Good morning all. Hopium paid subscribers gathered last night for one of our regular live gatherings, the first of the new year. I send along the video recording above. A transcript is also available. It was a lively and comprehensive session about what happened in the election and what comes next for our politics and for Hopium itself. I hope you will watch or listen and share with others you think might find this post and the video of interest.
In our gathering last night we discussed our important wins in Virginia Tuesday night and how winning Virginia in November of 2025 will be one of our central projects this year; how Democrats have been slow to understand the nature of the conflict we now find ourselves in, and need to dramatically raise our game to compete with greater MAGA here and abroad; how we need to learn how to take, celebrate and build on the wins when they come, stick together, support one another and stay healthy and strong in what is going to be a hard, tough road; how here at Hopium we are going to dive into Trump’s madness, and while we are not going to make it our own we are also going to try to understand it and not dismiss it as performative; how Trump is still the same man we saw during the campaign - weak, craven, corrupt, impulsive and far, far too extreme for the American people, a serial criminal and traitor to America, our democracy and the West, a small, pathetic man not a strongman; how Hopium itself will need to evolve and change to meet the new challenges we face; and how while it is going to be tough, and hard, and ugly, we have to stay in the game and keep fighting for our freedoms, our democracy, our families and our future.
I talked about that very first post I sent you after the Election, “Proud Of You:”
While I am going to go slow, listen, and take my time I do have a few initial thoughts this morning about where we are now and where we are going, together……
Over the past few years we, our country, our leaders, Merrick Garland, the Harris SuperPAC and many, many others failed to adequately indict Trump and explain what an unprecedented threat he was. A rapist, fraudster, traitor and 34 times felon was just elected President. The relentless normalization of his extremism, madness and ugliness, the legacy media’s complicity in reporting on the race not the stakes, was a collective failure of enormous consequence.
Related to point one, I still think many on our side and in the establishment simply do not understand the nature of the conflict America finds itself in today. Trump and his global allies are playing a different game than we are used to. They have invented a whole new deeply illiberal game with all sorts of new pieces and rules. We have been slow, dangerously and recklessly, slow in recognizing how the rules of the game have changed.
It’s why whatever happens next, it is time for the Democratic Party’s generational wheel to turn and for new leaders who are not steeped in and hobbled by old ways to take the helm. We are facing a new battlefield, and more contemporary strategies, tactics, alliances and leaders are required in this next stage of the fight. Now is a time for re-invention, re-imagination, and risk-taking. We need to build a new politics for the American center-left, a more modern one, one more suited to the opportunities and challenges in front of us, a more “networked” one as my friend Joe Trippi would say.
In the our discussion last night I also reviewed my current 7 top takeaways, recommendations and to dos, updated and fresh, still very much a work in progress as I still have many more questions than answers:
1 - It Was A Very Close Election, and We Had Important Wins - Trump won by 1.5 points and fail to reach 50%. 115,000 votes changing in MI, PA, WI and Harris wins. We picked up a seat in the House and were less than 4,000 votes from making Hakeem Jeffries Speaker. We had important downballot wins in AZ, NC, MI, NV, PA, WI. While we have work to do this was a narrow win not a landslide, and our road back is not insurmountable. I go deeper into all this here.
2 - Finding More Voters, Forging A New Majority - The dramatic gains Trump made with Latinos and young people (particularly young men) unraveled the coalition that had gotten us 51% of the vote on average over the last four Presidential elections. We will need to imagine and build a new majority coalition now and need a concerted party wide effort to make gains with voters of all kinds - working class, rural, Latinos, young men, etc.
As part of this strategy we need to make partisan voter registration a core responsibility of the Democratic Party at all levels once again and not leave this important work to outside, non-partisan groups.
3- Getting On The Right Side Of Opportunity/Winning The Big Economic Argument - As I wrote the other day, we need a deep and long conversation about how we can win the big economic argument with MAGA in the coming years. Three consecutive Dem Presidents have left the country far better than we found it. Three consecutive GOP Presidents have been economic and societal wrecking balls. We should not be losing the economic argument to these guys, or losing ground with working class voters given our economic track record. There needs to be urgency about finding a better path here, and it is very possible that Trump’s dangerous economic plans - tariffs, mass deportation, huge tax cuts for wealthy Americans, spending cuts for everyone else - will give us a big opportunity to make our case very soon (sure looks that way!!!).
It is time now for Democrats to move beyond our flaccid and failed “prices are too high” narrative and 1) reconnect our economic arguments to opportunity and prosperity for all 2) tear into his reckless and dangerous economic agenda that is already raising prices, threatening our prosperity and betraying the central promises Trump made to working people in his campaign.
Getting Louder/Building A 24/7/365 Politics - This is a familiar topic for Hopium readers, but there is real urgency here too. For background see my post-election posts on the need for us to get louder here, here, here, here and most recently this one on our need to get far smarter in how we strategically contest the right’s information superiority in our campaigns themselves. I am going to be talking a lot about the need to see the millions of people supporting our campaigns as “partners in the fight, not donors to the cause” and help unlock not just the financial or volunteer potential of our family but also its capacity to become information warriors and ferocious, effective amplifiers.
As I wrote just after the Election getting louder is a central way we address the dangerous drop off in Democratic voters we’ve seen outside the battleground states in both the 2022 and 2024 elections, something Mike Podhorzer discussed in his recently published analysis.
Finally, while we must build out a new pro-democracy media ecosystem, our electeds and Democratic Parties must have urgency, much greater urgency, about raising their comms game, getting louder and contesting the right’s information superiority 24/7/365. House and Senate Dems no longer have the White House or the Presidential campaign to carry the daily load, and are going to have to assume far greater responsibility for mobilizing the current capacities in our family, including the tens of thousands of elected Dems across the US, to aggressive contest MAGA, everyday.
An example of how we have to be thinking now - Senate Dems should have launched a national effort with all allied groups to defeat Trump’s most unacceptable nominees - Gabbard, Hegseth, Kennedy, Patel. Thinking this can get done “in the hearings” is old think, dangerous old think. They operate 24/7/365 movement wide and so must we. Millions of people and hundreds of groups are ready to go to work to challenge Trump 2.0. We need to put them to work.
5 - Develop And Advance A New Agenda Of Renewal and Reform - In a recent post I discussed the need for Democrats to develop a broad agenda for renewal and reform, a topic we’ve been discussing here for many months and one central to my February New Republic essay, Biden Must Reinvent What A Presidential Campaign Is. In this period of opposition we must not only oppose, but must also propose. Far too many voters see Washington as broken and corrupt. We have must have an agenda to speak to them, and use it to highlight the unprecedented illiberalism and corruption of MAGA (as above).
6 - While Focusing On Kitchen Table Issues, We Cannot Leave Behind The Harris-Walz Campaign’s Powerful Embrace of Freedom and Patriotism - We can both be focused on improving the lives of everyday Americans and lean hard into the powerful love of country themes the Vice President advanced during her campaign. This is particularly true in the fights for our personal freedoms and rights of all kinds including reproductive freedom.
For example - Democratic leaders at all levels should be condemning loudly what NC Republicans are doing right now to overturn an election and disqualify the votes of the good people of the Tar Heel State.
7 - We Need To Talk About All These Corrosive Emails Telling Dems We Are Losing, Not Winning And Whether They Contributed To The Troubling Demobilization We Saw in 2024. Again, Democrats across the country need to be treated as “partners in the fight and not donors to the cause.” When folks ask why are Democratic voters and activists perpetually worried and anxious, it’s because the Party and our campaigns are doing everything they can to scare the crap out of everyone and tell them everything is terrible. We have to find a better way.
Finally, I am sharing excerpts from two of my post-election essays, for emphasis and deliberation:
Re-Imagining The Roles Of The DNC, Elected Officials And Grassroots Dems In The Info Wars - As we’ve discussed since the very first day of Hopium, our family has to learn how to be loud not just in our muscular campaigns but every day, 24/7/365. We need to work together to close what I call the loudness gap with the right. We’ve talked here about the need to grow pro-democracy media organizations like Crooked Media, COURIER Newsroom, MeidasTouch, Resolute Square, Deep State Radio and fellow Substackers like Robert Hubbell, Heather Cox Richardson and Timothy Snyder. We’ve talked about the role we all have to play in working our networks each day, getting louder, and becoming more accomplished information warriors for our democracy. Today, I want to talk another piece of a new loudness strategy - the roles of our party committees and elected officials.
First, the DNC and other state parties must become more like MeidasTouch. The DNC has to become a central communications hub of the new opposition, and produce high quality, modern, social and YouTube content everyday both advancing our ideas and leaders, and challenging theirs. As some have mentioned here, elements of the social-based KamalaHQ should be brought into the DNC, and large gatherings of Dems along the lines of White Dudes For Harris should become a regular thing. Our party infrastructure simply has to take on a greater comms responsibility in the 20 months outside of the last 4 months of elections every two years, and large donors in our family should support this strategic evolution.
Next, the relationship between Democrats across the country and our big campaigns and party committees must change. The millions of us who gave and volunteered need to be treated like partners in the fight not just donors to the cause. There has to be a more respectful information based relationship between us, where our campaigns and parties start treating us not only like ATMs but also like proud patriots, information warriors and willing amplifiers. In this networked age we must see the 4-5-6m people who gave this past cycle as a vast information network to be deployed to counter the right’s information superiority. Imagine the Senate/House/DNC doing a training on how to understand and talk about Trump’s tariffs or his mass deportation plans with a million Dems over Zoom? Creating a true and robust center-left amplification network has to be an immediate, 2025 goal.
Finally, our elected officials, every single one of them, at all levels of government, need to get louder in every way possible every day. There has to be a revolution in how we see the role of an elected official, both on the official side and on the campaign side. Electeds need to not only govern and legislate, but also should see themselves as influencers and info warriors with enormous platforms to help shape the information environment every day, 24/7/365. Simply, they have to work it as hard as they can, every day, using all the tools at their disposal.
Party leaders should work to create a new baseline of understanding of how people get their information these days to help every person in this process become more effective. Classes and training should be required for all electeds and their staffs, and best practices shared.
In the last Congress we saw examples of where we need to go. House Members like AOC, Eric Swalwell, Jamie Raskin, Maxwell Frost, Jeff Jackson, Jasmine Crockett and Jerad Moskowitz were effective at creating “hot moments’ which broke through the noise and went viral. These kinds of tactics are going to become far more important now in this period of opposition.
The world has changed and we need to change with it or be left behind.
……….
Been doing a lot of thinking about my 2022 Two Elections take that postulated there were two elections in 2022 - a bluer one inside the battleground, a redder one outside. The reason the battlegrounds were bluer in 2022 the theory goes was due to our financial and organizational advantage (all of you) that allowed us to control the information environment and push our on the ground performance to the upper end of what was possible. However, where we did not have those campaigns, and the right maintained information superiority, we fell behind. This trend was most acute in large Dem states like CA and NY, where we saw a huge Dem drop-off in performance.
We are seeing some of that same dynamic this time. While the nation moved about six points to the right from 2020 it moved less in the battlegrounds where we deployed our big campaigns and where the Dem Senate did too. But this year we once again saw drop-off in big Dem states where we did not have competitive campaigns. To me all this means two things:
We may have to start running noisy, spectacle filled campaigns in every state every election cycle or expect drop-off, underperformance
We have to build a far better permanent center-left based media ecosystem to compete with what the right has built. As powerful as the right’s propaganda effort has been, it got more powerful with the addition of Twitter this year and the rightward movement of some legacy media. It will become powerful still when Trump is back in the White House. There is great urgency to this work.
We have a loudness problem on our side that simply must be addressed strategically across the entire party in every state and across the country. Our muscular campaigns allow us to close the info and loudness gap with the right every two years. And while our rigorous targeting allows us to concentrate our firepower and be competitive, we have to do more to be competitive and win the national conversation every day, something all of our hyper-targeting of media markets and narrow persuadable groups doesn’t do for us. We have to be speaking every day to all parts of our coalition, and not just a handful of swing voters and their concerns in a few battleground states. For if we don’t do this, our campaigns will end up always playing defense in a right-constructed frame, that, among other things, discourages us from talking about all the good we do as a party - for right-adjacent groups never believe any of that. All they know is the bad - high inflation, trans, the border, crime - and thus the campaign and data ecosystem tells us not to even try to challenge it. It’s too baked in. Over time this means we never get to make the case for us which is one reason why no one knows all the good Biden-Harris had done. For right-adjacent swing voters don’t believe it, and thus even though our economy today is arguably stronger than it has been in 60 years, we spent the general election talking about the harms of inflation rather than our success in getting to the other side of it and orchestrating a soft landing.
Look at this data from last week’s Economist/YouGov tracking poll. The US has had more jobs created under Biden than any four year period in US history. Only 19% of independent voters think jobs are increasing right now, and a whopping 80% say there is no job growth or jobs are decreasing (34%). So the way our campaign data ecosystem works is that a candidate would be told not to talk about the growing economy for our target voters don’t believe it. Even though it is true, and no one will know it is true unless we tell them.
So if we do not start having a national strategy to compete and win in the national debate every day, all we do is operate inside a right-wing defined frame which prevents us from ever telling our side of the story. What else could explain that no one knows for example this bit of data, data that Bill Clinton referred to in his Convention speech - 96% of all jobs created in America since 1989 have come under Democratic Presidents.
The bottom line - we have a lot of work to do (returning to Hopium’s core mission) to defeat MAGA, tell our inspiring story more effectively, and ensure that freedom and democracy prevail.
Thanks for being along for the ride here at Hopium, being part of this plucky community of proud patriots and info warriors. While it is going to be a hard, tough road I am looking forward to taking the wins when they come and to building our next and better thing together with all of you in the months ahead.
Let us end today’s post with powerful guidance about our path forward from Thomas Jefferson. We can do this people!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - Simon
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