"Closing Strong" - My New Weekly Video Series On The 2024 Election With Tara McGowan and COURIER Newsroom

Two Hopium Events This Week - Let's Keep Working Hard Everybody!

Happy Sunday all. In the spirit of leaving it all out there on the playing field I’ve teamed up with my good friend Tara McGowan, Founder and Publisher of COURIER Newsroom, to launch a new weekly video series about the 2024 election. We are calling it “Closing Strong,” and our very first episode with Hopium favorite, Anderson Clayton, and Wired Magazine’s Makena Kelly, is here:

This new series will be in addition to all the traditional content available here at Hopium. Our goal each week in Closing Strong is to talk about the election through a traditional political lens but to also look hard at all the ways our politics is changing. I’m doing this series because when I talk to Tara, the leader of an innovative pro-democracy news organization targeting younger Americans, I always learn something about this new information terrain we all find ourselves in now. It is a core understanding here at Hopium that we need to keep experimenting with ways of “getting louder” and closing the loudness gap with the powerful right wing noise machine. It’s a central reason I took my work to Substack last year. I felt I could reach more people in new and compelling ways and “get louder.”

Tara has built COURIER with a similar intent, though its mission is to engage younger Americans in the ways young people engage with information and politics today. Closing Strong will not only discuss these changes that are happening in our politics - the rise of TikTok, influencers, new social first advertising strategies, content creators etc - but it is also being distributed on these new channels in ways that can reach younger people too. So while I am bringing Tara and new forward-leaning sensibilities and insights to the Hopium community, Tara is bringing our Hopium-infused political insights to the COURIER community and younger Americans. It’s an exciting and interesting new partnership and project. We all have so much to learn about how to bring our arguments and values to more people and by launching Closing Strong we will not just be talking about how to do this but actually doing it too.

I’ll be sharing our weekly episode here every week and on my YouTube channel but you can also find it through COURIER’s various outlets including their main site (sign up for their newsletter) and on their YouTube channel.

So check out our first episode, share it others and lets close strong, together.

New ABC News Poll Has Harris Up 6 Points, 52%-46% - Some new, encouraging data today. A new ABC News poll has the Vice President up 6 with likely voters:

The 538 Congressional Generic (are you voting Democratic for Republican for Congress) has shifted 3 pts towards the Democrats in the last 5 weeks:

With 9 days to go until the next debate, and 19 until early in person voting begins, Democrats are in a far better position than Republicans. National polling has shifted 6-7 points towards us, and the Vice President now leads in national polling by 3-4 points. The battleground state polling has been much better for us than them, and we are much closer to 270. Polling in the key Senate races continues to be very encouraging. We’ve opened up a meaningful lead in the Congressional Generic now. And most importantly, our financial and organizational advantage (the work you all do!) means we will be able to close the election out much more forcefully than Trump and the Republicans. For all these reasons I believe we are favored now and if keep working hard we can have the election we all want to have this fall.

Tom Bonier Joins The Hopium Community Wednesday Night at 7pm ET- My good friend and super smart data guy Tom Bonier will be joining us live this Wednesday night at 7pm. Tom will be discussing 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. 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 House 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. 19 days to go before early in voting begins everybody - time to get to work!

• Harris-Walz!!!!!! - $931,000 raised, $1m goal - Donate | Volunteer | Merch | The Harris-Walz YouTube Channel - Let’s get to $1m people!

• Winning The House - $965,000 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 - $428,000 raised, $500,000 goal - Donate | Volunteer | Learn More | Be sure to watch my interview with NC Dem Chair Anderson Clayton

• Arizona/Ruben Gallego - $341,000 raised, $400,000 goal - Donate | Volunteer | Learn More | Be sure to watch my interview with Ruben Gallego

• Nebraska/Blue Dot - $155,000 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 19 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!

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