Holy Hell - an actual journalist in the wild!! And caught on tape!! Truly, I thought the species extinct but maybe Jim DeFede will restore the fourth estate to its former glory. Happy Hump Day, family!
I think there are still actual journalists, but they get weeded out the higher you get on the food chain. So they are very rare indeed in the NATIONAL media.
Go Jim DeFede !!! Jason Garcia/Seeking Rents is also another excellent investigative reporter exposing all things Republi-cretin in the sunshine state. 😎
love, love, love the MeidasTouch video, and the pic of the English bulldog (I grew up with an English bulldog named Pamela--sweetest dog ever on planet Earth)
You can use archive.is to read it without a subscription. But this article isn't actually worth reading IMO - it's an economist giving a doomy prediction about the future of the US dollar, but there's no actual substance to it. Meanwhile the US economy is growing faster than almost any other developed economy.
I don't know what Simon thinks, but I think this person is trying to spread doom about the US economy so that his crypto investments will pay off. There's zero substance to this article or to his prediction.
I have lots of moderate and liberal friends who are skeptical/terrified about 2024. They really worried about the electoral college. Can you suggest any data I can access showing Biden's current prospects in the battleground states?
Simon....do you have any insights into the efforts of the National Popular Vote Compact? This would effectively get rid of the electoral college without a constitutional amendment. It started out well, but seems to have lost some traction.
Me too. We all have to be Simons within out networks. I have several nervous friends who I keep on having the same conversation with. “I’d rather be us than them.” It’s starting to work! The other day, my best client and most nervous friend (who WhatsApps me every time the NYT does a doom and gloom with a link) send me a VM that he was in the car with his 90 year mom and her three friends and read my Simonesqe “calm down and work” response and reported that they loved it and wanted my friend to share more of the same. He really should just go back and read older posts on our thread! But, keep it up. It’s starting to work! Go Team.
I just listened to you on The Enemies List with Rick Wilson & it seems to me that a branding opportunity has presented itself: the GOP is the Party of Assault. They assault POC, LGTBQ, immigrants, single women, pregnant women, powerful women, voting rights & democracy itself. They assaulted the Capitol, want to shoot migrants at the border, capitulate to Putin’s assault on Ukraine. They want every one on their side to buy an assault rifle and carry it around in public. They wear assault rifle pins on their lapels in the House of Representatives! Their standard bearer has himself been adjudicated as having perpetrated a sexual assault on a 55 year old woman who he went on to mercilessly defame, bully & intimidate a quarter of a century later. Dems, the Lincoln Project and anyone else with a platform should hang this brand around the GOP’s neck from now until they get their sh*t together and denounce all of these things.
Yes but they have had their enablers on the Dem side on this issue; Arne Duncan, Rahm Emmanuel, Jonathan Alter ( I've forgiven him a bit for this, it's been a long time ) who preferred to listen to the Bill Gates' of the world who thought they could run schools like the tech business.
Yes indeed. Loud and Proud--and working so hard on behalf of the country we love. Fantastic, seeing you on so many platforms. It is a lot--preparation, organization and just plain hard work. Thank you, Simon!
Agree. And the cross-tabs for the Bloomberg polls show very unlikely shifts in preference among younger voters. If you take them at face value, Biden is underwater with 18-29 yo and just barely above for 30-44 yo. Contrast that with the new YouGov poll today that has Biden up 20 with 18-29 yo and 18 with 30-44 yo, which is much closer to past behavior and the Harvard youth poll from late last year. Something odd is going on -- some polls just don't seem to be capturing the electorate well. Here's an interesting discussion of that: https://dellavolpe.substack.com/p/whos-winning-the-youth-vote-depends
I would trust Della Volpe's ideas more than anyone's on the youth vote. The only explanation I hear is that Biden is bleeding the youth vote, including Black youth, over Gaza. There is a concerted effort in the media and on left wing sites to paint Biden and Blinken as responsible for genocide. It is suspicious that so many young people would be so invested in a part of the world they likely know very little about; calling Israelis colonizers in the area must come as a shock to a people who had an ancient kingdom led by the likes of Kings David and Solomon....the history is long and complicated, and the current troubles are actually a more recent historical development, coming out of the conflicts between the decline of colonial empires, Zionism and Pan Arabism. There are no easy answers here. Those who think they have one are ill-informed. I will say this; the R's are calling for a widening of any wars in the Middle East and calling Biden a coward if he doesn't attack Iran. Do the youth of America think that a trump administration would favor peace in the area? And thanks for that Della Volpe analysis. Using landlines to conduct polls in this day and age is probably not a good way to gather accurate data.
To me, the most important three points to make about these polls with Trump leading are 1) If those showed Biden ahead, would we be resting easy or be panicking that they would lull us into complacency like they did in 2016? 2) Polls showing Trump winning the popular vote show a massive swing in his direction based on ??? 3) The winner of this election will be the candidate whose campaign does the best job getting out the vote with an effective ground operation. That means that we need everyone who went to the polls in 2020, 2022, and 2023 to vote against the GOP to be just as determined now as they were then. If anything, they are more determined. Nothing turns out democratic voters like the smirking orange face of Pervert Hoover.
I'm wondering if you have any inside information as to the effectiveness of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the organization's political arm. I listened to their 'executive' briefing membership event last week and was impressed by their speakers, but they gave little concrete advise as to what plan of action we as individuals could take besides donating to the Fund itself. Do you think this is a could use of donation dollars?
Donated and forwarded your newsletter to all my friends - again! Thank you also for not only always highlighting important data (which I share through my fam/friends newsletter), but also for constantly hitting on mindset - I actually think those are the two most important things and appreciate the tools you give us to make a difference in our community. 🩵
I Heard the Rick Wilson interview this morning while taking my morning walk; overcast and dark with sleet turning to rain, I was feeling down after switching off Bloomberg, who had to lead with the Morning Consult poll showing trump ahead and some other stuff about Biden being blamed for the border crisis " in the swing states" none of which are experiencing a border crisis as far as I can tell; then Simon gets on with the indomitable Rick Wilson and you hear two people who know politics describe trump's antics, and you walk away thinking there's no way on earth trump can be elected again. Simon, you said something about trump wearing a girdle and spray tanning and I found myself laughing out loud in the dark at 6am in the mall parking lot with a bunch of Millennials ( who go to the local gym in the mall before work ) staring at this late boomer ( born in late 62 ) who I'm sure they think is nuts ( walking outside in the sleet? ). It brightened my day, even though we have not actually seen the sun since around New Year's here!
I like Simon's focused messaging, but there are some other points I'd like to see being circulated. We have a very engaged electorate and lots of media through which to propagate our message, so we have the resources to fight on several fronts at once.
1. Trump’s a convicted rapist. A jury of his peers concluded that he raped a woman. Campaign surrogates should say this all the time, and combine it with his stated intention to ban abortions. He hates women and believes he has the right to control their bodies, both physically and legislatively. This will connect viscerally with all the women who have personally experienced this kind of treatment from men (i.e., all women). It will help motivate the female voters who voted against the GOP in 2020 and 2022 to do so again. This is the message: “Ask E. Jean Carroll (roll tape). Ask Trump himself (roll tape). He grabs women by the p***y whenever he gets the chance. If he’s president again, you [the female American voter] will be next.” The idea of Trump as a rapist is powerful because it really clarifies how the Dobbs decision has nothing to do with fetuses and everything to do with a deep hatred of women and a desire to control their bodies. He forces his will on women and strips them of their right to say no, both literally and politically.
2. He’s only running to stay out of prison. I think this is a strong message. Tell voters “He doesn’t care about you, your finances, your family, your health care, or your rights. He is a desperate man who sees the White House as his only way to avoid going to jail,” or “Would you feel safe getting in a car with a driver who is on the run from the law and facing life in prison?” This can be used to undercut his claims to be concerned about trade or the border. We need messages like “He says he cares about immigration, but all he really cares about is trying to stay out of jail,” or “Biden is running to protect your rights/save our environment/expand the ACA to give all Americans access to health care/fix our broken immigration system. Convicted rapist and scam artist Trump is running out of desperation—because he’s running out of time.”
3. As a variation on #3, we could talk about his downfall as already in progress and stress the unimaginable chaos that will accompany a sitting president being dragged from the White House in handcuffs. Emphasize that Trump knows that by running for president as he desperately tries to avoid jail, he is leading the country into economic collapase and weakening us in front of our enemies Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea. Our messages can be “It’s not IF he’s going to prison, it’s WHEN,” or “There’s no doubt he’s going down in flames, the only question is whether he’s going to take you and your family down with him when he does,” or “He’s going to prison. He knows it. You know it. America’s enemies know it. And they’re waiting.” As a pro-Biden message, we could say, “Joe Biden puts American workers and families first. Donald Trump wants to put American workers and families between him and the consequences. This sniveling coward will push the American people in front of a train to avoid facing justice.” Images of him cowering behind a voter would really get this message.
4. I have a theory that people who tell pollsters they trust Republicans more than Dems on the economy are really saying that they see Republicans as concerned with money (a relic of the old GOP’s tax-cutting and budget-slashing agenda) while they see Democrats as concerned with moral issues like protecting people’s rights and protecting the environment. The fact that exit polls sometimes show that more people trusted Republicans on the economy than actually voted for Republicans is telling. It only reflects a basic and unreflective categorization on voters’ part of the GOP as the party of the rich and the Dems as the party of the not-rich, rather than some firm belief that they will financially be better off under the GOP. It’s just a shorthand way of distinguishing the parties. But with Trump, we can undermine this message by portraying him as a fake billionaire and a failure of a businessperson. We need messages like “He’s not a businessman, he just played one on TV,” or “Trump bankrupted his own company, and if he’s president, he’ll bankrupt us too,” or “Trump is the greatest job-killer in American history.” To combine this message with a pro-Biden message: “Biden creates jobs. Trump creates nothing but drama.” #1 and #3 can be combined in the epithet “Pervert Hoover” which I heard on Meidas Touch and thought was pretty great.
5. Trump’s a loser. People don’t want to vote for a loser. Even GOP talking heads and Fox News are upset about the losses in 2018, 2020, and 2022. We need to paint Trump as a man too vain to admit he’s a loser and do the honorable thing for his party, which drives swing voters away and makes the base feel ignored by their own party leaders. We need to present the GOP as trying the same thing again and again and expecting different results. We need to give GOP voters an excuse to abandon them to teach the hated party leadership a lesson about refusing to learn from their mistakes or listen to their voters. We need to convince likely GOP voters that they are throwing their votes away because their party is out of touch with the American people and completely under the control of billionaires like Elon Musk, whom everyone hates.
6. Target Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio. The chaos in Texas is an opportunity. Even if we can’t win it, we can make them devote unanticipated resources to it (resources that would have to be diverted from elsewhere) and put them on the defense. The humiliation of DeSantis, the scandal-plagued Florida GOP, the abortion amendment on the ballot (with support from GOP women), and our recent electoral successes create an opportunity there. Simon has already identified my home state of North Carolina, where I agree there is an opportunity. And my current state of Ohio, where we just passed the pro-choice Issue 1 by a huge margin, where the gerrymandered state house is way to the right of voters, and where Sherrod Brown is up for re-election, there is an opportunity. Tim Ryan ran a working-class campaign (like the one Brown should run) and lost to a GOP celebrity candidate, but he made them work a lot harder for it than they thought they were going to have to and thereby helped us hold the senate indirectly. As Simon and others have noted, the GOP took the house in 2022 only because of the GOP candidates who won in NY and California, places where MAGA was out of the spotlight and Dems weren’t running full-on campaign machinery. There should be NO PLACE matching that description in this campaign. VSA, Swing Left, Indivisible, and everybody else need to make the GOP face painful decisions about what areas to abandon so they can focus on shoring up R-leaning districts and they need to do that very early on. Expand the map and reach out to Dem voters in red states.
7. We should also target Trump’s intractable supporters with messages to dampen their enthusiasm for voting in this election by exploiting their mistrust of voting in general. Hardcore Trumpers think he won in 2020 but was denied the presidency because of some massive fraud orchestrated and covered up by every government official (Republican and Democrat) at every level of government from as high as Mike Pence all the way down to some poor county commissioner in Georgia. They have absolutely no reason to believe it won’t just happen again in 2024. People who think their votes don’t matter because the whole thing is a scam aren’t going to be motivated to go stand in line and vote. This really belongs to the “dark arts” category of political messaging, but it’s a GOP weakness no one talks about. Trump’s main message to his voters over the past four years is “You voted for me. I won. But ‘globalist elites’ (i.e., ‘Jews’) stole the election.” This is hardly a good GOTV strategy. Considering how suspicious they are even of their own primaries, they can only believe that the conspiracy to keep the rightful king off his throne is even more powerful now than it was before, and that it reaches right into the heart of their own party. This belief is more likely to push them toward complete disengagement than toward voting, let alone knocking on doors, making calls, sending out postcards, and doing all the grassroots things a campaign needs its supporters to do.
Just saw this great news from Chair Clayton from the NC Dems! I’ve sent a few donations their way thanks to the Hopium Chronicled bringing them to my awareness, and I hope everyone else has too! 😎🇺🇸
Holy Hell - an actual journalist in the wild!! And caught on tape!! Truly, I thought the species extinct but maybe Jim DeFede will restore the fourth estate to its former glory. Happy Hump Day, family!
I think there are still actual journalists, but they get weeded out the higher you get on the food chain. So they are very rare indeed in the NATIONAL media.
“I’m not trying to be a politician.”😂😂
Go Jim DeFede !!! Jason Garcia/Seeking Rents is also another excellent investigative reporter exposing all things Republi-cretin in the sunshine state. 😎
Saw you on MeidasTouch . I’m a subscriber. Great segment. You were your usual terrific self. I encourage everyone to check it out.
love, love, love the MeidasTouch video, and the pic of the English bulldog (I grew up with an English bulldog named Pamela--sweetest dog ever on planet Earth)
"secession" not "succession" please. :-)
A righteous rant for a morning. Many thanks!
thank you! Fixed on line. I make an error or two a day, and it's always to fun to see how quickly folks catch them each day!
That’s “too” fun Simon....as long as we’re catching errors 🤷♂️😂
What should we think about this, Simon?
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/27/business/dick-bove-retirement.html?campaign_id=190&emc=edit_ufn_20240131&instance_id=113954&nl=from-the-times®i_id=62736632&segment_id=156901&te=1&user_id=1954281691901575042ea1071c8ea6b0
Not all of us have a subscription to the NY Times. Can you give us the gist of the article? Thanks!
You can use archive.is to read it without a subscription. But this article isn't actually worth reading IMO - it's an economist giving a doomy prediction about the future of the US dollar, but there's no actual substance to it. Meanwhile the US economy is growing faster than almost any other developed economy.
I don't know what Simon thinks, but I think this person is trying to spread doom about the US economy so that his crypto investments will pay off. There's zero substance to this article or to his prediction.
It truly is a classic NYT nothing-burger that ultimately is not worth sharing. A dramatic headline with no meat. Apologies for posting.
Simon
I'm very optimistic about 2024 like yourself.
I have lots of moderate and liberal friends who are skeptical/terrified about 2024. They really worried about the electoral college. Can you suggest any data I can access showing Biden's current prospects in the battleground states?
Tks
will try to address tomorrow
Simon....do you have any insights into the efforts of the National Popular Vote Compact? This would effectively get rid of the electoral college without a constitutional amendment. It started out well, but seems to have lost some traction.
Me too. We all have to be Simons within out networks. I have several nervous friends who I keep on having the same conversation with. “I’d rather be us than them.” It’s starting to work! The other day, my best client and most nervous friend (who WhatsApps me every time the NYT does a doom and gloom with a link) send me a VM that he was in the car with his 90 year mom and her three friends and read my Simonesqe “calm down and work” response and reported that they loved it and wanted my friend to share more of the same. He really should just go back and read older posts on our thread! But, keep it up. It’s starting to work! Go Team.
Undeniably accurate: maga base has seceded from the country we live in.
I just listened to you on The Enemies List with Rick Wilson & it seems to me that a branding opportunity has presented itself: the GOP is the Party of Assault. They assault POC, LGTBQ, immigrants, single women, pregnant women, powerful women, voting rights & democracy itself. They assaulted the Capitol, want to shoot migrants at the border, capitulate to Putin’s assault on Ukraine. They want every one on their side to buy an assault rifle and carry it around in public. They wear assault rifle pins on their lapels in the House of Representatives! Their standard bearer has himself been adjudicated as having perpetrated a sexual assault on a 55 year old woman who he went on to mercilessly defame, bully & intimidate a quarter of a century later. Dems, the Lincoln Project and anyone else with a platform should hang this brand around the GOP’s neck from now until they get their sh*t together and denounce all of these things.
I forget to add that the GOP has perpetrated a decades-long assault on public schools and education.
Yes but they have had their enablers on the Dem side on this issue; Arne Duncan, Rahm Emmanuel, Jonathan Alter ( I've forgiven him a bit for this, it's been a long time ) who preferred to listen to the Bill Gates' of the world who thought they could run schools like the tech business.
Yes indeed. Loud and Proud--and working so hard on behalf of the country we love. Fantastic, seeing you on so many platforms. It is a lot--preparation, organization and just plain hard work. Thank you, Simon!
Don’t freak out about the Bloomberg/Morning Consult state polls - Simon and Tom Bonier have done enough to reassure us on how these things work.
Biden campaign is kicking into full gear. They’re doing great so far. Raising $$, actual votes - that’s what really matters.
Agree. And the cross-tabs for the Bloomberg polls show very unlikely shifts in preference among younger voters. If you take them at face value, Biden is underwater with 18-29 yo and just barely above for 30-44 yo. Contrast that with the new YouGov poll today that has Biden up 20 with 18-29 yo and 18 with 30-44 yo, which is much closer to past behavior and the Harvard youth poll from late last year. Something odd is going on -- some polls just don't seem to be capturing the electorate well. Here's an interesting discussion of that: https://dellavolpe.substack.com/p/whos-winning-the-youth-vote-depends
I would trust Della Volpe's ideas more than anyone's on the youth vote. The only explanation I hear is that Biden is bleeding the youth vote, including Black youth, over Gaza. There is a concerted effort in the media and on left wing sites to paint Biden and Blinken as responsible for genocide. It is suspicious that so many young people would be so invested in a part of the world they likely know very little about; calling Israelis colonizers in the area must come as a shock to a people who had an ancient kingdom led by the likes of Kings David and Solomon....the history is long and complicated, and the current troubles are actually a more recent historical development, coming out of the conflicts between the decline of colonial empires, Zionism and Pan Arabism. There are no easy answers here. Those who think they have one are ill-informed. I will say this; the R's are calling for a widening of any wars in the Middle East and calling Biden a coward if he doesn't attack Iran. Do the youth of America think that a trump administration would favor peace in the area? And thanks for that Della Volpe analysis. Using landlines to conduct polls in this day and age is probably not a good way to gather accurate data.
Remember this one? https://www.monmouth.edu/polling-institute/reports/monmouthpoll_us_021120/
To me, the most important three points to make about these polls with Trump leading are 1) If those showed Biden ahead, would we be resting easy or be panicking that they would lull us into complacency like they did in 2016? 2) Polls showing Trump winning the popular vote show a massive swing in his direction based on ??? 3) The winner of this election will be the candidate whose campaign does the best job getting out the vote with an effective ground operation. That means that we need everyone who went to the polls in 2020, 2022, and 2023 to vote against the GOP to be just as determined now as they were then. If anything, they are more determined. Nothing turns out democratic voters like the smirking orange face of Pervert Hoover.
Simon
I'm wondering if you have any inside information as to the effectiveness of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the organization's political arm. I listened to their 'executive' briefing membership event last week and was impressed by their speakers, but they gave little concrete advise as to what plan of action we as individuals could take besides donating to the Fund itself. Do you think this is a could use of donation dollars?
Donated and forwarded your newsletter to all my friends - again! Thank you also for not only always highlighting important data (which I share through my fam/friends newsletter), but also for constantly hitting on mindset - I actually think those are the two most important things and appreciate the tools you give us to make a difference in our community. 🩵
Thanks Simon,
I'm looking forward to your guidance.
I Heard the Rick Wilson interview this morning while taking my morning walk; overcast and dark with sleet turning to rain, I was feeling down after switching off Bloomberg, who had to lead with the Morning Consult poll showing trump ahead and some other stuff about Biden being blamed for the border crisis " in the swing states" none of which are experiencing a border crisis as far as I can tell; then Simon gets on with the indomitable Rick Wilson and you hear two people who know politics describe trump's antics, and you walk away thinking there's no way on earth trump can be elected again. Simon, you said something about trump wearing a girdle and spray tanning and I found myself laughing out loud in the dark at 6am in the mall parking lot with a bunch of Millennials ( who go to the local gym in the mall before work ) staring at this late boomer ( born in late 62 ) who I'm sure they think is nuts ( walking outside in the sleet? ). It brightened my day, even though we have not actually seen the sun since around New Year's here!
I like Simon's focused messaging, but there are some other points I'd like to see being circulated. We have a very engaged electorate and lots of media through which to propagate our message, so we have the resources to fight on several fronts at once.
1. Trump’s a convicted rapist. A jury of his peers concluded that he raped a woman. Campaign surrogates should say this all the time, and combine it with his stated intention to ban abortions. He hates women and believes he has the right to control their bodies, both physically and legislatively. This will connect viscerally with all the women who have personally experienced this kind of treatment from men (i.e., all women). It will help motivate the female voters who voted against the GOP in 2020 and 2022 to do so again. This is the message: “Ask E. Jean Carroll (roll tape). Ask Trump himself (roll tape). He grabs women by the p***y whenever he gets the chance. If he’s president again, you [the female American voter] will be next.” The idea of Trump as a rapist is powerful because it really clarifies how the Dobbs decision has nothing to do with fetuses and everything to do with a deep hatred of women and a desire to control their bodies. He forces his will on women and strips them of their right to say no, both literally and politically.
2. He’s only running to stay out of prison. I think this is a strong message. Tell voters “He doesn’t care about you, your finances, your family, your health care, or your rights. He is a desperate man who sees the White House as his only way to avoid going to jail,” or “Would you feel safe getting in a car with a driver who is on the run from the law and facing life in prison?” This can be used to undercut his claims to be concerned about trade or the border. We need messages like “He says he cares about immigration, but all he really cares about is trying to stay out of jail,” or “Biden is running to protect your rights/save our environment/expand the ACA to give all Americans access to health care/fix our broken immigration system. Convicted rapist and scam artist Trump is running out of desperation—because he’s running out of time.”
3. As a variation on #3, we could talk about his downfall as already in progress and stress the unimaginable chaos that will accompany a sitting president being dragged from the White House in handcuffs. Emphasize that Trump knows that by running for president as he desperately tries to avoid jail, he is leading the country into economic collapase and weakening us in front of our enemies Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea. Our messages can be “It’s not IF he’s going to prison, it’s WHEN,” or “There’s no doubt he’s going down in flames, the only question is whether he’s going to take you and your family down with him when he does,” or “He’s going to prison. He knows it. You know it. America’s enemies know it. And they’re waiting.” As a pro-Biden message, we could say, “Joe Biden puts American workers and families first. Donald Trump wants to put American workers and families between him and the consequences. This sniveling coward will push the American people in front of a train to avoid facing justice.” Images of him cowering behind a voter would really get this message.
4. I have a theory that people who tell pollsters they trust Republicans more than Dems on the economy are really saying that they see Republicans as concerned with money (a relic of the old GOP’s tax-cutting and budget-slashing agenda) while they see Democrats as concerned with moral issues like protecting people’s rights and protecting the environment. The fact that exit polls sometimes show that more people trusted Republicans on the economy than actually voted for Republicans is telling. It only reflects a basic and unreflective categorization on voters’ part of the GOP as the party of the rich and the Dems as the party of the not-rich, rather than some firm belief that they will financially be better off under the GOP. It’s just a shorthand way of distinguishing the parties. But with Trump, we can undermine this message by portraying him as a fake billionaire and a failure of a businessperson. We need messages like “He’s not a businessman, he just played one on TV,” or “Trump bankrupted his own company, and if he’s president, he’ll bankrupt us too,” or “Trump is the greatest job-killer in American history.” To combine this message with a pro-Biden message: “Biden creates jobs. Trump creates nothing but drama.” #1 and #3 can be combined in the epithet “Pervert Hoover” which I heard on Meidas Touch and thought was pretty great.
5. Trump’s a loser. People don’t want to vote for a loser. Even GOP talking heads and Fox News are upset about the losses in 2018, 2020, and 2022. We need to paint Trump as a man too vain to admit he’s a loser and do the honorable thing for his party, which drives swing voters away and makes the base feel ignored by their own party leaders. We need to present the GOP as trying the same thing again and again and expecting different results. We need to give GOP voters an excuse to abandon them to teach the hated party leadership a lesson about refusing to learn from their mistakes or listen to their voters. We need to convince likely GOP voters that they are throwing their votes away because their party is out of touch with the American people and completely under the control of billionaires like Elon Musk, whom everyone hates.
6. Target Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio. The chaos in Texas is an opportunity. Even if we can’t win it, we can make them devote unanticipated resources to it (resources that would have to be diverted from elsewhere) and put them on the defense. The humiliation of DeSantis, the scandal-plagued Florida GOP, the abortion amendment on the ballot (with support from GOP women), and our recent electoral successes create an opportunity there. Simon has already identified my home state of North Carolina, where I agree there is an opportunity. And my current state of Ohio, where we just passed the pro-choice Issue 1 by a huge margin, where the gerrymandered state house is way to the right of voters, and where Sherrod Brown is up for re-election, there is an opportunity. Tim Ryan ran a working-class campaign (like the one Brown should run) and lost to a GOP celebrity candidate, but he made them work a lot harder for it than they thought they were going to have to and thereby helped us hold the senate indirectly. As Simon and others have noted, the GOP took the house in 2022 only because of the GOP candidates who won in NY and California, places where MAGA was out of the spotlight and Dems weren’t running full-on campaign machinery. There should be NO PLACE matching that description in this campaign. VSA, Swing Left, Indivisible, and everybody else need to make the GOP face painful decisions about what areas to abandon so they can focus on shoring up R-leaning districts and they need to do that very early on. Expand the map and reach out to Dem voters in red states.
7. We should also target Trump’s intractable supporters with messages to dampen their enthusiasm for voting in this election by exploiting their mistrust of voting in general. Hardcore Trumpers think he won in 2020 but was denied the presidency because of some massive fraud orchestrated and covered up by every government official (Republican and Democrat) at every level of government from as high as Mike Pence all the way down to some poor county commissioner in Georgia. They have absolutely no reason to believe it won’t just happen again in 2024. People who think their votes don’t matter because the whole thing is a scam aren’t going to be motivated to go stand in line and vote. This really belongs to the “dark arts” category of political messaging, but it’s a GOP weakness no one talks about. Trump’s main message to his voters over the past four years is “You voted for me. I won. But ‘globalist elites’ (i.e., ‘Jews’) stole the election.” This is hardly a good GOTV strategy. Considering how suspicious they are even of their own primaries, they can only believe that the conspiracy to keep the rightful king off his throne is even more powerful now than it was before, and that it reaches right into the heart of their own party. This belief is more likely to push them toward complete disengagement than toward voting, let alone knocking on doors, making calls, sending out postcards, and doing all the grassroots things a campaign needs its supporters to do.
Just saw this great news from Chair Clayton from the NC Dems! I’ve sent a few donations their way thanks to the Hopium Chronicled bringing them to my awareness, and I hope everyone else has too! 😎🇺🇸
https://x.com/abreezeclayton/status/1752768496503578900?s=20
(Gist is, NC Rs are in debt by a couple hundred thousand bucks, and NC Ds have nearly 4 million in cash on hand 😁)