Great New Biden Ad, Biden Leads in 4 New Polls, Gov. Newsom Helps Celebrate Hopium's 1st Birthday!

Welcome New Subscribers!

Happy Saturday all. We’ve had a really good week. I got a few things for you today:

Wednesday, 7pm EST - Our Monthly Hopium Gathering - Our monthly get together for the entire Hopium community is this Wednesday at 7pm EST. Register here. I will kick if off with 15-20 minutes of opening remarks and then take your questions. I’m excited to share that the inspiring North Carolina Dem Party Chair Anderson Clayton will be joining us around 745pm to provide an update on her work to turn North Carolina blue this November. Our event will be recorded and shared here for those who can’t make it live. Given how much we’ve grown in recent months it’s possible this event fills up so register as soon as you can and make sure you log in Wednesday at 655pm to secure your spot.

If you haven’t caught it yet hope you can watch my talk with Governor Gavin Newsom from Wednesday night. He came by to help us mark Hopium’s 1st birthday and offer his thoughts on the State of the Union and the 2024 election. After my talk with Gavin I spent 15 minutes giving my latest take on the election, and spelled out why I am optimistic about winning this November. It was a great event, lots of energy - a perfect weekend dose of Hopium for our community!

Great New Biden Ad, “For You” - The 1st Biden ad of the general election dropped this morning and it is just great. Strong, warm, funny. A really start to the general. Do watch fellow info warriors and share this through your networks and organizations this weekend. We need as many people to see it as possible.

Here’s the releases from the campaign:

In “For You” President Biden Touts His Historic Record, Points Out Trump’s Lack Thereof  

In “For You” President Biden discusses how his wisdom, experience, and—yes, even age—have been critical to getting big things done for the American people in his first term, and the choice Americans will face this November between Joe Biden’s experienced and effective leadership versus Donald Trump and his assault on Americans’ rights and democracy.

The six-week ad flight will air on national cable and local broadcast and cable television in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina. The ad campaign will target audiences in the key markets of Detroit, Flint, Grand Rapids, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, Phoenix, Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Raleigh, with a focus on voters of color and young voters. The ad will air on popular entertainment and sports programming on stations like ESPN, TNT, FX, Adult Swim, and Comedy Central and during high-viewership moments like the NCAA March Madness Tournament. It will also run digitally across platforms – with a heavy emphasis on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.

The following is a statement from Biden-Harris Campaign Communications Director Michael Tyler:

“Y'all want to talk about age? Let's talk about age. At 77, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump. At 78, he led us through the COVID crisis, put us on a path to creating nearly 15 million new jobs since the day he took office, and passed the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to repair our roads and bridges and expand access to broadband internet to every community. At 79, he got us the most significant gun safety legislation in a generation and became the first president to beat Big Pharma and cap the cost of insulin at $35 for seniors. At the same time, he made the single largest investment in history to combat climate change – all before his 80th birthday. Meanwhile, the only helpful thing Donald Trump did for the American people in four years was lose the 2020 election to Joe Biden – and it’s the one thing he won’t take credit for.”

“Now, Joe Biden is 81 and he's going to beat Donald Trump again because he wakes up every single day fighting for the American people while Trump wages a campaign of revenge and retribution focused on himself. Trump may be four years younger than Joe Biden, but his ideas are old as hell and they've already been rejected by the American people. Joe Biden is running to make sure we reject them for good.”

The general election is here my friends. Make sure you sign up for the Biden-Harris campaign today. Give whatever you can - $5, $10 or more - to get going. As we discussed yesterday, Joe Biden has made it clear he is fighting for us. Now we need to go fight for him!

Biden Leads in 4 New National Polls - Even before his powerful State of The Union speech, the President has had his best week of polling in some time. Four new, national polls show him leading. He made meaningful gains in all of them, and all 4 had more interviews than the most recent NYT poll (you can find the polls at 538). Here they are, Biden-Trump:

• 47%-44% Kaiser Family Foundation (7 pt Biden gain since last poll)

• 51%-49% Emerson (3 pt Biden gain since last poll)

• 44%-43% Morning Consult (5 pt Biden gain over past month)

• 43%-42% TIPP (3 pt Biden gain since last poll)

A central reason I’ve been so optimistic about us winning in November is that I always believed that when it became clear to voters that it was Biden vs Trump, and the Biden campaign began in earnest, a big chunk of our wandering coalition would come home. Biden would then gain 3-4 points and open up a small but meaningful lead in national polling. It’s possible that is what we we’re seeing now. It’s what Morning Consult found in their polling this week:

Biden retakes lead from Trump: Biden leads Trump, the likeliest Republican presidential nominee for 2024, by 1 percentage point (44% to 43%) in our latest national tracking survey. It’s Biden’s first lead over Trump since early January, and is driven by coalescence among the voters who backed him last time around: 85% of Biden 2020 voters say they’d vote for him if the election were today, the largest share since early September.

We begin the general election with the race close and competitive. Trump does not lead, nor he is favored. As I wrote recently, there are serious warning signs about ongoing Trump/Republican struggles and underperformance right now for those who want to see them. Yes, we have work to do to win this election and get to 55. But it is doable work, work that we can do, whereas their job of selling a more dangerous and extreme MAGA to a country which has rejected it in 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2023 is far, far harder.

Remember:

Joe Biden is a good President. The country is better off. The Democratic Party is strong and winning elections across the country. And they have Trump.

We Are Building The Most Powerful Democratic Machine In History - From Michael Scherer in the Washington Post, “Biden’s campaign aims to seize March for campaign push”:

Democrats also enjoy a still vibrant network of grass-roots groups around the country, which have remained engaged since 2018 and are largely able to coordinate with the Biden campaign. Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Biden’s campaign manager, spoke last week to Swing Left, a network of volunteers. She invited people to join the campaign’s “I’m On Board” organizing effort.

“As we jump into March, as we come out of Super Tuesday and the president’s State of the Union in the next couple of weeks, it will be a real opportunity to just remind voters of just what that choice, how important and how critical this election is, and really what everyone can do to get on board,” Rodriguez told the group on Feb. 29.

While Biden has lacked the movement-like charisma of his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, Democrats continue to enjoy significant state and local organizing muscle, largely through loose national networks of local progressive groups. The campaign of Rep. Tom Suozzi, who recently outperformed polling by about eight points in a special election on New York’s Long Island, credits these groups with giving him a huge advantage, as have other campaigns in special elections in recent years.

Suozzi’s campaign team said about a third of the door-knocking, letter-writing and phone-calling that took place in that race came from groups outside the district, such as the Massachusetts-based Swing Blue Alliance. Democrats widely believe that the opposition to Trump will solidify, powering volunteer efforts despite the misgivings about Biden’s candidacy.

“In the past few years, fear of MAGA has helped fuel the building of the most powerful grassroots machine the Democratic Party has ever had,” Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist who now works with local activist groups, said in a statement. “Their money and hard work will ensure the Biden campaign is the biggest and strongest Presidential campaign Democrats have ever run.”

Let’s Do More, Worry Less - Here at Hopium we strive to channel all this worry and anxiety we have about our current moment into concrete action - do more, worry less - as we say here. Here are a few things you do today, right now:

Donate to and join the Biden-Harris campaign - This is very important. The general election has begun and it’s time to get on board the Biden-Harris train. Please donate whatever amount you can - $5, $10 - just to get started.

Our community has already raised over $144,000 for Biden Harris - thank you!

Make an early investment in North Carolina - North Carolina is our most important 2024 expansion state. Please consider donating today. For more on why I think North Carolina is so important watch my interview with Anderson Clayton, the dynamic new NC Democratic Party Chair.

Our community has already raised $91,000 for this critical battleground - thank you all!

Help Ruben Gallego Win Arizona - Yesterday I endorsed Ruben Gallego in his race to become the next Senator in Arizona. The polls are encouraging there, and this is a very critical 2024 battleground state - must win Biden-Harris state, must win Senate, two House pick up opportunities (and maybe the state house too). Because Senator Sinema stayed in for so long, Ruben is a bit behind where he should be financially and organizationally, and needs our help today. Please donate today, and I will be posting some volunteer opportunities in the coming days. We have already over $36,000 for Ruben - thank you all!

Spread Hopium - Encourage people in your networks to become a Hopium subscriber. Our goal is to get to 50,000 subscribers by March 31st (we’re at 47,000 today!). With your help, we can hit our goal, grow our community, and bring the upbeat, data-filled analysis here to more and more people. You can also become a paid subscriber which helps us grow here.

Hopium Chronicles Turned 1 This Week!!! - I launched this thing a year ago with this welcome post, and my get to 55 memo. I’m so proud of what we’ve done together, the community we’ve built. Here’s what I wrote last March:

Though I’ve been in politics for a long time, my journey fighting the “red wave” over the past year changed my understanding of the work that needs to get done to defeat MAGA, tell our inspiring story more effectively, and ensure that freedom and democracy prevail.

Basically I came to understand that our politics was changing and I had to change with it. It led me to conclude that my old organization, NDN, which I founded back in 1996, was no longer the right vehicle for me. It did a lot of good over a long period of time, and we built a remarkable community there. As I discuss in my recent interview with Ron Brownstein in the Atlantic, I feel like we are entering a new political era in America, one that requires new strategies and approaches. NDN was built for a different era, and it had a different mission. I needed to do something new, organize my work in new ways. So here I am. With all of you.

I am calling it Hopium Chronicles because I want this to be a journey guided by hope and optimism, of belief in ourselves, in love of country and a clear understanding of the nature of the conflict we are in. I have become convinced that part of Greater MAGA’s strategy is to intentionally poison our discourse with negative sentiment every day. They want us to feel bad about America, our democracy, our leaders, our institutions, our success, each other, ourselves. We cannot let them do that any more. While they talk American down every day, we need to talk it up. While they spread lies, we respond with truth and data. Hopium is a rejection of the darkness they are trying to spread. It is a way of standing up for our great country and its remarkable people. It is the key to how we win.

I will be having more to say about year 2 of Hopium in the coming days, and in our broader Hopium-wide gathering on Wednesday. If you want to mark our anniversary by becoming a paid subscriber you can do so here. Your financial support allows me to do this work, our community to grow and keeps the Hopium flowing! Thank you to all of you who have been of this spirited experiment so far. We’ve done a lot of good together, but as all know our most important work lies ahead.

Keep working hard all. Proud to be in this fight with all of you. We are going to win this thing, together - Simon