Spelling Out What We Want To Do, Strong And Weak, Leaning Hard Into No Kings

When we fight Trump we get stronger and he gets weaker.....

Morning all. As we head into the weekend we have lots of interesting pods, important speeches, and riveting discussion for you to dive into……

Great Hopium Guests - We’ve had some terrific guests and discussions in recent days:

• Fresh off hosting the People’s State of the Union the great Katie Phang dropped by to give us her thoughts on the path forward

• Economist Rob Shapiro explained why the battle to counter Trump’s failed, ruinous, and self-enriching economic agenda is really only beginning

• Rep. Delia Ramirez talked about the fight to rein in ICE, and the need for us to stand up for our neighbors

• Historian Phillips O’Brien made it very clear that we should be doing much more to challenge Trump’s selling out of Ukraine and Europe to Russia

• Dr. Jenna Norton and Colette Delawalla came by to for an update on the battle against Trump’s anti-science and MAGA mysticism, and to preview Stand Up For Science’s National Day Of Action next Saturday, March 7th

• Iowa Dem Chair Rita Hart talked about their special election success and why 2026 is looking like a year of opportunity in Iowa

The Spanberger and Padilla Speeches - If you haven’t watched them or read the transcripts try to get them soon. These excellent speeches created important new narrative and rhetorical frames for the pro-democracy movement, ones that we should be echoing in our own work in the days ahead. You can find recording and transcripts of the two speeches here - Spanberger, Padilla.

My Talks/Interviews - Here’s my weekly talk, Trump Should Have Course Corrected This Week. He Didn’t - And 2026 Republicans Are In Trouble, and new State of the Union recaps with Greg Sargent and Mike Nellis.

Next Week - Always check our Events page for latest schedule of upcoming live events and recorded conversations (things do change!) but so far next week Stuart Stevens is dropping by for our monthly catch up Monday at 10am EST; I’ll be joining Jen Rubin and the Contrarians on Wednesday morning; we will be sitting down with Governor Josh Shapiro on Wednesday afternoon; and TX Dem Chair Kendall Scudder is joining us live Thursday afternoon to talk about the results of Tuesday night’s primaries in Texas. Exciting week ahead!

With the State of the Union behind us Washington now begins the annual appropriations process where the two parties dig in and fight for their priorities. I think Democrats and our broader pro-democracy movement should use this time to start laying out what it is we want to do, what our agenda is, and what our priorities are. Gov. Spanberger and Sen. Padilla began that process this week. To kick it off I am reupping our working Hopium Agenda:

The Hopium Agenda (2/27/26)

1. Stand with Ukraine and our European allies, and far more forcefully challenge Trump’s traitorous efforts to sell out the US and the West to Russia

2. Congress must stand forcefully for the rule of law in the Caribbean, the Pacific and throughout the world; Trump’s illegal strikes on the high seas must end; no war can be waged without Congressional approval, including in Iran; there must accountability for those who have broken the law, and the US must withdraw from Venezuela and cease other threats to violate the UN Charter and the sovereignty of other nations

3. Roll back Trump’s terrible, illegal tariffs that are re-igniting inflation, driving up prices, shifting the tax burden from the wealthy to working people, hurting small businesses and farmers, reviving tyrannical “taxation without representation,” and alienating governments and people throughout the world. To make up for the eventual loss of revenue from the ending of tax cuts we should reverse the 2025 tax cuts to the wealthy and corporations and claw back the unnecessary additional funding ICE has received; and yes the money Trump illegally collected must be returned, immediately.

4. Defend our democracy, rule of law, and our liberties by adopting the Dem leadership’s ten point plan to rein in ICE; ending mass deportation and the expansion of the detention camps; war against his outrageous targeting of his domestic political opponents and vigorously defend the 1st Amendment; end the deployment of the military and para-military on our streets and the dangerous occupation of our cities; stop the unprecedented regime corruption; force the Administration to finally comply with Congress and end the rancid, illegal cover up of the Epstein crimes; and ensure we have free and fair elections this November.

5. Fight Trump’s war on science, higher education and our public health; reverse the cuts to the ACA, Medicaid and our clean energy investments; take part in Stand Up For Science’s National Day Of Action on March 7th; become the health and wellness movement, and take back ground recklessly lost to MAGA on public health

I’ve created a page to workshop our agenda. You can leave comments there, review earlier drafts of it for inspiration. In posting it today I realize there are parts that clearly need updating, things not yet in there that need to be. So help me improve it, and in the process spend time thinking about what you believe is most for us to do when we have power again.

I agree with something many of you argue here - we must make clear not just what we are against, but what we are for; what will happen when we come back into power; what we will commit to do, not just say. Let’s do our part at creating a robust conversation now about who we are, what our agenda is, what we are fighting for.

As we go forward there are two polling/message/narrative/framing areas that I think our family needs a big conversation about - strong and weak, and accepting that “threats to democracy” are things we need to be leaning into not pivoting away from.

First, strong and weak. As regular Hopium readers know this is something we discuss frequently, for our issue heavy polling often does not go into brand attributes that are also important for how people come to form opinions about politics. I gave a talk about this need for us to become strong last week, Trump Is Weak, And Now We Must Become Strong. Here is a piece of what I said:

We need to go into this period feeling strong and powerful like we’re winning and that we’re strong and he’s weak, and we’re winning, and he’s losing and we’re succeeding, and he’s failing, which is not how we always feel. But we need to… in order to win the elections. Because for people to vote for us, they have to think, and I’ve written about this a lot, they don’t have to only think that our hearts in the right place and that we want to do the right thing… they have to think that we are strong enough to overcome all of this, to be able to not just advocate for them, but to fight for them, to bring needed change that will make their lives better.

And so this idea of us being strong and gaining strength through fighting and winning is really important. It’s something that our family has to focus on as much as getting the issues right. We have to become strong enough in the eyes of voters to be able to execute on our promises and our agenda and get things done. All the data that’s out there showing that voters think that our party is weak is a huge problem that has to be addressed. I think it’s being addressed right now. We’ve made a principled stand. Our leaders have on ICE. We are doing the right thing. And through this fight, we will get stronger. We will show the American people that we just don’t want to do the right thing, but that we’re strong enough to organize ourselves, to come together, to gather our power, and to make their lives better. And that’s what this fight over ICE is about now on the Hill, which is why we have to see it through and win this battle with Trump in the coming days.

In that post I showed this data from the 2024 Exit Polls that haunts me literally every day. People like Democrats, but we failed “strong enough to bring needed change” test in 2024:

Recent Navigator polling confirmed that “weakness” is still a problem:

And today, G. Elliott Morris has a terrific new piece on this, Democrats’ real problem isn’t being too liberal — it’s being seen as too weak, built around this new data from his polling:

The second part we need to work through is this reticence to lean into “threats to democracy” or No Kings. Some of this is a hangover from 2024. But we need to be clear that there is a mountain of data, literally a mountain of data, showing that “threats to democracy” is both a top tier voting issue in the country right now and something helping motivate our voters. And thus we should be leaning into it, not pivoting from it.

In December I went through the data available to us then in a post, In 2026 Democrats Can Be Both Warriors For Working People Against Oligarchy AND Proud Patriots Fighting For Democracy Here And Abroad, that showed that we should leaning into threats to democracy, as Governor Spanberger and Senator Padilla did so effectively on Tuesday night. Here are two examples from that post:

Yale University Poll, December 2025:

Here’s what a CNN poll taken right before the Election found:

Registered voters who are Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents are far more likely than Republican-aligned voters to say they are extremely motivated to vote next year (67% compared with 46%). Those Democratic-aligned voters who consider the state of democracy to be a top concern are perhaps the most fired up within the party: 82% in that group say they are deeply motivated to vote, compared with 57 % among Democratic-aligned voters who call the economy their top concern.

A January CNN poll asked a very interesting question of the 61% who disapproved of Trump - “What the is most important reason you disapprove of Trump.” The top two were:

• Temperament/Personal Behavior

• Democracy/Rule Of Law/Misusing Power

Here’s one of the conclusions of a new Navigator battleground poll this week:

Battleground Americans want Congress to prioritize the economy, corruption, and threats to democracy – but by overwhelming margins believe Congressional Republicans are most focused on immigration.

Here’s the topline, with a time series that tracks this results in 2/26, 9/25, 5/25, 2/25 (so the column on the left is 2/26 (now), then 9/25, 5/25 and 2/25):

And here’s the results with the top two issues combined - corruption and threats to democracy (No Kings) are #1 and #2.

OK, that was a lot. To sum up - we need to go on offense now, make clear what we are for, what we will do when we regain power. As we ramp up this effort we must recognize that what people are looking for from us is not just to be right, and well-intentioned, but strong enough to deliver for them. And that one of the reasons I think many still believe we are weak is that we are not speaking to one of their greatest concerns - that Trump is an aspiring dictators, and is a threat to our democracy and rights and freedoms. So to not just be right, but to be strong we must make it clear we are willing to fight with Trump and not just compromise; and that we are willing to take on the toughest and perhaps most important fight of all - preventing him from ending the great American experiment for all time as he so clearly intends to do.

Governor Spanberger and Senator Padilla showed us the way on Tuesday. It was a great start. Now, together, lets keep going……

And Get To Work People!

Winning The Midterms, Competing In Red States and Red Places, Expanding The Map

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Keep working hard everyone. The momentum is with us, and we need to keep fighting as hard as we can - Simon