Sunday Hopium - We Have A Lot Of Work To Do

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Happy Sunday all. Here at Hopium Sundays are light days, days to recharge, reboot and get ready for the week ahead. After this hard week I’m looking forward to spending time today watching the Premiere League, getting ready for both March Madness and the upcoming baseball season, get a good workout in and hang out with my family. Need these quiet days in the midst of all the noise, chaos and worry…..

A few notes this morning. The House Dem/DNC/State Parties’ People’s Town Halls got off to a good start this weekend as Governor Walz visited battleground Republican-held House districts in Iowa and Nebraska. Check out some of the local coverage of the Governor’s visit to Omaha yesterday:

Visit here to see the schedule of upcoming Town Halls and help bring awareness of this important new project to your networks. If you are lucky enough to be able to attend one of these Town Halls make sure you organize and bring others with you. Yesterday’s Hopium post detailed all the ways House Dems are now rising to the moment; my Friday post challenges Senate Democrats to join them; and a new Washington Post story (free link, please read) details the efforts of both chambers to up their comms game, something I write about in both posts and discuss in my new video presentation on our challenging moment

A new NBC News poll released this morning found Trump in the same degraded place the other polls I’ve been discussing this week found - 47%-51% job approval, and deeply under water on the economy, inflation, foreign policy and Ukraine:

Trump has stumbled; he is in a far weaker place; and it’s why we need to keep working hard. Many more Americans are now open to hearing from us (and why these Town Halls in GOP districts are so important now) about what Trump is now doing to our economy and country.

Many have noted that his NBC poll and a new CNN poll show broad dissatisfaction among Democrats with their party right now, something I will be talking about more this coming week. Here’s the big graph from the CNN poll:

Today the gravity of our current moment is weighing very heavily on me. Trump and Musk are breaking things that will be very hard, if not impossible, to repair. We are going to come out of this a far weaker and poorer nation, one less respected in the world, less free and far more alone. It is why we, and our leaders, must have so much urgency now; and why it is so hard to understand why some of our leaders continue to be so slow to patriotically answer history’s very clear call for them to rise and fight Trump and Musk with everything they got.

I write this morning from the former bedroom of my oldest son, now 24. I get up every day, literally, every day, thinking about how Trump and Musk are stealing the future of my three Gen Z kids and the futures of all their peers. It is the thing that motivates me to do this work more than anything else right now. There is no longer any doubt they will have far fewer opportunities in their lives due to the Russian-backed Trumpian wrecking ball smashing through our country and the world right now. Last night, my middle son, 22, told me knew of 4 friends whose life plans had been dramatically altered in the last few weeks due to the malicious Muskian rampage against our government. 4 people. One of them was a friend whose PhD program offer at a prominent university was just withdrawn.

The morning after the Election I wrote a short post thanking all of you for your incredible effort last year. Our community left it all out there on the playing field for our democracy, and I remain incredibly grateful for what you did then, and what many of you are doing now. This community has again and again answered the call. Here was my initial take on what happened from that dark morning. It speaks to me today:

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.

So, on this early spring Sunday, let’s rest up and get ready. For we need to have a big week this week. Our leaders need to hear from us, loudly. We need to keep letting them know what is expected out them now. And yes, we have candidates to support and lots and lots and lots of work to do, together…..

Things We Can Do This Week - While we have made many recommendations to Democrats in recent months for how to raise our game and fight harder and smarter, let’s focus on our current four recommended sets of actions for how we can best channel our love of country and our frustrations into concrete action today:

1 - Fight The Trump-Musk Attack On Our Government, Our Privacy And Our Constitutional Order - Encourage your Senators and Representatives to let Facts be be submitted to a candid world in a joint Senate-House Letter to America; to hold their own hearings; to file criminal referrals for Musk and his malicious posse to DOJ/FBI and amicus briefs in the court cases regarding the usurpation of their Constitutional authorities or file suits of their own (House Dems began doing this two weeks ago). Encourage them to hold a daily morning press conference to more aggressively challenge Musk’s ransacking of the USG that is making America less prosperous, less healthy, less safe and far less respected in the world.

2 - Loudly Protest Trump’s Embrace of Russia and Abandonment of NATO and Europe - Let your electeds know you are outraged by traitorous Trump’s selling out of Zelenskyy, abandonment of Europe and embrace of Putin; and that we cannot accept this level of appeasement of someone who is a clear enemy of America and the West, and certainly not an ally. Demand that Trump not let his Saudi meeting w/Putin become our Munich; demand that he not become our Neville Chamberlain; demand that we rejoin our European and NATO allies in support of Zelenskyy and democracy here and everywhere. The country is not with Trump’s embrace of Putin and we must be very loud, very, very loud now. See my new essay on the need to support our allies and not surrender to Putin, and my new interview with Rep. Adam Smith, the Ranking Member of the House Armed Services Committee, one of the most important foreign policy voices in our party.

3 - Organize Against The 17 Most Vulnerable Republican House Members - For those of you who live in AZ, CA, CO, IA, MI, NE, NJ, NY, PA, VA, WI please start talking to your local orgs - state and local Democratic parties, grassroots groups, traditional Dem allies - about mounting a campaign targeting the most vulnerable 17 Republican House Members to urge them to vote against whatever joint House-Senate reconciliation bill emerges in the coming weeks. We launched this new effort a few weeks ago and while we should be urging all our Senators and Reps to vote against these emerging plans, those of you can work these 17 House Rs have a special role to play in this next phase of the battle over the budget. As we’ve discussed there is a lot of concern in the Republican House about the size of the Medicaid cuts required in the House outline passed last month and we need to keep working it people! (will be updating this in coming days now that the DNC, the House Dems and the state parties have become active in all these districts - as we hoped!!!!!)

4 - Keep Calling Attorneys General In The States - Ask them to protect you and your data, tax returns and privacy, and to keep federally mandated monies flowing to your states and communities. For those in the 19 states that brought the successful Treasury suit thank them and encourage them to keep going. I still believe these 19 states should make criminal referrals of Musk/his posse to DOJ/FBI and raise the stakes.

Paid subscribers should self-report their actions today in our daily chat. So inspired by how hard so many of you are working. I want to make a special plea to all Hopium readers in states with Republican Senators - please make your calls, every day. Even 50 to 100 people calling every day in every red state can make a difference. We have hundreds of Hopium subscribers in every state in the country and it’s critical that we all do our part now.

Next, for those wanting to do more traditional political/campaign work we have four Hopium-backed efforts we're rallying behind in addition to our new House Hopium 7:

Help Susan Crawford and Ben Wikler in Wisconsin - As a way of honoring our good friend Ben Wikler and supporting this critical April Supreme Court race in Wisconsin, I’m asking our community to donate to the Wisconsin Democratic Party today. The money raised here will make sure Ben has the resources he needs to keep his team in place so they can support this critical statewide race. I know many of you are already deeply involved here - thank you all.

Watch our new discussion with Susan and Ben. Thanks to a huge surge of support in recent days we have already raised $151,000 from almost 2,000 of you, blowing past our original $50,000 goal and now our stretch goals of $100,000, $125,000 and $150,000. We are now upping this to a new superduper-stretch goal of $175,000 by March 31st. Amazing work everyone!

Support The Hopium House 7 - We’ve begun our work to help flip the House next year by supporting and shoring up the 7 newly-elected battleground House Dems we helped elect last year. You can give to all 7 through a single donation to our new ActBlue page and learn more about this important effort here. We’ve already raised almost $12,000 towards our $50,000 March 31st goal - thank you all!

Help Get Ken Martin Off To A Strong Start - In this time of extraordinary challenge we need a strong DNC. Two weeks ago we set a goal of raising $100,000 by March 31st for our new Chair. Incredibly, over 1,000 of you have donated over $100,000 so far. Watch my interview with Ken about what he wants to do with the DNC, and chip in whatever you can to help Ken and the new exciting team at the DNC get off to a strong start!

Help Abigail Spanberger Win Virginia - Virginia will be one of the big battlegrounds of the November, 2025 elections and we have a great candidate for Governor, Abigail Spanberger. Watch my interview with Abigail, donate, volunteer, and learn more here. Given how many federal employees live in Virginia, this race is also now on the front lines of the Trump/Musk assault on the federal government. We’ve raised more than $63,000 so far towards our March 31st goal of $100,000 - thank you all. Let’s keep working it for Abigail!

Get Anderson Clayton And The NC Dems Fight The GOP’s Attempt To Steal A Supreme Court Seat - Last week we began a campaign to raise $50,000 for Anderson Clayton and the NC Dems. These funds will help the NC Dems get off to a great start in 2025 and help cover the costs of their fight to prevent the Republicans from stealing a Supreme Court seat we won together in 2024. Watch my new interview with Chair Clayton from last week to get an update on the fight over the Supreme Court seat and her plans to win elections and counter Trump this year. We’ve raised $23,000 so far - thank you all!

Help Hopium Celebrate Our 2nd Anniversary - In a post from this weekend I reflected back on our work together over these past two years, and made two asks:

1) Commit to bring in one new Hopium subscriber at the your current subscriber level this month. Help us grow this community, and bring our plucky, upbeat, hardworking spirit to more people across the US.

2) Upgrade your subscription to paid or paid to Founding (10% off annual paid subscriptions through March). The resources you provide allows me to work full time at Hopium and keeps our community vibrant, growing and making all sorts of good trouble every day. Gift and group subscriptions are also a great way to grow our community!

Get some rest today everyone. We need to have a big and loud week this week. Our leaders need to hear from us - Simon