New Biden Ad, Happy Fourth, and A Big, Big Thank You

Jane Kleeb Reports In From Nebraska With A Video Message For The Hopium Community!

Happy Fourth all. Much to honor and cherish this year. Much to reflect on. Much to fight for.

As I’ve been writing Bidenworld needs time and space to process what has happened over the past week and come up with a new plan. The NATO Summit is next week in Washington and the President is rightly focused on ensuring this vital meeting goes well in a period of enormous challenge. The party committees and campaigns will be doing private polling and focus groups to give us a deeper understanding of where are now. Party leaders will be talking and assessing. My assumption is that we will know much more about the next phase of our campaign by the end of next week or early the week after.

Yes there has been some not so good polling in recent days but there has also been good polling. Yesterday we got these three new polls (all polls can be found on 538):

• Ipsos/Reuters 40%-40% - Biden gains 2

• TIPP 43%-41% - Biden gains 2

• Bullfinch PA Biden 45%-44% - 1st Biden lead in PA in some time

The polling is not all moving in the same direction right now, and we need to be careful about jumping to conclusions based on a single poll. In addition to the polls above, a new CNN poll showed no movement in the race, as did a new Morning Consult poll and the Biden campaign’s own internal polling. As we’ve discussed here there is a lot of evidence that the debate did meaningful damage to Trump, so it’s my bet that if the race has moved, it will be a slight movement against Biden, not a big one as voters are not as inured to Trump’s ugliness and danger as the DC commentariat.

I think the writeup of a new Yahoo/YouGov poll which showed very little movement since early June captures where we are in this early post-debate polling:

A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll confirms what most viewers sensed after last Thursday’s presidential debate: that it was a disastrous night for the 81-year-old President Biden, who looked unsteady, sounded sick, stumbled over his words and, at one point, lost his train of thought entirely.

A full 60% of Americans, for instance, now say Biden is not “fit to serve another term as president.” Just 24% say he is fit. The president’s fitness rating has only been that low once before, in November 2023, and it has never been worse.

Yet the survey of 1,754 U.S. adults, which was conducted from June 28 to July 1, also shows that Biden (43%) remains statistically tied with his Republican rival, former President Donald Trump (45%), in a head-to-head matchup among registered voters — even after a performance that seemed to substantiate long-standing concerns about the president’s age and competence going forward.

In short, Biden’s vulnerability has never been more apparent — but Trump remains too flawed to fully capitalize.

I also want to point out one thing from the new CNN poll that will be of interest to folks, as it comes up here a lot. In their head to heads right now it is:

• Trump 49 Biden 43

• Trimp 47 Harris 45

This new data suggests that Harris is bringing more to the ticket, particularly with younger voters and voters of color, than is commonly understood right now. We should all be looking at this dynamic more carefully in the coming days.

The campaign and our fight against MAGA continues, and while we should rest up this weekend we need to come back on Monday ready to go. The election today remains close and competitive, and we just have to go out there and win this thing, together. The Biden campaign is not letting up and just released a very good new ad which will be running in the battlegrounds. We should be sharing it far and wide through out networks:

So, our work for our candidates and state parties continues:

• Biden-Harris - $557,000 today, $750,000 goal - Donate | Volunteer | Learn More

• Winning The House - $476,000 today, $750,000 goal - Donate | Volunteer | Learn More

• North Carolina - $311,000 today, $500,000 goal - Donate | Volunteer | Learn More | Watch my interview with NC Dem Chair Anderson Clayton

• Arizona/Ruben Gallego - $277,000 today, $300,000 goal - Donate | Volunteer | Learn More | Watch my interview with Ruben Gallego

• Nebraska/Blue Dot - $108,000 today, $150,000 goal- Donate | Volunteer | Learn More | Watch my interview with NE Dem Chair Jane Kleeb

Here’s a video our friend Jane Kleeb just sent thanking the Hopium community for our investment in her and Nebraska’s blue dot. Do watch - it’s awesome!

Here’s how you can do even more:

• Watch our interviews with Janelle Bynum (OR-5), George Whitesides (CA-27), Kirsten Engel (AZ-06) and Andrei Cherny (AZ-01)

• Volunteer for the Biden-Harris campaign - Their phonebanks into the battleground are ratcheting up next week. I am going to do at least one shift - can you join me?

• Join me and Anderson Clayton in Raleigh on Friday, July 19th by donating to the NCDP Unity Dinner and signing up here

• Commit to Vote on Day 1 and get everyone you know to join you

Save the date for these upcoming Hopium events, registration links coming soon:

• Wed, July 10, 1pm ET - Hopium Founding Member Monthly Gathering

• Thur, July 11, 7pm ET - Hopium Paid Subscriber Monthly Gathering

• Tues, July 23, 7pm ET - Hopium-wide Monthly Gathering

Finally, I just want to thank everyone here in Hopium land, particularly our paid subscribers. This Hopium project and the community we are building together has been far more successful and meaningful than I could ever anticipated. A few days ago we gained our 10,000th paid subscriber, a big milestone that makes us a Substack “bestseller” -

I launched Hopium Chronicles last March because I felt in this time of enormous challenge I needed to do more, to find my highest and best use for our democracy and great country. I had more to give and needed a way to channel it all. Here’s what I wrote on our first day, March 7th, 2023:

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.

And together, since March of last year, we have been fighting and winning in races all across the country. But we have one big one left to win this year, so rest up, celebrate our independence and freedoms, fly your flag ride-side up not upside down, and let’s come back on Monday ready to go.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be in community with all of you, to be in this fight together. There is no place I would rather be on this July Fourth holiday than with all of you.

I will be off until the 8th, hopefully. See you all soon, keep working hard and a big big thank you - Simon