Morning all. First up is a new video, above. It’s a recording of my discussion with Hopium paid subscribers yesterday. In it I offer some initial thoughts about this ugly election, and reflect on our important work here at Hopium over the past 20 months. As I did in my post yesterday, and in this new video, I again want to thank all of you for all that you did this cycle to advance our politics. We did a lot of good here at Hopium, and I am grateful for this plucky community of proud patriots and info warriors every day.
When you are ready make time to watch the Vice President’s eloquent concession speech. It is hard but necessary viewing.
Yesterday both the Michigan and Wisconsin Senate races were called for us. We lead in the current counts in both Arizona and Nevada, and trail in Pennsylvania. It looks like we broke the GOP super majority in North Carolina, an important goal for us this cycle, and won some important Council of State (cabinet) races there too. With new fair maps in place, we picked up House and Senate seats in Wisconsin, enough to put them both chambers in play in 2026. As of posting this morning control of both chambers in the Arizona legislature are still up for grabs.
We still have a shot at flipping the US House, and will know more in a few days. Here is a report on our Hopium 15:
AZ 01 - Shah trails in the current count, race not called
AZ 06 - Engel trails in the current count, race not called
CA 13 - Gray trails in the current count, race not called
CA 22 - Salas trails in the current count, race not called (not looking good)
CA 27 - Whitesides trails in the current count, race not called
CA 41 - Rollins leads in current count, race not called
CA 45 - Tran trails in the current count, race not called
IA 01 - Bohannan trails in current count, race not called
NJ 07 - Altman lost, race called
NY 04 - Gillen leads in the current count, race not called (looks good)
NY 17 - Jones lost, race called
NY 19 - Riley flipped this seat, race called
NE 02 - Vargas trails in current count, race not called
OR 05 - Bynum leads in current count, race not called (looks good)
PA 10 - Stelson trails in current count, race not called
While not everything went our way this cycle the Hopium community contributed to some important wins:
AZ - Gallego is favored to win, still waiting on the state legislative races
NC - Won the Governorship, Council of State races, broke the GOP super majority in the legislature
NE - Won the blue dot in NE-02
WI - Won the Baldwin Senate race, picked up state legislative seats
US House - we will pick up seats here, and the DCCC is optimistic some of these races that have us down right now will come home as the votes get counted
As for the Presidential race, it’s pretty clear now that Trump’s Election Day surge carried the day for him, and surprised everyone, including his own campaign. Many of you have asked how is it possible he did so well when he had fewer ads and no real field operation. It’s a good question, and one we need be airing out as a family in the coming weeks.
A reminder about the data we had going into Election Day, and why I was so optimistic. Harris gained in the last week of polling, and had her best week of battleground state polls of the election. All the major forecasters, including Nate Silver and 538, tipped back to her and had her winning the Electoral College. We went into Election Day ahead in the battleground early vote, and in a comparable place to 2020. We actually went into Election Day in better shape than 2020 in the early vote in AZ, GA, MI, NE-2 and WI. Trump’s Election Day surge overwhelmed all that.
I found this new Tweet from The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson of John Burn-Murdoch’s Financial Times analysis useful. The disruption of COVID, global inflation, and Russia’s war in Ukraine has unseated incumbent parties throughout the developed world this year. Democrats almost withstood the tide, and may end up even flipping the House, in part because our economic recovery from COVID has been far better than any other advanced nation in the world.
Been doing a lot of thinking about my 2022 Two Elections take that postulated there were two elections in 2022 - a bluer one inside the battleground, a redder one outside. The reason the battlegrounds were bluer in 2022 the theory goes was due to our financial and organizational advantage (all of you) that allowed us to control the information environment and push our on the ground performance to the upper end of what was possible. However, where we did not have those campaigns, and the right maintained information superiority, we fell behind. This trend was most acute in large Dem states like CA and NY, where we saw a huge Dem drop-off in performance.
We are seeing some of that same dynamic this time. While the nation moved about six points to the right from 2020 it moved less in the battlegrounds where we deployed our big campaigns and where the Dem Senate did too. But this year we once again saw drop-off in big Dem states where we did not have competitive campaigns. To me all this means two things:
We may have to start running noisy, spectacle filled campaigns in every state every election cycle or expect drop-off, underperformance
We have to build a far better permanent center-left based media ecosystem to compete with what the right has built. As powerful as the right’s propaganda effort has been, it got more powerful with the addition of Twitter this year and the rightward movement of some legacy media. It will become powerful still when Trump is back in the White House. There is great urgency to this work.
We have a loudness problem on our side that simply must be addressed strategically across the entire party in every state and across the country. Our muscular campaigns allow us to close the info and loudness gap with the right every two years. And while our rigorous targeting allows us to concentrate our firepower and be competitive, we have to do more to be competitive and win the national conversation every day, something all of our hyper-targeting of media markets and narrow persuadable groups doesn’t do for us. We have to be speaking every day to all parts of our coalition, and not just a handful of swing voters and their concerns in a few battleground states. For if we don’t do this, our campaigns will end up always playing defense in a right-constructed frame, that, among other things, discourages us from talking about all the good we do as a party - for right-adjacent groups never believe any of that. All they know is the bad - high inflation, trans, the border, crime - and thus the campaign and data ecosystem tells us not to even try to challenge it. It’s too baked in. Over time this means we never get to make the case for us which is one reason why no one knows all the good Biden-Harris had done. For right-adjacent swing voters don’t believe it, and thus even though our economy today is arguably stronger than it has been in 60 years, we spent the general election talking about the harms of inflation rather than our success in getting to the other side of it and orchestrating a soft landing.
Look at this data from last week’s Economist/YouGov tracking poll. The US has had more jobs created under Biden than any four year period in US history. Only 19% of independent voters think jobs are increasing right now, and a whopping 80% say there is no job growth or jobs are decreasing (34%). So the way our campaign data ecosystem works is that a candidate would be told not to talk about the growing economy for our target voters don’t believe it. Even though it is true, and no one will know it is true unless we tell them.
So if we do not start having a national strategy to compete and win in the national debate every day, all we do is operate inside a right-wing defined frame which prevents us from ever telling our side of the story. What else could explain that no one knows for example this bit of data, data that Bill Clinton referred to in his Convention speech - 96% of all jobs created in America since 1989 have come under Democratic Presidents.
To further explore the challenges we have in the information space watch this recent discussion Tara McGowan and I had with Dan Pfeiffer in one of our recent Closing Strong episodes. Get to it when you can, and I will be coming back to all this. Sorry I am little ranty this morning. I am tired, angry and a bit unfocused.
The bottom line - we have a lot of work to do (returning to Hopium’s core mission) to defeat MAGA, tell our inspiring story more effectively, and ensure that freedom and democracy prevail.
Onward - Simon
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