"Hopium is a rejection of the darkness they are trying to spread"

Biden campaign makes major investment in North Carolina/Welcome New Subscribers!

Happy Friday all. Still on vacation, still got some good stuff for you today…..

• Why I Am Optimistic About Winning This November - Recent posts, pods and video presentations on the 2024 election

• Do More, Worry Less - Join me in supporting Biden-Harris, Ruben Gallego, Anderson Clayton and growing the Hopium community. March 31st is the filing deadline for the quarter - please donate what you can today!!!!!!!

• Upcoming Events - Our Spring calendar is coming together (new registration links available - sign up today!)

• Hopium Building Blocks - This week I’m sharing work that helped inform the creation of Hopium a year ago. The first four posts are:

  • The 50 Year Strategy (2007)

  • Forward or Backward? (2012)

  • The Case for Optimism (2017)

  • Build Back Better (2020)

Stay focused my friends. Do not get distracted. Remember:

Joe Biden is a good President. The country is better off. The Democratic Party is strong, unified, and winning elections all across the country.

And they have Trump.

In ever way imaginable, when it comes to the 2024 elections, I would much rather be us than them.

Biden Makes Major Investment in North Carolina - Winning North Carolina is one of our highest priorities this year. Team Biden is now going all in there, and giving our friend Anderson Clayton the tools she needs to help turn Carolina blue. From Axios today, Biden campaign opening up 10 field offices in North Carolina:

President Biden's North Carolina campaign is ramping up efforts to mobilize Democratic voters and reach out to suburban swing voters by opening 10 new field offices across the state.

Why it matters: The Biden campaign has named North Carolina as one of its key battleground investments for the 2024 election. The president has already visited the state twice this year.

Zoom in: In addition to its headquarters in Raleigh, the Biden campaign is opening field offices in Forsyth, Mecklenburg, Guilford, Cumberland, Johnston, Orange, New Hanover, Buncombe, Cabarrus and Alamance counties.

The locations highlight the campaign's belief that the state could be flipped by getting better turnout in larger cities like Charlotte and Greensboro.

But it's also focusing on reaching out to Republican and unaffiliated voters in suburban counties, like Cabarrus (northeast of Charlotte), Johnston (southeast of Raleigh) and Alamance (wedged between Durham and Greensboro).

The big picture: North Carolina has been elusive for Democrats since 2008, but it's one of the few states where the presidential campaign is playing offense, NBC News reported.

A senior Biden official told Axios' Sophia Cai the campaign this month has opened 44 offices in Wisconsin, 12 to 14 offices in Pennsylvania and 20 offices in Michigan.

It also comes as the Republican National Committee struggles to boost staffing levels in battleground states, Axios reported.

Less than eight months before the Nov. 5 election, significant parts of the RNC's get-out-the-vote operation in states likely to decide the election are playing catch-up after Trump's team ousted 60 staffers in its recent takeover.

About a third of those ousted staffers were state directors and regional political directors, jobs that are key to recruiting, training and mobilizing volunteers far ahead of Election Day.

Between the lines: It's not clear where or when the Trump team will open field offices throughout North Carolina.

But Chris LaCivita, a Trump Campaign senior advisor and the Republican National Committee's chief of staff, dismissed Biden's recent battleground staffing moves and pointed to Trump's lead in national polls.

"With an operation fueled by hundreds of thousands of small dollar donors and energized supporters, and without sharing our strategy with Democrats through the media, we have the message, the operation, and the money to propel President Trump to victory on November 5," LaCivita said in a statement.

What they're saying: "North Carolina is a key battleground in 2024 and we are organizing earlier than ever before to flip our state and deliver a win for Biden-Harris and Tar Heel Democrats this year," David Berrios, Biden's North Carolina campaign manager, said in a statement.

As Anderson Clayton told us a few weeks ago, the $134,000 our community has raised for the North Carolina Democratic Party so goes directly into funding these kinds of field operations. Thank you everyone. Very proud of the early and meaningful contribution we’ve made to 2024’s most important expansion state. And if you haven’t given yet consider donating today. We can do this people!

“Hopium is a rejection of the darkness they are trying to spread” - Hopium’s First Post - This week I’ve been sharing essays which contributed to the thinking behind starting Hopium Chronicles a year ago. Today’s post bring us up to the Hopium period with my very first post from March 7th, 2023. It spells out my strategy and rationale for this vital project.

Enjoy, and thank you for being here at Hopium. We are 50,000 strong now - hard to believe! I’m having a lot of fun, and I think we are making a real difference.

Keep fighting hard everyone. We have a big election to win, together, this year - Simon

Welcome To My New Home - Hopium Chronicles

Simon Rosenberg

March 7, 2023

Welcome everyone. I am excited you are here, and excited to get going. Let me explain how I got here, and what I hope we are going to do here, together, in the years ahead. And do subscribe right away - it is how this new powerful new platform Substack has built works.

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.

By subscribing to Hopium Chronicles you will be able to participate in all this work. Paid subscribers will get more time with me and my merry friends, provide funding for this critical work, and be able to connect with other members of the community to compare notes, devise strategies and plot victories. You will get at least one discussion with me every week and paid subscriber only content. Founding Members will become early major investors in ensuring this new project can become what we all want it to be. If it all goes right we can become a powerful learning community, of people wanting to become more effective defenders of democracy and everything that has made America great.

There are a lot of reasons to be optimistic about our politics now. Democrats had a very good election in 2022, our third good election in a row. President Biden has been a good President, and America is far better off today. The Democratic Party is strong, our rising generation of leaders is ready and our grassroots is bigger and more effective then its ever been. Putin has stumbled in Ukraine, and the climate package passed by Congress last year has dramatically accelerated the global pace of decarbonization.

But we also know that MAGA remains too much of a threat, and we have a lot of work to do. This place and our community of proud patriots and info warriors is going to be about doing that work, bravely, passionately, successfully. A few of the things we will be working on in the coming months:

• working to make sure the economy stays strong, President Biden’s big 3 bills survive GOP sabotage, and the war in Ukraine is successful

• more effectively telling our story, and winning the big economic argument with the right

• finding new ways to get louder and counter the right’s information superiority

• exploring strategies for expanding our coalition, get to 55% in national elections

We will also be spending time with important leaders of our party and the broader pro-democracy community. I will be showcasing some of the remarkable groups and people I’ve met during my journey over the past year. And we will be picking a few really important candidates to raise money for and hang out with.

So let’s get going. I have some idea how this is all going to go but I hope all of you will not be shy and help me turn this into a place where you love hanging out, do some good, share some Hopium, and together defeat MAGA and ensure that freedom and democracy prevail, here and everywhere.

Excitingly yours, Simon

Washington, DC March 7, 2023