Friday Notes - Joe Biden Is A Good President, More Bad Polling for Rs on Abortion, RFK = Russian Stooge

It's Friday, everybody.

Happy Friday everyone! Let’s get to it:

Videos/Upcoming Events - 4 events on the books now:

• Wednesday, June 28th 1pm EST - Youth Vote Discussion with Harvard’s John Della Volpe - RSVP/Learn More

• Tuesday, July 18th 8pm EST - Hopium Paid Subscriber Political Briefing and Hangout - Save The Date

• Thursday, July 20th 1pm EST - With Democrats Things Get Better, July 2023 - RSVP, Learn More

• Tuesday, July 25th 8pm EST - My Monthly Political Briefing and Discussion - RSVP

And my June political briefing and With Democrats Things Get Better are still fresh and meaty if you are looking for some videos to kick back and watch this weekend.

What’s the most important issue right now? Joe Biden has been a good President - The case for Biden’s re-election has gotten much stronger in recent months:

• The economy remains remarkably strong, inflation has come way down, the deficit is down, wages are also very strong, the President’s big investment agenda is starting to kick in and drive meaningful growth.

• Our recovery from COVID has been the strongest in the G7, and inflation, a global phenomenon, is lower here than in the UK and EU.

• The President’s new border plan is working, and the flow to the border has plummeted. Early 2023 data shows murder rates down across the US by 12%, among the largest drops in recent history. In 2022 he passed the first bi-partisan gun safety legislation in 30 years. And while there is more to do in all these areas we need to acknowledge the real progress that has been made.

• The President is in the process of restoring America’s rightful place on the global stage, the West has been revitalized, Putin has been badly bloodied in Ukraine, the withdrawal from Afghanistan looks more and more strategic and prescient as time passes, and he has made the US once again a respected global leader in the fight against climate change.

• We are getting to the other side of the COVID and Russian/Ukraine shocks, and the country is returning to something that feels far more normal - which was the central promise of Biden’s campaign in 2020.

You can find more from Hopium on the strong Biden presidency here, here and here. Let’s be loud and proud people. What’s your version of this narrative, this list? Spend time in the coming days working on your case for Biden that you can sell to your networks this summer (this graph is from Steve Rattner, using FRED data).

More Bad Polling for Rs on Abortion - A few days ago we discussed new USA Today polling showing American voters becoming much more pro-abortion over the past year, an ominous development for the GOP. Our friends at Navigator dropped a new report today that finds similar movement. Note that Hispanics are the most pro-choice of any of the top demos - quite a right wing narrative buster.

RFK Is A Russian Stooge - There is a lot not to like about RFK Jr, but I wasn’t really aware until the last few days what a fire-breathing Russian propagandist he is. As you can find in this new Joe Cirincione analysis, RFK has taken positions on Ukraine that could have literally been written by the Kremlin. That so many prominent Republicans, including people like Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, keep finding themselves aligned with the genocidal, anti-Western, anti-US leader of Russia remains one of the hardest things to understand about this terrible era of MAGA.

We are not going to be spending a lot of time here talking about RFK, No Labels, Cornell West and all these third-party, MAGA ratfu—ing projects, but we are going to be talking about the significance of so many prominent Americans becoming willing tools of Putin and how MAGA has become a pro-Russian, American fifth column. Our collective response to Russia’s penetration of our politics has been deeply inadequate, and it is one of the reasons I started this Hopium project. We need to get smarter about understanding the nature of the conflict we are now in, for while it may not be war as we traditionally understand it, it is a conflict, and it is one we simply have to win.

Keep working hard all - Simon