Dr. Jill Biden On The Choice, Biden's Strength With Likely Voters Matters, Dems Need A Big Reform & Renewal Agenda

Hopium Paid Subscribers Gather Next Week/Early Voting Begins on Sept 20th!

Happy Thursday all. It’s a beautiful morning here in DC, and I have a few things for you today:

My Segment on MSNBC Last Night - I joined Katie Phang last night who was subbing for Lawrence O’Donnell on MSNBC’s The Last Word. It was an important discussion about the state of the 2024 election. Hope you will watch.

Two points to emphasize. The First Lady’s message here about the choice in front of us is simple, clear, vital: “My husband is calm, steady, and strong, has character, integrity. Or we have the other choice…..chaotic.” Strong, successful, integrity vs chaos, extremism, ugliness. It’s a powerful emerging frame for the 2024 election.

Second, our segment talks about Nate Cohn’s Friday analysis about recent polling showing Biden doing better with the voters who are most likely to vote in 2024, and Trump doing a bit better with an expanded electorate which includes voters who are unlikely to vote (usually about 80% of registered voters vote). Ron Brownstein has a very good dive on this dynamic in a new CNN piece too.

As I say in the clip, and this has been core to my 2024 analysis (and here too) for many months now, I think what is most likely to happen is that of these “disinterested voters” who decide to become voters they will go through the same process of having to consider “the choice” in front of them as more interested voters. They will see Biden good, pragmatic, successful and Trump ugly, extreme, dangerous. Our muscular campaigns, fueled by your financial support and volunteering, will have the resources to define this choice for these newly checked in voters in the seven states, as we’ve been doing in election after election since Dobbs. What is likely - not guaranteed - is that many of them will become Biden supporters and help us win.

Remember that in 2022 Republicans won the national popular vote by 3 points, but in the battlegrounds, driven by our strong campaigns, we dramatically outperformed expectations in many of the same states we have to win this November. When we went to work and the electorate became informed, we won. Fear and opposition to MAGA has been the driving force of every election since 2018 is almost certainly will be again this year.

Here’s a passage from the Brownstein analysis:

Merged results from the three most recent national NBC polls, conducted by a bipartisan team of prominent Democratic and Republican pollsters, for instance, found that Biden leads Trump by 4 percentage points among people who voted in both 2020 and 2022. But among those who voted in 2020 but not 2022, Trump led Biden by 12 percentage points. Trump’s lead swelled to 20 percentage points among those who did not vote in either 2020 or 2022. Fully 65% of those who did not vote in either of the past two elections said they disapproved of Biden’s performance in office.

Combined results from recent national New York Times/Siena College polls likewise have found Biden narrowly leading among potential 2024 voters who turned out in 2020 while trailing Trump by double digits among those who did not vote in their previous contest.

Hopkins has conducted perhaps the most ambitious attempt to quantify the divergence between Americans with and without a history of voting. Earlier this year, he and a colleague worked with NORC at the University of Chicago to survey over 2,400 adults about their preferences in the 2024 race. The poll only surveyed people who were old enough to vote in each of the past three elections — the midterms of 2018 and 2022 and the 2020 presidential race.

The results were striking. Among adults who had voted in each of the past three federal elections, Biden led Trump by 11 points, and Biden eked out a narrow advantage among voters who participated in two of the past three races. But, the poll found, Trump led Biden by 12 percentage points among those who voted in just one of the past three elections and by a crushing margin of 18 percentage points among those who came out for none of them.

Imagine, if you are Trump right now, to be counting on holding to young men of color who are not yet checked in when they learn that he is the most virulent racist and xenophobe in modern American history? How does MAGA survive messages like this one from Sunny Hostin on The View?

“Trump is a racist running on racism”

MAGA has not been able to survive messages like this in 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2023, and the 2024 version of MAGA is far uglier, far more extreme and dangerous than any of these earlier iterations of MAGA. Yes, we have work to do, and are not where we want to be right now, but our path to victory is clearer and more plausible than Trump turning out and holding onto younger men of color who have little history of voting.

Here’s how Nate Cohn describes MAGA’s challenge:

Trump’s dependence on these voters could make the race more volatile soon. As voters tune in over the next six months, there’s a chance that disengaged but traditionally Democratic voters could revert to their usual partisan leanings. Alternately, they might stay home, which could also help Biden.

As I say in the clip, and this cannot be said enough, being the candidate ahead with those who have regularly voted in recent general and mid-term elections is a far stronger place to be than where Trump is today. That many in the commentariat allowed themselves to be talked into a place where all our victories with actual voters these past few years didn’t matter much is starting to look like another “red wave” level analytic miss. For what we may be seeing now is that Biden’s strength and leads with the more highly informed and higher propensity voters - which has been characterized by many as a problem - is strength and leads among what will almost be the actual electorate itself this November. And that means we are more far likely to win than Trump.

A Great Cover From The Economist - Check this out. It’s true of course.

Democrats Need A Big Reform and Renewal Agenda - In my recent essay in the New Republic, I wrote about the need for Democrats to develop and campaign on a clear agenda to strengthen our democracy and tackle the corruption and rot (Thomas, Alito) that has overtaken our Capital:

If the primary job of the first term was about successfully getting America to the other side of Covid, the second term should be about mobilizing unprecedented resources around tackling the next two existential challenges of our time–countering climate change and accelerating the energy transition from fossil fuels, and ensuring that freedom and democracy prevail here in the United States and everywhere.

The president should talk directly and forcefully to the American people about the existential nature of these dual challenges, particularly the rise of what is perhaps the most serious threat we’ve ever seen to the American-led, rules-based order; and he should prepare Americans for what could be years or even decades of hot and cold conflict with authoritarians at home and abroad. The president began that process this year with his compelling speech near Valley Forge in early January.

As part that mobilization, we will need to keep our economy strong and prosperous, persistently proving that democratic capitalism remains the best system for human advancement; develop a long overdue national strategy to restore integrity to our daily discourse, making it far harder for authoritarian forces to manipulate and control speech in open societies; build greater governmentwide institutional capacity to advance pro-democracy initiatives here and across the world; and be direct in asking the American people, as President Kennedy once did, to become active partners in ensuring we prevail in these deeply consequential struggles in the coming decades….

…..The president should commit to making progress in at least two other areas during his second term—cleaning up a city and a democracy that have been weakened by corruption and illiberalism of all kinds, and raising American life expectancy so it is again at the level of peer nations’.

I think Joe Biden should promise to clean up the city he has so long been a part of. Among the things we can tackle are the influence of foreign money, the need to raise ethical standards at the Supreme Court, eliminating the debt ceiling and the ability to shut down the government, and the wild abuse of Senate holds on nominations. Perhaps Biden could set up a commission to make broader recommendations on how to modernize and reform a city desperately in need of it.

Such an agenda is not just needed and necessary, but we know from polling that tackling “political corruption” is a high priority for two of our most important target groups - independents and young people. If President Biden were to lead the charge it would be a way of taking his many years here - experience, wisdom, understanding of how DC works - and turning the issue of his age into a powerful weapon against the Republicans.

Upcoming Events - Look forward to seeing folks at these upcoming events, and if you want to join our paid subscriber events and aren’t yet a paid Hopium subscriber you can sign up here.

• Tue, June 4, 7pm ET - Monthly Hopium Paid Subscriber Get Together

• Wed, June 5, 1pm ET - Monthly Hopium Founding Members Get Together

• Thur, June 20 - Simon speaks in person at a Wisconsin Democratic Party Event (Madison) - more details soon

• Tue, June 25, 7pm ET - Monthly Hopium Chronicles Community Get Together (Save The Date)

• Thur, June 27 - 1st Presidential Debate!!!

• Sat, June 29 - Simon speaks in person at Network NOVA’s 8th Annual Women’s Summit, Tyson’s Corner, VA - More info, register

Do More, Worry Less - Here at Hopium Chronicles we don’t worry, we do. Every day we channel the anxiety we all have into concrete actions for our country. The work we do together is how we win. Here are the four main campaigns we are running now, as we discussed above:

• Donate to and join The Biden-Harris Campaign. Job #1 for everyone in the Hopium community!

• Help Ruben Gallego Win Arizona. Watch my recent interview with the next Senator from Arizona here.

• Win North Carolina By Supporting Anderson Clayton and NC Dems. Watch my interview with the great Anderson Clayton here.

• Win The House By Backing Our 11 Candidates in Republican-held seats. All 11 of these courageous patriots will be speaking to the Hopium community in the weeks ahead.

Thanks to all who’ve given to or volunteered for these critical efforts. We’ve already raised over $190,000 for our 11 House candidates in our first week of fundraising! When the Hopium community is called, it answers, again and again and again. Thank you all.

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