Sunday Hopium - More Notes On The Path Forward And Building An Effective and Ferocious Opposition

I am speaking Tuesday night in Bethesda, Maryland - join us!

Good morning all. Given the velocity and gravity of the events around us I am going to make Sundays a kind of mental rest day, where I disengage a bit, reflect, read, spend time with family and friends, find some balance and get ready for the week ahead. Our Sunday posts will be in that vein for a while - reflective, not so much in the daily crush of events.

Let’s start with the Hopium Daily Reminder:

Trump 2.0 is a profound, ongoing betrayal of America, and everything that has made this remarkable nation the most powerful and prosperous in the world. It is why we must fight. As dark as all this is, we cannot for one moment forget that what Trump is doing is wrong; he and his project remain deeply unstable and his coalition fractious; he is doing deeply unpopular things, going far beyond his narrow “mandate;” he is old, impulsive, reckless and clearly in decline; and extremists and ideologues are often far better at bread and circuses than governing.

Thanks to all of you who watched my new, inspiring talk with Susan Crawford and Ben Wikler. We’ve raised a lot of money for Susan and Ben in the last 24 hours and I am grateful to all of you who have stepped up for this critical April 1st election. You can donate to her and the Wisconsin Democrats here.

I am spending a lot of time thinking about what Hopium becomes now in this time of crisis - how many times do I post each day; how many live and recorded events; how do I organize all the content here better for you given that we are producing far more daily content than in the 2023-2024 Hopium. What guides me here everyday is a sincere desire to not chase the new, but to remain relentlessly focused on what is most important. My job more than any thing else is to help you sort through all the info flying at you each day and spend our time here on what I think is most important. So rather than being a comprehensive site, we are narrow, targeted, focused. I think of Hopium more as an import-letter rather than a news-letter. Here we stay focused on what matters and work incredibly hard to not get distracted and blown around by the new (news).

So the site has begun to evolve. I will be building more discreet pages that make it easier to connect with our most important work and insights. Here is what we have so far:

Events (link) - this page will be updated daily and have a list of upcoming Hopium events and my public appearances. You can find info here on my Tuesday night appearance in Bethesda, Maryland for example.

2025 Campaigns/Actions (link) - this will have our current list of endorsed political campaigns and what I am calling our “daily actions” - the things we are contacting our elected representatives about.

7 Key Takeaways (link) - for now this has my current working list of 7 key takeaways from the 2024 election and other related “path forward” commentary.

Re-imagining The Roles Of The DNC, Elected Officials and Grassroots Dems In The Info Wars (link) - this page is an example of a new kind of page here at Hopium. It won’t be on the site’s navigation bar but it acts like a reference to a term or concept that I keep coming back to here, like an encyclopedia entry. These pages will be particularly important for our many new subscribers will are not as well versed in the understandings and arguments here.

Podcasts (link) - this is a Substack vertical that provides easy access to all of the lead videos and talks I share with you. Go here for my new discussion with Susan Crawford and Ben Wikler; my latest video talk; and my interviews with leading experts and elected officials.

Additionally, in the past few days Substack introduced a major new upgrade of its live video capacity. In its early days live video from our Substacks could only be seen on the Substack app for phones and tablets. It can now be seen on all devices, including more traditional computers. It’s a big deal. I’m going to start experimenting with this new capacity in the coming days as it will make it far easier to bring you short, timely, live discussions with those leading the charge in this new day.

Finally, our daily chat. I will be exploring ways to make this invaluable part of the Hopium experience more robust and easier to use. The info sharing and collaboration that is happening there everyday has become important and I pledge to find new and better ways for our community to connect and collaborate.

Due to the generosity of our paid subscribers and Founding Members I’ve been able to bring on my first full time employee, Lincoln Cooper, who will be helping me grow, evolve and improve Hopium to meet the moment. Thanks to all of you….

Hopium Weekend Reading, Viewing - three more things to review this weekend:

• My new video presentation and post, Standing Up For Our Democracy, Every Day - Notes on Building An Effective and Ferocious Opposition

• My new comprehensive essay on the Trump/Musk assault on the US government and what I call the “America of the Four Freedoms,” Republicans Are Now The Party of Appeasement, Chaos and Betrayal

• Inflation Spikes, Trump Is Not Winning - my latest take on why Trump is much weaker and more vulnerable then he appears right now, and why understanding Trump as weak not strong is essential

A Collection of Notes On The Path Forward - in the spirit of Sunday reflection, here are some of the things I’ve written of late that I continue to wrestle with every day. Some of these ideas have been overtaken by events. Some still need to be explored and implemented. Let’s keep working it, everyone.

From Proud Of All Of You, 11/6/24 - On The Failure To Disqualify Trump And The Need For The Generational Wheel To Turn In the Democratic Party -

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 complicit 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.

From Fighting Hard, Fighting Smart, 2/6/25 - On The Need For Leaders Schumer and Jeffries and The DNC To Build A New Political and Comms Superstructure To Lead The Fight Against Trump -

Last night I also reviewed my recommendation that Leaders Schumer and Jeffries should assign senior staff to work with the DNC, DSCC, DCCC and other party committees to come up with a new comms and political structure to ensure that we become the effective and ferocious opposition necessary to preserve our democracy now.

The Leaders have a powerful new team ready to go to work with and for them:

• millions of donors/volunteers/info warriors

• growing pro-democracy media ecosystem

• hundreds of capable and battle tested grassroots groups

• traditional allied groups, and the national party infrastructure

• tens of thousands of elected Democrats at all levels of government across the country

The Leaders should now empower staff to work with the new and hungry team at the DNC to imagine, design and build a new kind of political/comms super-structure integrating all of those who want and can help to respond to the needs of this extraordinary moment. We will not win with what what we have. We can and must build something new, more modern, more muscular, more effective.

From More Thoughts On Modernizing Our Comms, The Role Of The DNC, And Getting Louder, 11/12/24 - 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.

From Raising Our Game, Building The Next Thing, Going 24/7/365, 1/9/25 - My Working 7 Key Takeways From The 2024 Election -

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.

4 - 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 (note, tragically, this did not happen).

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.

Let’s end with the remarkable “barbarous ancestors” passage from Thomas Jefferson:

Enjoy your Sunday all. Rest up, reflect, recharge and see you tomorrow morning - Simon