Morning all. Dems had another overperformance in a special election last night, this one for a state house seat in South Carolina. Our candidate, Keishan Scott, won 71%-24% in a district Kamala Harris only won by 5 points last year. The Dowballot’s special election tracker has Dems running 16 points ahead of where we were at this point in 2018, an election where we flipped the House and won the national house vote by 8.6 points….
…..across 23 such races tracked by The Downballot, Democrats are now running more than 16 points ahead of the top of the ticket on average in 2025. And even without Sutton's outlier win, that figure stands at more than 13 points. By comparison, leading up to Donald Trump's first midterms in 2018, Democrats had outperformed in special elections by an average of 10.6 points.
Paid Subscribers Gather Tonight, My Discussion With Stuart Stevens Is Being Moved To Next Week - My noon discussion with Stuart Stevens is being moved to next week (Stuart is under the weather), but Hopium paid subscribers are gathering tonight at 8pm, ET. Register here. Excited to see folks tonight!
You can always find the latest listing of our upcoming events on our Events page. All recorded events and podcasts can be found on the Hopium site under Podcast and now on YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify too. Enjoy everyone!
Musk Savages Trump Budget, As He Should - Yesterday Elon Musk posted this Tweet heard around the world:
While we may differ on the reasons, Musk is right - the reconciliation bill is an outrageous, disgusting abomination, as is Trump’s broader economic strategy. The four pillars of Trump’s “more for me, less for you” economic agenda - tariffs, reconciliation, mass deportations and an assault on science, research and academia - will leave America poorer; greater in debt; with a broken public health system; a slower economy and interest rates, prices and inflation at elevated levels; working and middle class shouldering a greater share of the tax burden; labor shortages particularly in rural areas; unprecedented corruption; and our companies far less competitive relative to other nations.
Our credit rating has been downgraded to levels not seen in over 100 years. Global and US growth are slowing. Our tariffs have made America look feckless to the world, angered our closest allies and are modern day “taxation without representation” - a broad tax on working and middle class people levied without the consent of Congress. The fiscal integrity of the United States is now very much in jeopardy.
Trump the Russian backed grifter is advancing an agenda that looks far more foreign sabotage than a strategy for American prosperity or greatness. And Musk is right, together all of this is a disgusting abomination, an extraordinary betrayal of the country and we have to keep working as hard as we can to stop it.
Yesterday afternoon I sat down with Charles Gaba, a health care policy and data expert. Our interview is above. I asked Charles to come talk to us about the GOP’s wild, systemic assault on our health and health care. Charles has been writing about how the reconciliation bill’s impact on our health care system would be far greater than 16m losing health insurance. In his estimates close to 50m people - 15% of the population - are likely to lose care or see huge premium spikes. But as Charles explains when this much money is taken out of a precarious health care system all at once, and you add Kennedy’s elimination of many billions of public health research and a weakening of our vaccine regime and other public health practices, there could be dramatic and dangerous follow on effects - hospital and clinic closures, a reduction in access to care and prices hikes for all of us, a resurgence of disease (making measles great again), an increase in homelessness and drug overdoses. What Trump and Kennedy are doing is a savage and breathtaking assault on the health of the American people, particularly those with less.
And that is how we end our discussion. It does appear, as Joni Ernst suggested this weekend, and as Musk showed in the elimination of USAID, that Trump and his allies are fine with mass suffering and mass death, even of their own constituents and voters.
It is another reason we have to work as hard as we can to defeat Trump’s rancid reconciliation bill.
Charles’ primary home is a site called ACA Signups, and you can find him on Twitter, Bluesky and other socials. I have learned a great deal from him over the years and I am sure you will too.
Here’s some of Charles’ recent work referenced in our discussion:
State By State: The ~46 million Americans whose healthcare is threatened by the GOP’s budget bill (Link)
Bringing Pie Charts to a Knife Fight: Medicaid, ACA & Medicare Enrollment by House District (Link)
How much more will ACA enrollees have to pay if the IRA subsidies expire? (Link)
Now, Let’s Get To Work - In last Saturday’s post I offered up some initial ideas of what our summer was going to look like. Please check it out if you haven’t gotten to it yet.
Job 1 for us this summer is fighting Trump’s ruinous economic agenda. We need to keep calling every day and demand our leaders vote down the reconciliation bill and roll back Trump’s terrible tariffs. This is the big, definitional battle of the summer and we need keep working it every day. Those of you in states with Republican Senators have a particularly important role to play.
Here’s a possible script for contacting your offices. Use whatever works for you:
I am calling to urge you to vote against the reconciliation bill and to roll back Trump’s terrible and illegal tariffs. Together these actions have raised taxes on all of us and will explode the deficit - things Republicans have always told us they did not believe in.
But your agenda is also causing all of us to “pay more and get less” for every day things including our health care; people to loses their jobs; and the economy to slow - all so you can give your rich donors a huge tax break. Your plans will weaken this great country and are an extraordinary betrayal of everything you promised during the campaign - which was to help people like me, not Elon Musk, get ahead.
Your plans are ones of sabotage, surrender and betrayal and I urge you to abandon them and to work with Democrats to find a better way.
I know many of you are involved in the June 14th No Kings events, town halls, Telsa take downs and all the other in person activities that have taken off of late. Thank you, and do keep working it everyone. I am still encouraging our community to explore ideas for how we can Own The Fourth and make our Independence Day an ugly day for our mad wannabe king. Hopium Merch is coming soon, and be sure to check our robust Events schedule as new events are being added daily.
Please self-report your activities to our daily paid subscriber chat. These reports help inspire me and I am sure others to do more, fight harder.
There are three additional efforts we’re working on now:
1 - Help Abigail Spanberger Win Virginia - Simply, the Virginia elections are the most important elections we have this year, and we must win them. We have narrow majorities in both legislative chambers and while our candidate Abigail Spanberger has a modest lead in current polling, this is going to be a close election where our money and volunteer time can make a real difference. If you are to give to only one candidate or election this year it should be this one. Here’s a link to do so today……
To learn more about Abigail check out my new discussion with her, watch her new TV ad, or head over to her campaign website We have now raised over $119,000 towards our June 30th goal of $200,000 - thank you all! We need to keep working it everyone!
2 - Support The Hopium House 7 - We’ve begun our work to help flip the House next year by supporting and shoring up the 7 newly-elected battleground House Dems we helped elect last year. Catch our interviews with Reps Derek Tran, Janelle Bynum, Tom Suozzi and Laura Gillen and give to all 7 through a single donation on our ActBlue page. Learn more about this important effort here.
We’ve already raised over $117,000 towards our $200,000 June 30th goal - great work everyone!
We also have ongoing campaigns to raise money for the new DNC, support the North Carolina Democratic Party and to thank Senator Cory Booker for his spirited leadership in a time of enormous challenge.
3 - Growing Hopium - We’ve set a goal of trying to grow the Hopium community from the 151,000 we are now to 175,000 by Labor Day. Do what you can to encourage your friends, family and colleagues to become a summer subscriber to Hopium, free or paid. To encourage the growth of our community annual paid subscriptions are 10% off through Labor Day too!
Keep working hard all. Some welcome progress today, and yes, lots more to do - Simon
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