Hopium PM - Rallying For Mary Peltola, Gallup Has Dems Up +8 In Party ID, Senate Bill Restores Most Science Cuts

Anderson Clayton joins us live from North Carolina tomorrow at 430pm EST

Afternoon all. Starting off with the most important - today Hopium is endorsing Mary Peltola, and making winning this vital race among our top priorities this year. You can donate to her campaign here; learn more about her and volunteer here; and catch her wonderful launch video “Fish, Family, and Freedom” [and corruption] here:

The last two polls in Alaska shows it to be a competitive race:

• Peltola 48% - Sullivan 46% Alaska Survey Research - Oct, 2025

• Peltola 46% - Sullivan 45% Data For Progress - Oct, 2025

A reminder about the 2026 Senate map and our strategy. We start 3 Senate seats down, and need to win 4 to gain the majority. If hold what we have, and flip ME (tbd), NC (Cooper), and Ohio (Brown) we get to 50. Getting to 51 requires us to win one of Alaska (Peltola), Iowa (tbd), Texas (tbd). That’s why our Audacious Expansion Fund has been raising for AK, IA, ME, TX - for we haven’t had our final candidates there yet - and why we we are raising for Cooper (NC) and Brown (OH) directly. This is a tough map, but not an impossible one. And our chance of taking back the Senate just jumped today!

So please donate to Mary today and help make these first 24 hours big ones for her so she can staff up and hit the ground running!

Some new Gallup data confirms that 2026 can be a year of opportunity for us. It finds that Party ID has shifted 12 points towards us from a year ago; from 43%-47% to 48%-40% today:

If the national map has shifted 12 points it makes these four states competitive (Trump 2024 margin of victory):

• Alaska +13

• Iowa +13

• Ohio +11

• Texas +14

It’s a hard, but not impossible, Senate map this year.

We got a new Morning Consult poll this afternoon and like other polling done since the killing of Nicole Good it showed Trump dropping. Today his job approval is 45%-53% (-8). Last week he was -5. So a 3 point drop. Here are the three other polls we’ve gotten with interviews since last Wednesday. 3 show movement against him, and the other shows him down 18!

• CBS/YouGov - 41%-59% (-18) - 2 points worse than the current FiftyPlusOne average

• RMG/Napolitan - 47%-51% (-4) - arguably the most pro-Trump pollster found Trump dropping 5 points since their last poll in mid-December.

• TIPP Insights - 40%-51% (-11) - another influential right-wing pollster. 7 point drop since early December, worst showing for Trump in this poll in the past year. Fresh this morning.

G. Elliott Morris has a terrific new analysis looking at the public’s perception of ICE, Support for abolishing ICE hits a new high. It contains this eye-popping graph from Civiqs:

I want to acknowledge that there is now a flood of video coming from Minnesota documenting the DHS/ICE/CBP terror campaign unfolding there. Here is one of the more compelling - a Marine yanked from her car and beaten:

As our friend Garrett Graff reminded us today:

In what is very welcome news Senate appropriators have restored much of Trump’s cuts to science funding in their current fiscal year 2026 bill. From the NYT (gift link):

Congress is racing to undo thousands of cuts to federal science programs that President Trump called for last year when planning the government’s current budget.

If enacted, the president’s bid for an overall cut in scientific funding to $154 billion from $198 billion — a plunge of 22 percent — would have been the largest reduction in federal spending on science since World War II, when Washington and the seekers of nature’s secrets began their partnership.

This week, the Senate Appropriations Committee released a bipartisan package of bills that largely scraps Mr. Trump’s planned cuts. Analysts say that, if the proposed budgets hold up in the weeks ahead, Congress will set aside roughly $188 billion for federal research — a drop of about 4 percent from the most recent annual budget.

“That’s pretty solid,” said Alessandra Zimmermann, a budget analyst at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a scientific group based in Washington. “Congress is really starting to push back.”

Surprisingly, analysts foresee a possible rise of more than 2 percent in the budget category known as basic research — the blue-sky variety that produces fundamental strides and spinoffs in fields such as health care and artificial intelligence. Last year, the Trump administration called for a cut in federal basic research of more than one-third.

Mr. Trump sought even larger cuts for the National Science Foundation, which sponsors much of the nation’s basic research. He proposed that its budget be slashed to $3.9 billion from $8.8 billion, a drop of 56 percent. The Senate package countered with a reduction to $8.75 billion, or less than 1 percent.

The bipartisan accord on funding science, Ms. Zimmermann said, stands in sharp contrast with the congressional impasse that shut down the government last fall as Democrats and Republicans clashed over the renewal of subsidies for the Affordable Care Act.

“They’re working together now,” she said. “It’s a return to normalcy.” The new cooperation, Ms. Zimmermann added, is “promising for the eventual passage of the bills.”

I will work to bring some one talk to us about this promising development soon - and yes, our work matters people!

Our good friend Anderson Clayton, the Chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, is joining us live tomorrow at 430pm EST to share some exciting news and give us her latest insights on how the 2026 landscape is shaping up. Click here to join us live tomorrow……..

Let’s Get To Work People!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Winning The Midterms - Support Our Candidates

• Hopium Winning The House Campaign (2026) - $67,400 raised, $250,000 goal (new stretch goal) - Donate to all four endorsed House challengers with one click | Learn More | Enjoy our new conversations with Christina Bohannan (IA-01), Mayor Paige Cognetti (PA-08), Jo Mendoza (AZ-06), and Janelle Stelson (PA-10)

• Mary Peltola For AK Senate - $250,000 goal - Donate | Volunteer and learn more

• Winning Ohio - $10,100 raised, $250,000 goal - Our new campaign splits contributions evenly among Sherrod Brown, the Acton/Pepper ticket, and the Ohio Democratic Party. Donate today and help us turn this critical 2026 battleground blue! | Watch my conversation with David Pepper, who does an overview of the opportunities we have in Ohio this year

• Roy Cooper for NC Senate (2026) - $65k raised, $250,000 goal - Donate | Learn More | Volunteer | Enjoy my conversations with Gov. Cooper and NC Dem Party Chair Anderson Clayton

• Jon Ossoff GA Senate (2026) - $110k raised, $250,000 goal - Donate | Learn More | Volunteer | Enjoy my inspiring conversation with Senator Ossoff

Expanding The Senate and Electoral College Maps, Winning In Red States and Red Places (2026-2032)

• Hopium’s Audacious Expansion Fund - $269,000 raised, $500,000 goal (new stretch goal) - Join our new campaign to expand our map by investing in the Democratic Parties of Alaska, Florida, Iowa, Maine, and Texas. Many thanks to two generous Hopium community members who have audaciously donated $10,000 to each of our five state parties

This recent post recapped our our very productive year together in 2025. In three new essays (here, here, here) I discuss how one of the ways we win the 2026 midterms is by providing early support to our candidates and parties to allow them to staff up, be loud, define the terms of the debate now, before the inevitable onslaught on AI slop, Russian disinfo, and Trumpian lies funded through bribes and corruption wash across the land.

The midterms could be won or lost in these next few months - not in the fall of 2026 - and we need be fighting now with everything we got.

Winning The Big Arguments With Trump, Defend Our Democracy - We have two recommended actions today:

1 - Call Your Senators and Member Of The House And Demand They Act Upon Our Five-Part Agenda - We need to be loud people, very, very loud and make the case for our now five part agenda:

1. Stand with Ukraine and our European allies, and far more forcefully challenge Trump’s traitorous efforts to sell out the US and the West to Russia; demand Congress rebuke/issue a no confidence vote on his current efforts to force Ukraine to surrender

2. Congress must stand forcefully for rule of law in the Caribbean and the Pacific - these illegal strikes must end; no war can be waged without Congressional approval; there must accountability for those who have broken the law, and the US must withdraw from Venezuela and cease other threats to violate the UN Charter and the sovereignty of other nations

3. Roll back Trump’s terrible, illegal tariffs that are re-igniting inflation, driving up prices, shifting the tax burden from the wealthy to working people, hurting small businesses and farmers, reviving tyrannical “taxation without representation,” and alienating governments and people throughout the world. To put America on a sounder fiscal course due to the enormous deficits brought by Trump’s 2025 tax cuts we should reverse these cuts to the wealthy and corporations

4. Defend our democracy, rule of law, and our liberties by blocking the expansion of ICE; restoring due process for immigrants across the country; vigorously defending the 1st Amendment; warring against his outrageous targeting of his domestic political opponents; ending the use of the military on our streets and the dangerous occupation of our cities; stopping the unprecedented regime corruption; and by forcing the Administration to finally comply with Congress end the rancid cover up of the Epstein crimes.

5. Fight Trump’s war on science, higher education and our public health; reverse - not delay - the cuts to the ACA, Medicaid and our clean energy investments; support and co-sponsor the Stand Up For Science/Rep. Haley Stevens effort to remove Robert Kennedy from HHS.

2 - Celebrate America, Our Constitution, Our 250th Birthday By Bringing Our Resolutions Project To Your Community - This July 4th America celebrates it’s 250th birthday. We need to make this holiday, a celebration of our Declaration Of Independence from a mad king, our day, and not allow it to become his.

One way we can do this is by bringing our Resolutions Project to your community or state. Imagine if by July 4th of next year a large number of towns, counties and states had passed formal resolutions, in the spirit of our Declaration of Independence, defending our Constitution and condemning the “injuries,” “abuses,” and “usurpations” of our mad king. For as our Founders wrote in the Declaration:

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

So far Hopium members have introduced or passed resolutions in 85 communities in 23 states. In the coming days we will be convening to discuss how to bring this campaign to more places and start planning to Own The Fourth next year.

Finally, please self-report your activities to our daily paid subscriber chat. These reports help inspire all of us to do more and fight harder!

Keep working hard everyone, and I remain so incredibly proud to be in this righteous fight with all of you - Simon