Let's Go Win NY-3 Together, Senate Ukraine Bill Advances, Annual CPI Drops, New Trippi Pod

A Huge Thank You To This Amazing Hopium Community/Welcome New Subscribers!

Happy Election Day all. Got a few things for you today:

Let’s Make Calls/Vote/Canvass for Tom Suozzi Today!!!!!!!!!!! - Friends, this is it - Election Day!!!! Please sign up for a shift of calls today and for those in or near NY-3 please encourage all your friends to get out there and vote. With the bad weather we need to work a bit harder than usual to get our vote out. The good news is that we go into Election Day with a lead, so if we close strong today we can and should win. Please sign up, and let’s go win this thing!!!!!!!

Just a huge thank you today to the Hopium community. We’ve raised over $115,000 from almost 2,100 contributors for Tom Suozzi, and many more of you have made calls and texts, sent postcards, canvassed and worked your networks for Tom. Tom texted me last night to thank us, and said we’ve gone above and beyond for him, and he knows it. So proud to be in this fight, with all of you.

Watch this video from the only debate Tom’s opponent showed up for, and see him hold her feet to the fire on her support of ending Roe. It’s why we need to win here folks!

New “That Trippi Show” Podcast - Did a long sit-down yesterday with my dear friend and Democratic Yoda Joe Trippi. Hope you will listen. Joe was integral in helping me develop my understanding of the election in 2022, and is one of the smartest guys in our business. Lots of new insights, ideas in here - get to it when you can. It’s a great discussion, and it’s called “We’re going to kick Trump’s ass this year.” Enjoy.

Good News - Senate Ukraine/Foreign Aid Bill Advances With Significant Republican Support - From the NYTimes:

The Senate passed a long-awaited foreign aid package for Ukraine and Israel early Tuesday morning, delivering a bipartisan endorsement of the legislation after months of negotiations, dire battlefield warnings and political mudslinging. But the measure faced a buzz saw of opposition in the House, where Republican resistance threatened to kill it.

The 70-to-29 vote reflected a critical mass of support in Congress for the $95 billion emergency aid legislation and for continuing to arm Ukraine in its fight against Russian aggression. The measure would provide an additional $60.1 billion for Kyiv — which would bring the total U.S. investment in the war effort to more than $170 billion — as well as $14.1 billion for Israel’s war against Hamas and almost $10 billion for humanitarian aid for civilians in conflict zones, including Palestinians in Gaza….

Twenty-two Senate Republicans voted with almost all Democrats for the bill — five more than had helped it over a final procedural hurdle on Monday night — while the rest of the party argued against continuing to fund a foreign nation’s battle to protect its sovereignty without first cracking down on an influx of migration into the United States across its border with Mexico.

Inflation - Getting There, Work To Do - From The Washington Post: “Inflation eased further in January as Fed weighs when to cut rates - The report comes as the Federal Reserve is pressing on in its fight to tame high prices — with plenty of success already in the rearview mirror”

Price increases cooled further in January, offering the latest sign that inflation has eased significantly since its pandemic-era surge but still hovers above what policymakers consider normal.

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Tuesday morning showed prices rose 3.1 percent in January, compared with the year before. That’s a slower increase than the 3.4 percent annual rate notched in December.

As many outlets are reporting while the annual inflation number was encouraging, inflation last month was a bit higher than expected - something policy makers will be watching closely in the rest of the data we expect this month. Note that the year to year increase in grocery prices came in at 1.2%, far below the robust wage gains we’ve seen. Much of the increase this month was due to rising housing costs - it’s clear now we need a more aggressive national housing strategy. It could be an important part of the President’s second term agenda.

“The personal attacks in the Republican special counsel’s report is just a bucket of B.S. that’s so deep your boots will get stuck in it” - Meet Mitch Landrieu, National Biden-Harris Co-Chair. He is going to be one of the most important spokespeople for us this year, and he is just awesome. Watch.

4 Things Biden Should Do Now - I was asked to write a short essay for a cover package of stories in the New Republic this month on what Biden should do now. In my essay I make 4 basic recommendations:

• Reimagine and Reinvent The War Room

• Build The Largest Youth Engagement Program In History

• Anchor The Second Term Around Countering Climate Change and The Fight For Democracy

• Offer A Big Reform/Clean Up Washington and A Strategy To Raise Life Expectancy

Here’s the opening:

I start off 2024 very optimistic about Joe Biden’s reelection and excited for what a second Biden term may bring. My working take on 2024 is that Joe Biden is a very good president, the country is better off today than when he came to office, and he will have a persuasive case for reelection. The Democratic Party has been winning elections all across the country, particularly since the Dobbs Supreme Court decision in 2022. The Republicans, on the other hand, are making a huge mistake in renominating Donald Trump, who is far more degraded, extreme, and dangerous than he was in 2016 or 2020. Current commentary is wildly discounting his negatives, but it will be hard for him to overcome them once the Biden campaign reminds voters of what Trump has done and plans to do. For all these reasons, it is far more likely that Joe Biden wins than loses this year.

But the aspiration of Democrats and our pro-democracy allies must be not just to win the election, but to win big, making 2024 a clear and unequivocal rejection of MAGA. For only once Republicans view MAGA as a political loser will they begin to walk away from their recent reckless embrace of extremism.

So, in that spirit of going big, here are four things Biden world should consider (and in some cases may already be working on). The first two are campaign-related. The second two for when the president begins to roll out his agenda for a second term:

Reimagine and Reinvent the War Room

When we think of the campaign war room, we think of 20 sweaty kids drinking Red Bulls and cranking out TikTok videos. But this year, I hope the Biden campaign can reimagine the war room as two, three, four million patriots networked together, amplifying the good works and the second-term agenda of the president through their networks. Republicans have what I call a “loudness advantage” over Democrats, and for Democrats to have the election they want this year, they need to be creative in finding ways to close that gap. The Biden team should ask supporters not just to help on campaigns in all the traditional ways, but also to become “information warriors” this year and help their side get very, very loud. We left the broadcast era of politics long ago, and it is time to start building campaigns not around top-down advertising but around bottom-up and shareable organic content appropriate for the networked information age we are now in.

You can read the whole essay here, and the broader package has some terrific essays I think you will find useful. Enjoy.

Thur, Feb 15, 7pm EST - Monthly Hopium Wide Political Briefing and Get Together - This Thursday will be our monthly gathering of the entire Hopium community, now 38,000 strong! I’ll kick it off with 20 minutes of opening remarks about our current political moment and then take your questions. Register here. A video recording of the event will be available to all who cannot make it live.

The 2024 Elections - Why I Am Optimistic About Winning This Year - Lots of material here for you to chew on this week.

• Hopium Posts - The Democratic Party Is Strong, Building The Most Powerful Democratic Machine We’ve Ever Had, Another Huge Jobs Report, Notes on Recent Polling, Republicans Are Having A Truly Awful 2024

• Hopium Presentations - Why I Am Optimistic About Winning This Year (2/8/24), With Democrats, Things Get Better

• Op-eds/Essays - Biden’s Chances Are Much Stronger Than People Realize (MSNBC), 4 Things Biden Should Do Now (New Republic)

• Video Interviews - MSNBC’s Last Word, CNN’s Amanpour, MeidasTouch’s Ben Meiselas, Lights On With Jessica Denson, David Pakman

• Podcasts (Audio) - The Ezra Klein Show, Deep State Radio w/David Rothkopf and Tara McGowan, Rick Wilson’s Enemies List

Let’s Do More, Worry Less - The Hopium community is supporting 4 critical 2024 projects right now - flipping NY-3, Biden-Harris, North Carolina Dems and Anderson Clayton and spreading Hopium throughout the land. Learn more and taken an action for your democracy today!

Make some calls for NY-3 and let’s go win this thing! - Simon