone” everyday to keep us pre-occupied with new, shiny things that make it harder to keep stay focused on the things that really matter. It’s why “responding” or “countering” Trump is by design almost impossible. We must every day put the new into its proper place and maintain our gritty focus on what’s important. Like a ship in a stormy sea we must have a place where we are going, a course to follow, and work with everything we have to not get blown off that course. In political parlance that means we need a strategy, a clear idea of where we are now and where we want to go, together, regardless of the noise, the incoming, the daily purposeful madness that works incessantly to blow us off course and make us lost at sea. Having clear and sturdy strategies has never been more important than in these first terrible first 100 days of Trump.

So my weekends are my time to assess where we are, revise my strategy for all of us here at Hopium and set a new course for the week ahead while staying true to the big strategic goal not of countering Trump, but defeating him.

In that vein here are some things I am kicking around today……

We begin this new week in that same place we’ve been of late, a place of both growing promise and extraordinary peril:

• We are stronger and he is weaker

• There is great urgency to our work as Trump continues to break things that will be very hard if not impossible to repair

Next, in yesterday’s post I go over a few things very central to my thinking now - the decline in Trump’s standing with the public is extraordinary, and meaningful; Dems need to use the big econ conversation to re-establish us as the party of prosperity, opportunity and better lives for the American people; the fight to roll back the tariffs is central now to everything we do for it allows us to go offense on the economy, his madness/recklessness/incompetence, and his unprecedented, traitorous abandonment of the Constitutional order. The tariff debate will allow us to open that Second Front I’ve been talking about for weeks now, and begin expanding our arguments to allow us now to become the party of both opportunity and the party of patriotism, love of country and true American greatness. Opening up that Second Front will make us and our movement stronger, more powerful. With his failures and declining standing with the public we have the opportunity now to go on offense and seize control of the national debate in a way that was hard to imagine a few weeks ago.

In yesterday’s post I also link to recent interviews with folks on the front lines who can help you go deeper on many of the most important issues in front of us now. Included in those discussions are new, timely interviews with Virginia Senator Tim Kaine, North Carolina Justice Allison Riggs and Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes.

Finally, as we take a step back today and assess our changing landscape, I’m sharing a series of things I’ve written over the past few months about things our movement needs to be doing now. I share so we can re-acquaint ourselves with some of this thinking and bring it into our own conversations as we all work to develop not just a response to Trump (temporal, reactive, ephemeral) but an effective strategy (offensive, muscular, sturdy) to defeat him. Responding allows your opponent to dictate the terms of the debate. Strategy is what allows us to do so.

Here we go…..

From Proud Of All Of You (11/6/24) - On The Failure To Disqualify Trump And The Need For The Generational Wheel To Turn In the Democratic Party -

While I am going to go slow, listen, and take my time I do have a few initial thoughts this morning about where we are now and where we are going, together……

Over the past few years we, our country, our leaders, Merrick Garland, the Harris SuperPAC and many, many others failed to adequately indict Trump and explain what an unprecedented threat he was. A sexual predator, fraudster, traitor and 34 times felon was just elected President. The relentless normalization of his extremism, madness and ugliness, the legacy media’s complicit in reporting on the race not the stakes, was a collective failure of enormous consequence.

Related to point one, I still think many on our side and in the establishment simply do not understand the nature of the conflict America finds itself in today. Trump and his global allies are playing a different game than we are used to. They have invented a whole new deeply illiberal game with all sorts of new pieces and rules. We have been slow, dangerously and recklessly, slow in recognizing how the rules of the game have changed.

It’s why whatever happens next, it is time for the Democratic Party’s generational wheel to turn and for new leaders who are not steeped in and hobbled by old ways to take the helm. We are facing a new battlefield, and more contemporary strategies, tactics, alliances and leaders are required in this next stage of the fight. Now is a time for re-invention, re-imagination, and risk-taking. We need to build a new politics for the American center-left, a more modern one, one more suited to the opportunities and challenges in front of us, a more “networked” one as my friend Joe Trippi would say.

From Fighting Hard, Fighting Smart (2/6/25) - On The Need For Leaders Schumer and Jeffries and The DNC To Build A New Political and Comms Superstructure To Lead The Fight Against Trump -

Last night I also reviewed my recommendation that Leaders Schumer and Jeffries should assign senior staff to work with the DNC, DSCC, DCCC and other party committees to come up with a new comms and political structure to ensure that we become the effective and ferocious opposition necessary to preserve our democracy now.

The Leaders have a powerful new team ready to go to work with and for them:

• millions of donors/volunteers/info warriors

• growing pro-democracy media ecosystem

• hundreds of capable and battle tested grassroots groups

• traditional allied groups, and the national party infrastructure

• tens of thousands of elected Democrats at all levels of government across the country

The Leaders should now empower staff to work with the new and hungry team at the DNC to imagine, design and build a new kind of political/comms super-structure integrating all of those who want and can help to respond to the needs of this extraordinary moment. We will not win with what what we have. We can and must build something new, more modern, more muscular, more effective.

From Raising Our Game, Building The Next Thing, Going 24/7/365 (1/9/25) - 7 Key Takeways From The 2024 Election -

1 - It Was A Very Close Election, and We Had Important Wins - Trump won by 1.5 points and fail to reach 50%. 115,000 votes changing in MI, PA, WI and Harris wins. We picked up a seat in the House and were less than 4,000 votes from making Hakeem Jeffries Speaker. We had important downballot wins in AZ, NC, MI, NV, PA, WI. While we have work to do this was a narrow win not a landslide, and our road back is not insurmountable. I go deeper into all this here.

2 - Finding More Voters, Forging A New Majority - The dramatic gains Trump made with Latinos and young people (particularly young men) unraveled the coalition that had gotten us 51% of the vote on average over the last four Presidential elections. We will need to imagine and build a new majority coalition now and need a concerted party wide effort to make gains with voters of all kinds - working class, rural, Latinos, young men, etc.

As part of this strategy we need to make partisan voter registration a core responsibility of the Democratic Party at all levels once again and not leave this important work to outside, non-partisan groups.

3 - Getting On The Right Side Of Opportunity/Winning The Big Economic Argument - As I wrote the other day, we need a deep and long conversation about how we can win the big economic argument with MAGA in the coming years. Three consecutive Dem Presidents have left the country far better than we found it. Three consecutive GOP Presidents have been economic and societal wrecking balls. We should not be losing the economic argument to these guys, or losing ground with working class voters given our economic track record. There needs to be urgency about finding a better path here, and it is very possible that Trump’s dangerous economic plans - tariffs, mass deportation, huge tax cuts for wealthy Americans, spending cuts for everyone else - will give us a big opportunity to make our case very soon (sure looks that way!!!).

It is time now for Democrats to move beyond our flaccid and failed “prices are too high” narrative and 1) reconnect our economic arguments to opportunity and prosperity for all 2) tear into his reckless and dangerous economic agenda that is already raising prices, threatening our prosperity and betraying the central promises Trump made to working people in his campaign.

4 - Getting Louder/Building A 24/7/365 Politics - This is a familiar topic for Hopium readers, but there is real urgency here too. For background see my post-election posts on the need for us to get louder here, here, here, here and most recently this one on our need to get far smarter in how we strategically contest the right’s information superiority in our campaigns themselves. I am going to be talking a lot about the need to see the millions of people supporting our campaigns as “partners in the fight, not donors to the cause” and help unlock not just the financial or volunteer potential of our family but also its capacity to become information warriors and ferocious, effective amplifiers.

As I wrote just after the Election getting louder is a central way we address the dangerous drop off in Democratic voters we’ve seen outside the battleground states in both the 2022 and 2024 elections, something Mike Podhorzer discussed in his recently published analysis.

Finally, while we must build out a new pro-democracy media ecosystem, our electeds and Democratic Parties must have urgency, much greater urgency, about raising their comms game, getting louder and contesting the right’s information superiority 24/7/365. House and Senate Dems no longer have the White House or the Presidential campaign to carry the daily load, and are going to have to assume far greater responsibility for mobilizing the current capacities in our family, including the tens of thousands of elected Dems across the US, to aggressive contest MAGA, everyday.

An example of how we have to be thinking now - Senate Dems should have launched a national effort with all allied groups to defeat Trump’s most unacceptable nominees - Gabbard, Hegseth, Kennedy, Patel. Thinking this can get done “in the hearings” is old think, dangerous old think. They operate 24/7/365 movement wide and so must we. Millions of people and hundreds of groups are ready to go to work to challenge Trump 2.0. We need to put them to work (note, tragically, this did not happen).

5 - Develop And Advance A New Agenda Of Renewal and Reform - In a recent post I discussed the need for Democrats to develop a broad agenda for renewal and reform, a topic we’ve been discussing here for many months and one central to my February, 2024 New Republic essay, Biden Must Reinvent What A Presidential Campaign Is. In this period of opposition we must not only oppose, but must also propose. Far too many voters see Washington as broken and corrupt. We have must have an agenda to speak to them, and use it to highlight the unprecedented illiberalism and corruption of MAGA (as above).

6 - While Focusing On Kitchen Table Issues, We Cannot Leave Behind The Harris-Walz Campaign’s Powerful Embrace of Freedom and Patriotism - We can both be focused on improving the lives of everyday Americans and lean hard into the powerful love of country themes the Vice President advanced during her campaign. This is particularly true in the fights for our personal freedoms and rights of all kinds including reproductive freedom.

For example - Democratic leaders at all levels should be condemning loudly what NC Republicans are doing right now to overturn an election and disqualify the votes of the good people of the Tar Heel State.

7 - We Need To Talk About All These Corrosive Emails Telling Dems We Are Losing, Not Winning And Whether They Contributed To The Troubling Demobilization We Saw in 2024. Again, Democrats across the country need to be treated as “partners in the fight and not donors to the cause.” When folks ask why are Democratic voters and activists perpetually worried and anxious, it’s because the Party and our campaigns are doing everything they can to scare the crap out of everyone and tell them everything is terrible. We have to find a better way.

Let’s end our Sunday reflections with Jefferson’s brilliant “barbarous ancestors” passage as team Trump works furiously to put that pre-Revolutionary coat of monarchy, oligarchy, bigotry and ignorance back on the modern and free people of America:

Get some rest today, kick all this around and let’s hit the ground running tomorrow - Simon