Happy Sunday all. I feel good. We’ve had a very good week of polling. We are overperforming expectations in the battleground early vote. The largest grassroots army every assembled - including all of you - is doing its thing, touching voters, pushing the election towards us in these closing days. Our inspiring candidate just keeps bringing it day after day, event after event, and has made every week a good week for the campaign and all of us. Watch as she walks out on the stage in Charlotte, North Carolina yesterday. I still get goosebumbs every time I watch these moments, which come day after day, 20,000 person crowd after 20,000 crowd:
And this incredible campaign, which had to completely retool itself with just a few months to go, continues to perform at extraordinary levels of ambition, creativity and execution. As a long time campaign professional, I am in awe of what they do every day, and grateful they have so ably risen to the moment for all of us.
So, this morning, with just three days of voting left in the 2024 election, I believe we are winning this election, my friends, but we have not won it yet - and we need to keep working as hard as we can in these final hours to bring it home.
Let’s start with the video Harrison Ford released yesterday. It is above. And it is powerful, compelling and persuasive. I’ve watched it at least ten times.
The campaign released their closing ad/video yesterday, and it is great.
Next, let’s spend time with last night’s Saturday Night Live cold open. It is a truly wonderful, joyful and memorable political moment. A great way to close, and a great way to keep working the vote in Pennsylvania!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I know many of you have been working really hard this weekend. Thank you. The self-reports you provide each day on our paid subscriber chat keep me energized and inspired. It is the fuel that keeps Hopium running each day, and the fuel for all Democrats each and every day.
I published two posts last week about the significance of our continued overperformance in elections across the country since Dobbs. The first talked about how Dobbs became a bridge too far for many non-MAGA Rs, and that some sizable chunk of the Republican coalition became loosed from the now extremist led-Republican Party. Those loosened Rs became a new battleground in our politics. Some couldn’t vote for MAGAs and stayed home. Some have crossed over to vote for us. Some have become Democrats.
Which is why Trump took an enormous risk in running this time as a fire-breathing, project-2025 loving, Putin-bootlicking, ultra-MAGA. His pick of Commander Vance of the Handmaid’s Tale wing of the Republican Party was idiotic and self-destructive, as was his repeated dissing of Nikki Haley and her voters. MAGA is a failed politics, having disappointed and underperformed in 2018, 2020, 2022, 2023 and throughout 2024. By going full on MAGA this time it was always - always - more likely Trump would lose than win.
The other driver of our recent, continued overperformance that I wrote about this week, one that has simply not gotten enough attention, is the maturing, committed, generous, Zooming Democratic grassroots. The money and sweat from all of you, and millions of your fellow proud patriots across the country, has given us the biggest, most powerful and most sophisticated campaigns we’ve ever had. These big, muscular campaigns allow us to overcome the right’s information superiority and control the information environment in our races; reach more voters than ever before through postcarding, canvassing, phone banking and texting; and provide the campaigns an unprecedented capacity to put on campaign events which also reach voters in new and compelling ways.
Of course these two phenomenon are related. For part of what has contributed to our now politics-altering hard-dollar, low-dollar advantage is the migration of higher income, higher educated Republicans and independents, particularly women, into our coalition. While it is mostly traditional Dems driving our new muscular grassroots, when a Republican donor leaves the GOP and donates to us, it’s a gain of two dollars - one for us, and one no longer for them. I think we will come to understand that the alienation of the non-MAGA wing of the GOP by MAGA has helped fuel this hard dollar Democratic fundraising advantage, which translates into bigger, better campaigns and repeated Dem overperformance. From the Washington Post’s Yasmeen Atutaleb earlier this week:
“The migration of higher-income, higher-educated voters in the Democratic Party is not only going to be very significant in terms of voters in the battleground states. Their money is helping supercharge all of our campaigns all across the country,” said Simon Rosenberg, a leading Democratic Party operative. “This is among the more consequential things that’s happened in American politics in recent years, because Democrats are not used to living in a world where we dramatically outspend Republicans.”
I built Hopium to help this emerging Democratic superpower, the Democratic grassroots, become bigger, stronger, and more effective. In my very first Hopium post I wrote:
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.
While I conceived of Hopium as a newsletter and information source helping the Democratic grassroots get smarter, this community quickly evolved in a place of doers as together we began doing more and worrying a lot less. We worked on races together across the country in 2023. In 2024 we helped elect Tom Suozzi and have worked tirelessly on Harris-Walz and the many other races below. We became not just a place for info warriors working to close the loudness gap with the right, we became a place that helped us make this new Democratic grassroots superpower even stronger and bigger through our money and sweat and all kinds of doing.
And so here we are two days out. Many of you reading this today will have worked a shift for Harris-Walz or another campaign. Many of you will be doing it again tomorrow and Tuesday. Others will be spending your Election Day working the polls, making sure your fellow citizens can vote without challenge. For doing - donating, volunteering, info warring - is how we win.
As for the data, we’ve had our best week of polling of the election. The Harris-Walz campaign has said this week that they believe late deciders are breaking their way. We are closing strong. And you can see that movement in the battleground state polls we received in the past few days which consistently showed us performing better in the battlegrounds than at any time in the election. You can this late break towards us in the new Iowa poll released by Anne Selzer showing the VP gaining 7 points and now with a modest 3 point lead there. You can see it in the set of battleground state polls from YouGov that finds Harris up 3+ in MI, PA and WI and winning the election:
You can also see this late break towards us in the early vote data. Using TargetEarly and the 2020 early vote at this time as a benchmark, and with the understanding that due to Republican prioritizing the early vote this time it was universally expected that they would do far better than 2020, a few takeaways:
Republicans were performing 8.1 percentage points better than 2020 in the national early vote a few days ago. Today that lead is down to 4.5 points.
In the 7 battleground states Dems and Rs are running even, and Ds are currently outpacing the Rs in AZ, GA, MI, NE-2 and WI.
The unaffiliated category as a percentage of the early vote is rising everywhere. This is not a good development for the Rs as it is widely expected that the unaffiliated category will favor Dems this time, and will be more Dem than 2020. We also expect to do better with Rs than 2020. Taken together that means if we are running even in the 7 battleground states, as we are today, we are actually running ahead of our 2020 vote - a truly remarkable achievement, and a sign of this late break and the strength of our campaign.
Even though the national electorate is only 2.7 points more D than R today, in the various polls of the early vote we are running 20+ points better than Republicans. This is a confirmation that we are picking up a fair number of R and unaffiliated voters in the early vote, and that we are heading into Election Day in better shape in the early vote than 2020, an election we won.
Let’s look at the progress we’ve made in the four sunbelt states since October 23rd. This data compares the GOP lead in the early vote compared to 2020 to their lead/deficit today:
Arizona - On 10/23 Rs were outperforming the 2020 early vote by 7.9 percentage points. Today Democrats lead in AZ by 0.8 points.
Georgia - On 10/23 Rs were outperforming the 2020 early vote by 2.6 percentage points. Today Democrats lead in GA by 3.1 points.
Nevada - On 10/23 Rs were outperforming the 2020 early vote by 13.1 percentage points. Dems have cut this lead to 4.5 points. As Nevada Senator Cortez Masto explained in our recent Closing Strong interview, the unaffiliated vote in NV is going to be larger and more Dem due to the adopting of automatic voter registration in the state. In what is a good sign for us the percentage of the very D unaffiliated vote has risen a lot in recent days. In my view it is likely, given current trends, that we will enter E-D ahead of 2020 in the NV early vote.
North Carolina - On 10/23 Rs were outperforming the 2020 early vote by 11.1 percentage points. Dems have cut this lead to 2.6 points. As NC today has a higher share of its early vote coming in as unaffiliated than 2020, it is almost certain we are now outpacing our 2020 early vote in the Tar Heel state.
As we’ve been discussing all week, as PA does not have early in person voting, only mail, there will be far less early vote here than in the other battleground states. Many PA Ds have decided to vote in person rather than by mail to ensure their vote is counted on Election Day. For all these reasons the PA early vote is far less important than in other states, and so that we are off a few points from 2020 isn’t that material. It’s a few points off from a smaller vote. PA is going to be an old fashioned Election Day state in 2024, and far too many are reading far too much into the current PA early vote returns.
The bottom line - if anyone is winning the early vote right now it is us. Our superior campaign has repelled the GOP’s ferocious effort to improve their battleground state early vote performance, an ominous sign for Trumpworld. For what we are seeing now in the early vote is that same Democratic overperformance of expectations that we’ve been seeing through our elections since Dobbs. In 2022 Tom Bonier and I believed that we would do better than folks expected because all the indicators of intensity were pointing to us - overperformance in special elections, voter reg turning more Dem, Dems raising more money and finally we outperformed expectations in the early vote. And we did do better than everyone expected.
We are seeing that same Dem heightened intensity that drove our wins in 2022 in this election now. We are raising more money. Voter reg got much better for us after Harris became the candidate. In the limited special and primary elections we had this year saw this repeated Dem overperformance and that MAGA struggle. And now we are seeing Dems outperforming expectations in the early vote. To repeat - it is incredible that Republicans have not been able to make gains in the battleground early vote this year despite their enormous efforts. It is a huge failure by the Trump campaign, and is perhaps a sign of what is to come on Election Day.
We are winning the 2024 election my friends, but have not won it yet. We need to keep working hard and enter Tuesday night with no regrets and having left it all out there on the playing field, together.
Working Hard And Closing Strong In The Home Stretch - 3 days of voting left everyone - let’s keep working it!
My one big ask today - invest in either Ruben Gallego/Arizona or Anderson Clayton and the NC Dems. We need to keep that second pathway to 270 open in case any of the core three - MI, PA, WI - falls. We were tied or ahead in both states this week in most polling and need to close strong now. Today is the last day I will be asking you to donate to our array of candidates and state parties.
I want to thank all of you who are self-reporting on all your remarkable work across the country in our paid subscriber daily chat Postcards, canvassing, back yard phonebank parties - you all are doing the work we need to do to win. 80m postcards are hitting now, and NYC has a postcard shortage because of all of you. Thank you everyone!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Harris-Walz, Our Presidential Checkmate States and Wisconsin - Learn more about our “checkmate” strategy, and support Ruben Gallego and these three front-line state parties:
Harris-Walz, The Mothership - $1,407,000 raised, $1,500,000 goal - Donate | Volunteer | Merch | Subscribe to The Harris-Walz YouTube Channel and watch her inspiring rallies live
North Carolina - $1,059,000 raised, $1,110,000 goal (new F—- Trump Stretch Goal) - Donate | Volunteer | Learn More | Be sure to watch my interview with NC Dem Chair Anderson Clayton
Arizona/Ruben Gallego - $657,000 raised, $700,000 goal - Donate | Volunteer | Learn More | Be sure to watch my interview with Ruben Gallego
Wisconsin Dem Party - $137,000 raised, $200,000 goal - Donate | Volunteer | Learn More | Watch Our Recent Closing Strong Interview with the great Ben Wikler
Nebraska/Blue Dot - $319,000 raised, $300,000 goal - Donate | Volunteer | Learn More | Be sure to watch my interview with NE Dem Chair Jane Kleeb.
Winning The House - Keeping getting very good vibes from our candidates and House Democratic leadership about flipping the House this year. We need to keep working it peeps!
Support All 15 Hopium-Backed Candidates With A Single Donation - $1,848,000 raised, $2,000,000 goal (new stretch goal!) - Donate | Volunteer, Learn More and Watch Interviews With Our Candidates (for our higher net worth donors note that you can give up to $49,500 split 15 ways for this group). You can donate to any one of our 15 candidates directly here.
Keeping The Senate Blue - this is a brawl my friends, and we just have to keep working it:
Arizona/Ruben Gallego - $657,000 raised, $700,000 goal - Donate | Volunteer | Learn More
Montana/Jon Tester - $199,000 raised, $200,000 goal (new stretch goal!) - Donate | Volunteer | Learn More
Ohio/Sherrod Brown - $135,000 raised, $150,000 goal (new stretch goal!) - Donate | Volunteer | Learn More
Wisconsin Dem Party/Tammy Baldwin - $137,000 raised, $200,000 goal - Donate | Volunteer | Learn More
Nebraska/Blue Dot - $319,000 raised, $300,000 goal - Donate | Volunteer | Learn More
Growing The Hopium Community - We’ve set some goals for the growth of our community so more of us can be doing more and worrying less in the home stretch:
Hopium Subscribers - 119,00 this morning, 125,000 goal
Paid Subscribers - 13,911 this morning, 14,000 goal
Great work everyone. You can become a paid subscriber and help us hit our goals by clicking on the link below or following this link. The subscription tab includes options for gift and group subscriptions, all 10% off through Election Day!
Keep working hard all. So proud to be in this fight with all of you - Simon
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