Transcript - Simon Rosenberg Presentation and Q & A With Hopium Paid Subscribers Featuring NC Democratic Party Chair Anderson Clayton (3/4/26)
Simon Rosenberg:
We’ve got a special event here tonight. Our friend Anderson Clayton is joining us at the beginning to give us an update from North Carolina. We had a good night last night in North Carolina. And I should say also, this is our anniversary week. I haven’t really done anything about it because it’s been so busy, but it is our third anniversary on Saturday. It’s hard to believe. Oh, there she is. Hello! I have to unmute you. There you are. Great. Listen, let’s start. I know you’re running around and busy. Can you hear me?
Chair Anderson Clayton: I can. Can you hear me, Simon Rosenberg?
Simon: Yes, ma’am.
Anderson: Oh, wonderful.
Simon: Okay, so we got about 400 people here, Anderson. I appreciate you joining. Listen, you had a big night last night!
Anderson: We did!
Simon: So, give us the update. I mean, give us the news.
Anderson Clayton:
North Carolina had a great primary night. As you all know, Roy Cooper is going on to be our Democratic nominee for the U.S. Senate this year to take on and defeat Trump’s handpicked candidate, Michael Whatley, who had about almost 200,000 less votes from folks in North Carolina in a primary election than Governor Roy Cooper did last night. So we are energized! There were more Democrats that came out and voted in this election cycle than we had in primary election cycles from 2024’s presidential election. So we are already seeing huge swaths of Democratic turnout in North Carolina, and we’re really excited about it. And I know that Simon is also going to make us take some good credit for making sure that we’re holding Democrats in North Carolina accountable. And we had four Democrats last night that lost their seats to make sure that we are able to hold a governor’s veto power in North Carolina. And so we had Democrats that were consistently overriding our Democratic governor’s vetoes that we were able to make sure lost their reelections and ensuring that Democratic Governor Josh Stein is going to be able to protect the people of North Carolina because 2027’s General Assembly is going to look a lot different than what it has.
Simon Rosenberg:
I want to just drill down on that for a second just to make sure people understand, Anderson. We had a lot of fun together in the 2024 cycle… you did a remarkable job in North Carolina. Those of you who are new to wonderful Anderson should know that in North Carolina where we made our biggest investment in the cycle, we did better down ballot than any of the other battleground states. And this is true even though North Carolina did not get the same level of funding from the national party. It wasn’t even a battleground state a year out. One of the reasons Hopium jumped in is that I felt we had a big opportunity there and I wanted to sort of push the National Party and the campaign to make it an equal battleground. That never really happened, but we leveled the playing field a little bit with over a million dollars that we raised for North Carolina. And you won five statewide seats in North Carolina in 2024. You won your Supreme Court race finally. But you also broke the supermajority. And so talk about why that huge achievement then kind of got undone a little bit since the election in 2024.
Anderson Clayton:
I mean, to be honest with you, we have always had some Democrats in North Carolina that have chosen to override the governor’s veto and sort of pick and sway with Republicans. And this year, North Carolina is a unique state. We are one party in the country that gives out vote builder access for free to any candidate that will sign up to run on our behalf, even at the congressional level, because we believe that data should be democratized in the Democratic Party. And one thing our state party did this year was censuring members that had overridden the governor’s veto and removed vote builder access from them, because our party was not trying to help support people who are not actually speaking for the voters in their districts. These legislators are in democratic districts by 60 percent margins and we need to make sure that we are upholding the values of those voters. So this was really about us sticking to what people elected those representatives to go to Raleigh and do on their behalf. Josh Stein won with the largest margin of any governor in North Carolina’s election history. And so I don’t say that lightly. He won by a 14-point margin over Mark Robinson in 2024 and won 14 rural counties that had also swung for Donald Trump. And so when Josh Stein’s veto pen goes down, we want that to be a permanent marker. And we’re making sure that in North Carolina, that’s how it happens.
Simon Rosenberg:
So the party recruited, or people ran. I won’t say necessarily recruited, but people ran against these incumbent Democrats who had been sort of betrayed by the governor and the party. And what were the margins last night, Anderson, in those races?
Anderson Clayton:
Overwhelming. And no, we have great partner organizations on the ground in the state, groups like Lead North Carolina and Siembra NC, who are also very active and did the recruitment of candidates. Because the party doesn’t get involved in primaries. We do not pick who ends up coming out of that, but we do want to make sure that party resources, things that we are providing to candidates that we pay for, that with the hard-earned dollars, honestly, that folks like you all give us, I want to make sure that money is going to the right places and going to the right people. And so we always want to make sure that we’re holding our own accountable as much as we can. And the voters last night said by 70 percent in every district that they also wanted to see the same thing.
Simon Rosenberg:
I called you a couple of weeks ago and we talked about this because I was sort of amazed at what was happening and intrigued about whether this would work. And I think that not only did it work and the governor got involved and lots of other people, but these guys got their asses kicked! I mean this was a definitive repudiation of this traitorous politics by the voters of these districts. What’s been the ramifications of this today in the state? I mean, was there a surprise? Were people kind of amazed at what happened?
Anderson Clayton:
I think a lot of people were definitely surprised, but I think that we had a lot of faith in the people on the ground. A very big thank you to folks like Patricia Smith, who ran for office, and also Reverend Rodney Sadler, and Rodney Pierce, who is our state representative, who’s going to keep his House seat from a former Democratic incumbent that had tried to come back and challenge him in his race as well, someone who had also override governor’s vetoes in previous years. We needed to make sure that we were in the future, making a strong message to voters in North Carolina that when you send a Democrat to Raleigh, you’re sending a Democrat to Raleigh.
Simon Rosenberg:
I did an interview today… I think you did too… I think you spoke to Jen Rubin today at some point, or she said she was going to talk to you… and I talked about how one of the reasons we got involved in North Carolina with you was there were, in the redistricting that happened in 2012, basically Democrats got routed. And we, in many purple states around the country, in blue states, Republicans ran up the score and took states that were purple and built these extraordinary veto-proof right-wing legislatures in states that were 50-50 states. Most of those states unwound all of that over the last 14 years with the exception of two: North Carolina and Wisconsin. I know you’re good buddies with Ben [Wikler]. So we put in over half a million into Wisconsin in the last couple of years, in part to help them. And they made enormous gains in the state. You know, they redid the maps. They made huge gains at the state-legislative level. The state is sort of on a trajectory to become where it’s far more even. We even have a shot of winning the House in this election cycle. North Carolina stands out as this last little place where they have had a veto override capacity and sort of have gerrymandered so incredibly. I don’t know that an international observer would even think North Carolina was really a legitimate democracy in some ways, given how much they’re thwarting the will of the people. In 2022, Republicans had more votes in the primary than we did in North Carolina. And as Anderson said, we had more votes in this primary last night in North Carolina than we did in the primary in 2024 at a presidential level, which is crazy. And by the way, you know, I’m interviewing Kendall [Scudder] tomorrow. Texas had a higher turnout in their primary last night than they did in the 2008 presidential, which was the highest ever. So you need to text [Kendall] and tell him, you know, like you guys both kicked ass. But talk about how we look in 2026, you have a ton of work to do. You’ve got a great top of the ticket. Roy Cooper knows how to win elections. Whatley, I think, was the wrong pick for them this cycle. He’s a bad pick. And I think we can win if we work hard. But talk about how you continue to unrig North Carolina in the coming years, Anderson.
Anderson Clayton:
Look, we won’t take anything for granted this year. North Carolina hasn’t won a Senate election, I know, for a very long time, as everybody likes to remind me.
Simon: I think since 1998 [Laughs.]
Anderson Clayton:
[Laughs.] And so I know that we have a lot to prove this year. But to your point, Roy Cooper at the top of the ticket, someone that has never lost a statewide election in North Carolina and had a 60% approval rating in rural North Carolina when he left office, we know that he has got such a great opportunity to really make that effort go down the ballot. And so North Carolina has a three-step plan to make sure that we take back the North Carolina State Supreme Court. And people like Simon Rosenberg and the folks that are on here tonight helped us do step one of that plan in 2024 when we helped reelect Justice Allison Riggs to the North Carolina State Supreme Court. Allison Riggs had the last uncertified race of 2024. It was a six-month election nihilism from national Republicans. Michael Whatley, who was the chair of the RNC at that point in time, who helped fund election nihilism in North Carolina, to try to use that to take into other states. We were able to prevail both in that lawsuit at the federal level, hold that Supreme Court seat by 734 votes at a 5.5 million cast in 2024, thanks to the incredible work and support of people like you all. And so never believe that your vote doesn’t matter or that the fight that you’re putting into these states across the country don’t matter because it does. And in 2026, I have another Democratic seat up with Justice Anita Earls, who is the only Black woman statewide on the bench right now in North Carolina. She is fantastic. A former civil rights attorney, someone who was the founder and the Executive Director of the Southern Coalition for Social Justice. She understands better than anybody right now why our rights are at threat from this administration and the authoritarianism that we’re seeing coming down from Washington. And in 2028, we have the ability to take three Republican seats. My step three of three, if you will. Three Republican seats that will be up on the North Carolina State Supreme Court and the ability to reverse partisan and racial gerrymandering. We’ve seen Democrats have to be on the defense a lot the last year and a half as Republicans have taken over and gerrymandered states across the country. We want to be on the offense of that going forward. And North Carolina is how you think long term, about making sure that Democrats, when we get control of Congress in 2026, we don’t lose it in 2028 and we keep it after that. And so I’m really excited that we are on the ground here and that we’re doing everything that we can to make sure that we work our asses off for 2026. But we’re looking at 2028, 2030 and 2032 and beyond here in North Carolina right now.
Simon Rosenberg:
Okay, my friend, I just want to let you know that our third anniversary is this Saturday. Hopium will be three years old.
Anderson: Aww!
Simon: I know!
Anderson: That’s bitter sweet for you, Simon, isn’t it? Come on!
Simon: [Laughs.] I don’t really have anything planned, you know, like any parties or anything.
Anderson: You need to!
Simon: This is our paid subscribers, you know, who funded, you know, you…
And I just want to say that it was appropriate that you were here tonight. Because the single most important thing that we’ve done together is the work that we’ve done with you in North Carolina. The most successful model. It has inspired us for what we’ve done this cycle. You also, in ways that I think you understand, have become an inspiration for state parties all across the country about what they can do if they can raise money and start rebuilding. You had a tremendous year last year. You have the possibility of having a great year this year. And when I think back in the three years and the work that we’ve done, I think the most important stuff we’ve done has been with you. And so it’s just appropriate that you’re here tonight with us. And so thank you, my sister, for spending a few minutes with us. And congratulations on another good election night. And we’re proud to be on your team.
Anderson Clayton:
Thank you so much, Simon. And I’m happy to be here on your third year anniversary. To everyone out there, I tell this story all the time, but Simon really did, I feel like come out of nowhere for me. And he said, I want to help mentor young people. I want to help bring young people into the Democratic Party. And so for me, as someone who was the youngest state party chair, who did not know how to raise money, having a grassroots army out there helping me do it. And Simon, you leading the charge made it all possible. So thank you sincerely from the bottom of my heart for everything that y’all have done for us.
Simon: Okay. Thank you, Anderson, for coming by.
Anderson: Bye y’all.
Simon: Good night.
Wasn’t that amazing? Isn’t she amazing? And seriously, I think that you know, what we did together with her, we raised $1.1 million for her in the ‘24 cycle. Incredible story. And what they did with it, though, and not only did they have success, but Anderson now has 25 full-time staff. They have a real party in North Carolina now. They produce daily press releases every day attacking Whatley. It’s what we all want out of us. It’s a model for how to take a party that was not modern and quickly turn it into a modern and super effective force. And they’ve also delivered. I mean, again, despite all odds, North Carolina did better down ballot than any of the other six battleground states in 2024. They just had an incredible election night last night. And you heard from Anderson that they don’t have just energy.
I mean, what I say about Anderson is that she’s not just full of energy, and just a great person, and an inspirational leader, she’s incredibly competent. And has turned the North Carolina Party into one of the true models for the whole country. So what they just did to take out these four miscreant Democrats who were going against the governor, who had used our resources and our money to get elected as Democrats and then turned on the party. This was a big deal because all of you are asking for Democrats to act in a more brass knuckled way and to be tougher and stronger and fight for our values more effectively.
Well, you just saw one of the most important young leaders we have in the country, and so it’s so great for what we’ve been able to do with her over the last couple of years. So thank you. And Anderson, by the way, somebody has pointed out, Anderson took a leadership role in starting this process by denying them access to the party resources. She got incredibly criticized for doing that. She was a little surprised at the blowback, but she proved to have been right in what she did and the plan was successful. So thank you all for continuing to support her and her great work.
Let me change gears and do a shorter version of my talks that I do here at night because there is so much going on. And I want to say that last night in Texas and in North Carolina and in Arkansas, we saw the same election that we’ve been seeing since January of 2025. I mean, there’s been in virtually every election that’s taken place…special elections, November elections, now primaries in an even year…we continue to see the same dynamic, which is that we’re performing at a high level. We have high turnouts. Our candidates are winning and overperforming and Republicans are struggling. And this is a very consistent dynamic. What’s important about that is that it then therefore means that it is likely that this dynamic will continue because it’s been so consistent going back all the way to the beginning of this election cycle after Trump won. Some of you may have read today that there have been 27 state legislative seats that have flipped hands since Trump got elected. All of them have flipped from red to blue. The Republicans haven’t picked up a single state legislative seat that they didn’t have before. And so we had a really good night last night. In Texas we had unbelievably high turnout. We flipped a red seat in Arkansas blue. North Carolina had incredibly high turnout. And, you know, the kind of thing that Harry Enten said today that every, Donald Kerr, election since every midterm since 2006 the party that had higher turnout in the primaries and these kinds of elections went on to win the House in November, and so all this is very encouraging it’s incredibly encouraging.
People are rejecting Trumpism. They’re embracing us. What’s important, right, is that it isn’t just that Republicans had that we had more votes than Republicans. We had a higher turnout in North Carolina last night than we had in the presidential primary year. They had a higher turnout in Texas last night for Democrats than they’ve ever had. And this is a midterm and not a presidential. And so even higher than the Obama-Clinton race in 2008. So people are not just voting against Trump, they’re voting for us. And this is really important. It should give us optimism that we’re on the right track here and that we are headed in the right direction if we keep working hard.
James Talarico, I mean, one of the things that I am most excited about is that I think you’re now beginning to see… for those who have worried that the Democratic Party feels old and stale and we need new leaders… James Talarico, Jon Ossoff, Anderson Clayton, Paige Cognetti, who you met, who’s a young, dynamic candidate running for the House in Pennsylvania. you know, Mary Patola in Alaska, you know, Gina Hinojosa in Texas, you’re starting to see that in this election, that we’re going to have 10 or so candidates are going to feel like the next thing. They’re going to feel like a new party, using new language and making new arguments. And I think this is unbelievably important, because for all the concern about whether we’re modern, we’re moving ahead, we can fight hard enough and represent for people, and that are we old and backwards and tired as a party, I think by the time spring and summer comes, it’s going to feel like the Democrats have a new team running nationally for them. And certainly, I think we’ll be able to market that and sell that to voters because it will be true. And that’s why I think the Talarico win, you know, either Crockett or Talarico winning would have helped reinforce this. Talarico is a generational talent in the way that Jasmine Crockett is.
Texas, look, what happened last night, and you could see it today, the Republicans got incredibly scared today… we had a definitive victory for one of our candidates. All the troubles that could have emerged… stuff that happened last night in Dallas County, it was all resolved. Jasmine Crockett today elegantly and gracefully and passionately endorsed James Talarico. The party came together. And what happened on the Republican side, right, they have the meanest, most nasty primary that we’ve seen in modern political history. The two candidates got basically an equal amount of vote and they have a runoff now in 12 weeks. There’s rumors that Trump’s going to endorse Cornyn. I’m waiting to see if that’s is a going to happen. And I just want to explain the math on this right now of the Texas runoff… Cornyn only got 42 percent of the vote and he’s the incumbent. So that means 58 percent of Republican primary voters voted for somebody other than the incumbent. When that happens historically, in the runoff, the incumbent loses. And that Paxton would go on to win because 58% have already voted against him. And and so one of the reasons I think you saw the panic today, you know, Trump claiming that if he endorses the other candidate…..Paxton is more likely to win right now than Cornyn. And the Republicans are going to try to get the guy who is more likely to win out of a race in a primary, in a runoff now in Texas.
I don’t know that I ever can remember anything like that happening after people have voted. I mean, if they tried to get Paxton out a month ago, two months ago, [that’s one thing], but voters voted last night and they rejected Cornyn. Cornyn’s in serious trouble. I mean, this is why you saw them sort of swoop in here immediately because if if Talarico is competitive in this race, not only are they going to have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars in the the runoff in the general, but it means the Senate really is in play. Because, you know, right now, Roy Cooper’s ahead in North Carolina. Ossoff is out of the box strong in Georgia. I don’t know what’s going to happen in Maine, but Collins is in deep trouble in Maine. We’re going to have a competitive primary there, and we had a really good election in November in Maine. You know, Sherrod Brown is competitive in Ohio. Even though we have a primary in Iowa, we’ve been overperforming. Rita Hart came and joined us two weeks ago. We’ve overperformed in six special elections in Ohio by 22 points. And the Iowa governor is the most unpopular governor in the country… Mary Peltola in Alaska… that race is competitive… all of a sudden this Senate map looks possible. It’s going to be unbelievably hard. Winning in all these places is going to be difficult. But the Republicans are desperate – they’re scared of Talarico, and I think one of the reasons Talarico won that race by the way, because the polling was very close a couple weeks ago, is their effort to ban him from going on Colbert… and so their attempt, you know, I use a term… just bear with me when I use it because it to me is the most accurate term. But their fuckery… their effort to sort of to sort of fuck with, you know, Talarico, because they’re scared of him, probably gave him the primary win.
And so that was a huge error because these guys are impulsive and extremists and are kind of crazy. And they don’t always think, you know, they use brute force and sometimes, as we’re learning in Iran, they don’t use it well, right? So you know, we had a really good night last night. We should be optimistic.
And you’re seeing again, the idea that they’re going to get Paxton out of the race when Paxton is more likely to win than Cornyn… good luck with that. I mean, it may all happen, right? You know, they may give him an offshore account with $100 million in it. Trump may be threatening to prosecute him. Who knows what’s going on behind the scenes? But the Republicans are showing signs of desperation today around this. And fear. We looked like a mature party came together quickly with grace. They are having the biggest food fight that anybody’s seen. They look like savage beasts. We also will be learning more about the House races. The other thing I want to put an exclamation point on about sort of the viability of the various House races and who’s a strong candidate, you know, we’re going to know more about that in the coming days… we have Kendall Scudder from the Texas Democratic party chair joining us tomorrow live at 2:30 Eastern time. That’s going to be a great report tomorrow. I haven’t done the deep dive into the House races. We’re going to hear from him tomorrow. But something very important happened is that Tony Gonzalez, this vile, disgusting congressman who had sex with one of his staffers, who then literally lit herself on fire and killed herself just a few months ago… the Republicans believe they were going to get rid of him in the House by him losing the primary. And then they can say, look, he doesn’t have to resign… he just lost his primary… voters have rendered their judgment… he won’t be coming back.
Well, he made it into the runoff last night and he could win. And the problem Mike Johnson has now is that they have a two seat margin. I just don’t imagine how this guy is still a congressman in three or four weeks, given what’s happened. They opened up an ethics investigation today, which is another way of kind of delaying the inevitable. But it’s going to be very difficult for other members to allow this guy to continue to vote with them and to be associated with them. And for the Republicans in Texas who are already dealing with this corrupt, venal, disgusting man, Paxton, now as the frontrunner in the Senate race down there, they’re now going to have another vile, disgusting candidate running in the runoff.
And so the Republican Party has put candidates forward that are some of the most corrupt and disgusting and vile people that we’ve seen in modern American politics. And they’re all now going to be in this isolated set of few races in Texas. Further, I mean, if you wanted to create an ideal contrast with James Talarico, you know, it’s Ken Paxton. It’s Tony Gonzalez. It’s these corrupt, venal figures against this sort of virtuous young man. And so I’m heartened by what happened last night.
And then the second point I want to make is that today — a lot of remarkable things happened. And this gets to the wheels coming off the Republican bus and sort of the sense of fragility.
You know, we had a ruling today. It looks like now, the refunds for the tariffs are going to go forward despite Trump’s claiming they weren’t. And that the legal process for that is going forward. They’re not going to be given to people. They’re going to be given back to the businesses. But that will be good for the economy. And it will be something we can say that Republicans now are giving money to businesses and not to people. But this is also something that just has to happen legally against Trump’s wishes because it’s going to take 200 billion dollars away from him that he thought he had, creating much more pressure on the system to raise taxes and to claw back the ICE funding. So this is moving forward.
Five Republicans today joined with the Democrats in the Oversight Committee to subpoena Pam Bondi to come to the Oversight Committee to explain her illegal activities in covering up the Epstein files. An enormous blow for the administration today. Kristi Noem was just destroyed in her hearings over the last two days. I mean, today’s hearing in the House… I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a cabinet official take as many kind of body blows as she took today. You know, one of the most remarkable moments that I have seen in the Trump era happened today in that hearing, for those of you may or may not know this, Corey Lewandowski works for her at DHS, helps run DHS, and has been a part of the sort of ferocity of ICE. Everyone in Washington knows they’re sleeping together. And so she’s sleeping… she’s having sexual relations with a subordinate in DHS. They live together in this house, a Coast Guard house. And she was asked about it today on the record, about whether she was having sexual relations with her subordinate. And her husband was sitting right behind her in the shot. And she didn’t answer. He was sitting there. She didn’t deny it because she was under oath. She kept changing the subject. It was honestly a shocking moment because she essentially admitted [to it] –– this also a vile figure who was fired in the first Trump term for shoving a female reporter and being a sexist, misogynist asshole, which in Trump world is pretty hard to do. And so that was an extraordinary set of things that happened today.
Today, Zelensky has committed to help the United States and Middle Eastern governments deal with the Shahed drones, the Russian Iranian Shahed drones that have been causing enormous damage in the Gulf Arab states. The United States government has now asked for their help as well. And we now know from a briefing that was done yesterday in Congress that our government is admitting that they underestimated the impact that Shahed drones were going to have in the region. So Zelensky now is being brought in as a hero and a partner to all of Russia’s OPEC partners in the Middle East. Russia is Iran’s biggest backer and biggest partner. So the Gulf Arab Sunni states are being reminded that Russia, their OPEC partner, is on the side with Iran against them, attacking them. And the guy who’s going to come save them is Zelensky. I mean, the international legitimacy this is giving him, the unbelievable double-fisted fuck you that is being given to Putin by the Gulf Arab states and by Ukraine… it’s unbelievable and encouraging. An amazing development today.
A 33rd House Republican retired today, an extraordinary level of retirements. And then on Saturday there are Stand Up for Science rallies all over the country. We’re having one here in DC. I’m speaking at it. It’s at 1 o’clock. The links and the details are on our events page. And I’m going to announce tomorrow that for anyone who’s coming, there’s going to be a Hopium gathering beforehand with me somewhere nearby at 12 or 12:15 for any of you in DC. And it will be our third anniversary. So it’ll be a third anniversary little celebration before we go over to stand up for science and be part of that important effort tomorrow.
And so let me conclude and close by saying is that this new war… and you’ve heard me say this in our other talks and in my writing, that things are not going the way that Trump wants. The economy is not responding. The Supreme Court slapped down his tariffs. You know, his approval rating continues to drop, to weaken. The ICE escapades have been rejected by the American people. And the Epstein files… the Epstein scandal is becoming existential to him. I mean, people are falling all over the world, including English princes. And the idea that he could fall, too, is now kind of not a far fetched thing. And so the war happened. And what is remarkable about the Gulf War, Trump’s war, whatever we’re going to call it, the Iran War, is that it’s clear that they weren’t prepared. And so one of the things that I think we’re going to start being able to talk about with Trump is not just his lawlessness and his disregard of the Constitution and his corruption, but the guy is a f*** up, right, of historic proportions. I mean, the tariffs were an unbelievable f*** up that slowed the economy down, caused prices to rise here, were slapped down by the courts, angered our allies, you know, and they turned out to be illegal and he’s got to give all the money back with interest.
Like I’ve argued, that in any other democracy, the tariff fiasco would have caused that government to fall. The Epstein scandal would have caused almost any other government to fall and it’s causing foreign leaders to fall. What’s happening with Iran is going to be another. They’re doing a lot of bluster right now about, you know, Hegseth is just a loathsome figure and is trying to argue that all of this has been wildly successful, but they weren’t prepared for the Shahed drones. They didn’t know… we have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Americans in these Gulf Arab countries and in the Middle East… they’re all stuck there. There was no plan to get them out. There’s no effort to get them out. They’re in harm’s way.
We’re closing embassies. Embassies are being, you know, attacked by the Shahed drones and by the Iranians. And it’s clear that however they went through the planning process, just my professional assessment of this is that the military war games everything out, right? They have scenario planning. This is what they do. It means that Trump and the people around Trump and Hegseth must have turned off Trump, some of the scenario planning process. Because it wasn’t that we just didn’t know this was going to happen – we weren’t prepared for it. We also have issues about how much weaponry we have because we’re burning through a lot of the available stocks. And it really seems as if there were briefings done with Trump and Hegseth, and Vance and Rubio, and so on, and that they were warned that if they go ahead full bore the way we’re going, that things could not go the way we want, and therefore we should do X, Y, and Z, and they refused to do those things. Because it doesn’t make any sense that our military, who had been the primary funder of the Ukrainians for the last four years, would not have reached out to Ukraine or had any experience in dealing with the drones, right? You know, what Trump said when he was asked, he said, you know, well, we just went in really fast. And what it meant was they weren’t prepared.
So we just launched, as Adam Smith called it, arguably the biggest…a war involving more people than potentially since the Korean War. I mean, the numbers of hundreds of millions of people are in this region that are now part of this war…and not only was it done without congressional authorization, but it was done poorly, and we weren’t prepared, and we didn’t work everything through. In a very kind of Trumpian way, it was impulsive and risky -- dangerous and stupid. And so I think we’re going to have another sort of tool in our toolbox. To really continue to undermine the legitimacy of the regime, which I’ve talked about here, it’s our essential job because we have to try to prevent them from doing so much harm to the world. And I said this in our discussion with Adam Smith the other night is that Trump is now probably without question the most dangerous person that has ever lived in all of human history. Because he has more power to to wreak havoc on the world than anybody’s ever had. And he’s a sadist. And he’s just killing people. They’re bombing the crap out of Tehran tonight, a major, highly populated city. This is moving, it appears, beyond military targets. We’ll see what’s really happening. We’ll know more.
And I think that we’re at a point now where, as I wrote in my piece, that we’ve been reminded very powerfully, for those of us who needed this lesson, about why it is the Founding Fathers gave war making powers to Congress and not to to a man. Because basically what’s happened is that this war, this massive war that has is going to drive oil prices through the roof and reignite inflation here in the United States, it’s going to slow the American economy, keep interest rates high. It’s going to do enormous damage to the Gulf Arab countries. You know, the whole world is unsettled. We’ve seen stock markets sell off and so on. Things are very volatile and fragile. And one person made this decision. And the FFs believed they had set up a government that would have prevented that from happening in this kind of mad king way.
And the truth is, it has never happened before in American history. We’ve never gone to war without Congress’s approval before on something of this magnitude, not invading Grenada or these kind of little skirmishes that happen here and there, but a war involving hundreds of millions of people, the center of oil production in the world, one of the most important places that creates stuff that make the world go round.
And [it’s] also a geopolitical flashpoint where wars have been going on for decades. Sunni and Shia, Arab and Persian, and so here we are with this guy, one guy, and he said, we went a little quick. They clearly didn’t war game it out. They didn’t plan it out. And this is just a monster fuck up, right, already. And what I keep coming back to is that we, our founders built a system that prevented something like this from happening for almost 250 years, but it happened. One guy went to war. A single guy made the call, not Congress. There was no deliberation. No briefings. There was no debate. There were no serious people sitting in a room and having big conversations, how to make sure this was successful. One guy just said, go. And it’s a reminder of why our democracy exists in the way that it was constructed, a powerful one.
And Hakeem Jeffries gave a speech today on the war powers resolution, the beginning of that debate today where he talked about how this has never happened before. This is an unprecedented moment. And it’s obviously another reason why Trump has to be removed or resigned because he is acting now just lawlessly. The war is lawless. ICE is lawless. The tariffs are lawless. He’s operating outside of the constitutional order and rule of law in the United States. And it’s why I’ve talked about how one of the lessons from last night in Texas, and we can get into it in the Q&A if you want, but what happened last night in the way that they disrupted the voting in Dallas and created all the chaos and confusion, and then got the Supreme Court to supinely in Texas sort of defend this kind of shenanigans that they pulled last night, it’s just a reminder….. just like the intervention where they tried to block Talarico from going on Colbert, it’s a reminder that this election from here on out for the next eight months, because it’s going our way and because we’re doing well, that the people we’re running against are operating outside of the constitutional order. And believe they’re waging a war and killing huge numbers of people right now. Illegally and unconstitutionally. And it means that we have to be vigilant about anticipating that the way they’re going to conduct this election is going to be whatever it takes. Because Donald Trump knows that if we flip the house, which is now very, very likely, that his last two years will be a catastrophe for him and for his family. And so I think that, you know, we have a lot to celebrate tonight. I know the war powers resolution didn’t succeed in the Senate, but you keep reading reports of senators, Republican senators expressing enormous concern about what Trump is doing.
Because if this thing goes sideways, I mean, the Republicans are already in deep s***. And he took this enormous risk to try to reset the election because the State of the Union address did not do that last week. And this thing is far more likely to end up, you know, [being] what I called today a shambolic shit show. And I think they all know that. They all know they’re tethered to this madman. And it’s why I’m proud of the Democrats this week for fighting on the war powers resolution. We’ll probably lose both of them, but we’re not finished fighting. I don’t know what’s going to happen in the House, actually. We picked up a major Republican today, Warren Davidson… backed the war powers resolution in the House. It was a little bit of a surprise. So we have to keep our heads down and keep plugging hard. And so to summarize, it was great to have Anderson here. We continue to have this one election where we’re doing really well and they’re not. You know, we had a really good day today in a variety of ways in addition to the elections. But the gravity of what Donald Trump is doing and the fact that he has essentially declared himself king and no longer feels bound by law is a grave matter. And I will be sharing Hakeem’s speech tomorrow, but Hakeem gave a speech today where he really tried to talk about what this means and how serious and grave this is for the country. It was a really good speech.
It was new language, I think, for the Democrats, building on the language of Spanberger and and Padilla last week, where you’re seeing far more language that feels No-kingsy and defending democracy, and freedoms and liberties, which I think we’ve struggled with a little bit. But I think we’re there now as a party. We get it. And I just want to say finally, you know, happy anniversary to this community.
We began together on March 7th, 2023. We’ve done a lot of remarkable things together during this time. The most important, I think, when I look back on it is the work we did with Anderson and what we’ve been able to build there. We continue to see, to reap the rewards of these investments that we made down there. I can’t tell you how grateful I am personally for the paid subscribers and you making all this possible. This is my only source of income. This is what I do every day. And you guys have allowed me at this time in my life, where I’m formerly young, to be putting myself I think to highest and best use by being part of this community and doing this work in a time I think [at which] we’re all desperate to be feeling like we’re doing our part. Well, I feel like I’ve been able to do my part these last three years, and it’s because of all of you. And so I just want to say, thank you. Let’s get to a few questions.
There’s a good question that Cassandra raised about our admonition against getting involved in primaries. North Carolina was different. This was different. This was four Democrats who ran on the party platform, who had flipped, in essence, to the Republican Party and were working with the Republicans to override Josh Stein’s legislation and the veto overrides. And so basically, they were working against the Democratic governor who had been elected by, as Anderson said, 14 points. And we won all of these races by like 50 points, right? So there was a clear kind of rejection of these traders, in essence, if you want to look at this. It was very cut and dry, you know, and so, yes, in general, I think that we have to be reticent about getting involved in primaries. Particularly against incumbents, but this was not a normal circumstance. This was open collaboration with the Republicans to undermine the ability of the Democratic governor to govern and to reassert the supermajority that they had lost, unwinding some of the most important gains we had in 2024.
And so what was amazing about this, if I can say, is that when Anderson began this process, and as she said, we don’t get involved in primaries, all she did was deny them access to the party resources. I mean, I spoke to her ten days ago, and she said, I think we got a chance of winning. I don’t know. But Josh Stein then endorsed against them and worked against them. And these were blowout wins. I mean, some of these candidates, these are incumbent state legislators — got 22% of the vote. So there was sort of a big judgment rendered by the family. This wasn’t kind of an isolated primary here or there, right? This was something different. And I think this was the appropriate call in this case. We almost got involved in it, but we’ve been doing so many other things that I ended up pulling back, but it’s a good question.
And yes, in general, let me just be clear about this, I think it’s not a good use of our time and money to endorse against incumbent members of Congress. I know that not everybody agrees with that. You know, open seats and primaries are very different. I try to stay out of primaries. Here, we’ve only endorsed in one primary since Hopium has been around. And it’s because [running] was one of my closest friends in the world. And also I thought by far and away, [he was] one of the better candidates and somebody who I could vouch for, and say that if he had won, and he didn’t, that he would have been an extraordinary member of Congress. Andre Cherny in Arizona last cycle. But we’ve tried to stay out of primaries because I think that I feel like our highest and best use.…. we’re like a startup, right? I mean, we help people that haven’t won yet win. And to make new things that need to happen, happen. And we don’t try to help incumbents that much. I mean, yes, we’re helping Jon Ossoff, but that’s a race that we just simply have to win. And also he’s an incredible candidate. But all the other stuff we’re endorsing are all kind of higher risk races that we’re not guaranteed to win. And that’s really where I think our money and time is best spent. I do want to say that I think it’s okay for parties to endorse in primaries. I think there are times when you need to do it. Because one of the two candidates would be a disaster in the general election….. you notice there has been very little of that this cycle, or even last cycle. In the party apparatus, [state parties], their job is to win elections. And there are times…you may see the Republican Party endorse in this runoff…it may happen in Texas…there are times when, you know, parties have to do it. They take the lumps when they do it. These are not without risk, right? And, you know, putting the thumb on the scale. So that’s a good question, though, thank you for asking. And I think this was specific circumstances that warranted a different strategy, in my case.
I want to talk about what happened in Dallas a little bit, and I just want to say that my advice to all of you, is that the story of Texas is James Talarico, and that spending a lot of time talking about what happened in Dallas I think is not the right way to look at what happened yesterday. I will explain what happened in Dallas as best I can.
In Texas, the law, and every state has their own laws about this, [is] that state counties can come together, the Republican and Democratic Party in the county, and decide to get behind something called vote centers. And vote centers are, for those of you who live in states that have vote centers, they mean you don’t vote in your precinct, you can vote anywhere in the county. So it allows people, if you’re working downtown, just to go down the street and vote and you don’t have to vote at home. And it’s a convenience thing. It makes it much easier for people to vote because you can go in anywhere and vote. You can vote anywhere in the county. So Texas has had vote centers in most counties for 12 years. And this year, the Republicans decided that they didn’t want to do that in Dallas County, which is legal. I mean, this is within their rights to do it. And what happened was that their vote centers were in existence in the early vote, but they were not in existence on Election Day. And what should have happened is the Democratic Party should have been educating the voters of Dallas County that Election Day voting was going to be different, and you needed to do your homework to go find your location. We’ll hear from Kendall tomorrow about all this. So they went to go vote. You know, they just went to go vote where they normally vote and they couldn’t do it. They had to go back to their precinct. Then a judge determined that because of the confusion, you know, they had to be open until nine o’clock.
Then the Supreme Court, with Ken Paxton’s help, came in and said you need to segregate those ballots. We’re not sure we’re going to allow those to be counted. And here’s the significance of that — so first of all, this was not a lot of votes in one of the precincts I watched last night. There were 400 votes and like eighteen of them came in after seven o’clock because people didn’t necessarily know that the polls were open later, and they didn’t even necessarily know where to go vote. And so there was massive disruption. So one is, yes, this was trickery, you know, to make it harder for people to vote in a major Democratic stronghold. But the more pernicious thing, and I could have asked Anderson about this, we’ll talk to Kendall about this tomorrow, is that what the Supreme Court did or is in the process of doing, we think, is invalidating votes that people believed were legal at the time. And this is part of what they tried to do in North Carolina in the Supreme Court race that we mentioned earlier [in which] we ended up prevailing. We, Hopium, played a major role in that success. They tried to invalidate, retroactively, votes that people believed they had cast legally at the time. And that’s dangerous, right? Creating ways of imagining invalidating votes because of X, Y, and Z, right, and the courts will reinforce that. I mean, the court’s basic position should be to count every vote. Those votes legally happened last night. And the Supreme Court intervened after these votes had taken place. And so the bias should never be towards invalidation of votes. It should be for counting every vote. And that’s also why this is significant.
There has been, I think, a lot of confusion about what really happened. And to me, part of the lesson is that, yes, Democrats, as I said earlier, need to be imagining in these upcoming primaries, heading into the general election, all the ways they’re going to f*** around with everything. Because they’re going to. It’s what they do. They’re a party now that it’s governed by somebody who doesn’t believe he is bound by law and the U.S. Constitution any longer. So it means that basically they’ve invented all these tools to beat us that aren’t available to a party that believes in democracy. We saw that in 2016 when the Trump campaign openly worked with the Russian government to bring the Russian government in to play a major role in defeating us in 2016. We saw it in 2021 when Trump, you know, in 2020 and 2021, when Trump lost every one of those lawsuits and then led an insurrection against the United States.
I mean, once you’ve brought in the Russian government to help you win and once you’ve led an insurrection against the United States, and you’ve declared yourself god emperor of the Western Hemisphere, and that laws and constitution don’t apply to you anymore… yeah, we should anticipate that this is not going to be a midterm election like any of us that have ever gone through. And I do know… many other groups are doing scenario planning and everything else. But part of what has to happen now is the party needs to take greater responsibility for all this… the DNC, the DSCC, the DCCC… because this affects all candidates. It doesn’t affect just one person. It affected every person running statewide in Texas last night. It affected everyone running in local races. And so this is part of the evolution of the Democratic Party.
That I think the Democratic Party itself as an entity needs to sort of place itself in this midterm and start war gaming out at a state level, at a national level, all the ways that Trump can disrupt the election. I’ve been talking about this a lot in the last couple of weeks. I’ve been writing about this. And I think that, yes, it reinforces the need and necessity for us to be doing a better job at anticipating what the Republicans are going to do than Trump did, who failed to anticipate the Shahed drone attacks against his Gulf-area business partners. And so, yes. I mean, what I’ve often talked about in my private briefings, David, when I do this, is that we need to be like the drone makers in Ukraine. We need to be learning how to fight in a different battlefield than the battlefield that we traditionally fight in. Because there’s never been an election where you’ve had one of the two parties that have basically renounced democracy. And also in 2016, when I helped Donna Brazile dig out from the Russia attack at the DNC, we worked with the FBI and DHS. Well, we’re not gonna be able to work with the FBI and DHS in 2026. There’s no reason to believe that you know, they could be actually part of the things that attack us for all we know.
So, you know, there is vulnerability here and I’m not trying to scare people, but it’s like any time you’ve got a problem in life or a challenge, you’ve got to face it forthrightly. You’ve got to be smart about the analysis you do. And you’ve got to develop a plan to make sure you’re more likely to succeed and to mitigate harm, right? And that’s what we need to be doing around what I call this new battlefield that we’re going to be facing in 2026. Because they keep getting reminders every day about how likely it is that we’re just going to kick their ass so badly in November. And so what do you do? As I mentioned last week, Trump could have course corrected in the State of the Union… he could have said, I’m dropping the tariffs, I’m refunding the ACA, I’m, you know, I’m going to pull back ICE and make them act within the law. If he had done that, his approval rating would have jumped ten points probably after that speech, but they chose not to do that. They’ve chosen to be a party with a leader who’s operating outside of democracy and outside of rule of law. Autocratic, fascist, whatever the term is you want to use, MAGA… which I think will be a term that we may use to describe this kind of stuff in the future. And none of us have ever operated against a party that controls the government, went down and stole ballots down in Georgia, seized ballots down in Georgia, right?
So, I think that now there’s no excuse any longer for us not to be prepared. We can’t wake up in this election, the day after the election, like we did in 2016 and 2024 and be surprised. There’s no excuse for that any longer. We know who he is. He reminded us in Iran, the Iran war. They reminded us in Texas last night. And this is just going to be part of the election landscape of this election. And I think we’re up for it and up to it. And certainly, we’re going to be helping here at Hopium. You know, our focus is still going to be winning the election because the most, as we saw with James Talarico and Jasmine Crockett last night, one of the reasons that didn’t turn into something very ugly was that Talarico won the election decisively. And Harris County, even if it had maximum vote, it wouldn’t have impacted what happened last night. And so the most important thing we can do at Hopium to make sure that we have the election we want to have — that we have to help our candidates, our party committees win the election decisively. In as many places as possible. Because then it becomes far harder for this f****** to be successful.
Remember, most of the polls at the end in the Democratic primary had Talarico winning by five points, seven points, eleven points. So the election results were consistent with the polling. If we go into election day and we’re up by ten points nationally, and our candidates are up all over the place, you know, it just gets much harder for them. You know, one of the reasons that they couldn’t pull it off in 2020 is that Joe Biden won the election and it was clear he won it decisively. And so when you’re wondering about your allocation of time, election protection, volunteering to help local candidates win, giving money, job one is going on offense and winning this election by as big of a margin as possible. The election protection stuff is secondary to that. It’s important, but it’s secondary. If the elections are big and we win decisively, it’s going to be much harder for them to pull off anything in the elections this year.
Let me end tonight and wrap up by saying, you know, thanks to everybody. We’ve done a lot of good here in three years. I love what Hopium has become, you know, in the sense that from the very beginning, what I hoped Hopium would be would be a place that was about doing. It wasn’t about arguing and debating. And we learn here. There’s a lot of learning that goes on here. I learn with all of you. I learn from your posts every day. We try to read every post I can. And I often learn a lot. I see articles and things that I have to check out.
Also, all of you keep me in touch with what’s going on in your areas, your community. So these reports that you do every day are not just helpful for your fellow Hopium members. They’re really important for me. You know, you’re like my intelligence service out there, keeping me aware of what’s happening. And I benefit from it tremendously. So thank you for that.
But I really, I didn’t come with any kind of prepared remarks other than to say that I’m very proud of what Hopium has become. And I’m proud of the reputation that we have when I tell people that we raised… in a little more than two years that we’ve raised almost $9 million for candidates and party committees around the country, that we may be the second or third largest investors in state parties in the whole country. We were the largest fundraiser for Ruben Gallego’s race in Arizona in the whole country in 2024. We won that blue dot in Nebraska. You know, we, this cycle, we were I think one of the two or three largest fundraisers in the Virginia races in 2023, which, you know, flipped the House and kept the Senate for us in a critical time. We’ve been one of the largest fundraisers for the Wisconsin Democratic Party in the last couple of years in the whole country. This small community, 150,000 people, it’s a lot, it’s a big community, but we’re not giant. We’re medium-sized and high-impact, punching above our weight perhaps. When I sit with political leaders and tell them about how much money we’ve raised, literally people’s jaws drop. I mean, like, how are you doing that? Like, what is that? How does that work? On a Substack? And so we’ve invented something here together, right? Hopium to me, what I loved about Substack was that it allows enormous creativity. You know, I sit down in the morning every day, and I have some days I know what I’m going to write. Most days I don’t. And I wander through, I read, I sort of try to figure out what’s the most important thing that I can convey to all of you every morning. I don’t try to cover the news.
I try to share with you what I think is most important that day because you can get news from a lot of places, but I want to try to distill everything down into what’s most important and to use my expertise in politics to help you focus on what matters the most, not all these distractions and bells and whistles and rabbit holes that we can all go down every day. And so, you know, not only is it the commentary here and the insights, I think, high quality, the interviews are competitive with virtually everybody else in terms of just the quality of people here and the quality of the conversations.The thing that makes Hopium different is the doing part – the focus on doing, the focus on what Hopium is, right, the way we talk about, which is that we just don’t hope tomorrow will be better than today…
We do the work to make it so. We’ve built something really incredible together everybody. Your money is making this possible. There is no outside money coming in. It’s all you… this is all a reader, community-driven enterprise and it’s really kind of a remarkable thing. You know, I had a recent meeting with my minder at Substack, and I explained to her that if you look at the the the overall economic activity of this site we generate, I think, on an annualized basis, as much economic activity as the top five sites on all of Substack. And some who have many more, their communities are much bigger. But the only economic activity they have there is the money that goes in for subscriptions. And by the way, you’ve noticed that it’s now becoming very common to have $80 subscriptions annually. And we’re still at $50, which is where we’ve been from the first day. We haven’t risen. That hasn’t increased. I’ve been a little surprised that the subscriptions have gone up so much. And so there are sites that are taking in more money than we take in, obviously. And as all of you know, I don’t have a paywall here. All of you, because you pay, everything is free here, which is also unlike most of the other sites which are heavily paywalled. And so I had this call with Substack saying, why don’t you do a survey of your top 50 sites in the world and find out what the aggregate economic activity the site generates every year, and I’m willing to bet that we’re in the top five. And think about how amazing that is. And so I just want to say thank you all. You know, this has been a lot of fun.
I’ve had a great time working with all of you. I love getting up in the morning and sitting down and spending a few hours hanging out with all of you in my head, thinking about how, what do I need to share with you today that’s going to be most relevant for your busy lives, keeping us focused on the things that matter the most, not chasing things, rabbit holes… but getting shit done, I mean, the North Carolina Democratic Party is one of the most successful Democratic parties in the country to a great degree because of us. So I just want to end by saying, you know, happy anniversary, everybody. Saturday’s the big day. You know, we’ve done a lot of good together here. But we all know that this cycle is one, this year is now one of enormous opportunity. It’s also going to be one of enormous challenge. It’s why the spirit of Hopium… every day fighting it out, no days off, right, I mean, I haven’t taken a day off this year… not letting up because our kids and our grandkids are expecting us to fight for them. You know, this is my son Jed’s room, my oldest son. And, you know, I’m, he grew up in this room, he’s off now doing his thing. And I, in some ways, I like being in here. Because it reminds me about why I’m doing this, which is I’m doing this for him. And I’m doing it for every young person in America who deserves to have the same opportunities that we all had. And that’s under threat. And, you know, not on my fucking watch is that going to happen. So let’s keep working hard, everybody. Thank you for everything. And I’ll see you tomorrow at 2:30 with Kendall Scudder. It’s going to be a great gathering. Invite your friends. By the way, all these free events, please invite your networks and your friends. They’re all welcome to come. And more the merrier. And love you guys. Thanks for everything. Bye-bye.