Troy Jackson Leads By 3 In New Maine Poll, OpenAI Goes Rogue, Rs “Preparing For The Bottom To Fall Out”

Let's keep calling the Senate to block Todd Blanche. Most important calls today are to Tillis and Cornyn - need to flood the zone everyone!

Morning all. Got a few things for you today…..

Need To Keep Calling To Block Blanche - Jay Clayton advanced through Committee last night but Todd Blanche does not yet have the votes - so we need to be aggressive today peeps and keep the pressure on. The most important calls are Senator Tillis and Senator Cornyn. Here’s Rick Wilson over at Lincoln Square this morning:

The victims of Jeffrey Epstein have released a letter to the U.S. Senators who will cast the deciding votes on Todd Blanche’s nomination to serve as Donald Trump’s Attorney General.

I have excoriated Todd Blanche as unethical and downright evil for his leadership of the Trump-Epstein cover-up, and I stand by every word. But the letter these women have written is so painful, so passionate, and so morally unanswerable that I am compelled to share it with you in full.

Let’s keep making our calls people, particularly those of you in North Carolina and Texas!

“We’re preparing for the bottom to fall out” - Here’s the lead story in Politico Playbook this morning, the most read political newsletter in Washington:

EPIC FUMBLE: For months, President Donald Trump has insisted he could manage the Iran conflict on his terms: hit hard, force a deal and keep the United States out of another long Middle East war.

Instead the U.S. and Iran are escalating strikes. More U.S. service members are dead. Gas prices are again on the rise. The administration’s diplomatic off-ramp appears to be narrowing. And Republicans working to preserve their congressional majorities are beginning to contemplate a scenario they once viewed as unthinkable: a full-scale war still dominating the political landscape in November.

“We’re preparing for the bottom to fall out,” a GOP operative working on midterm races told Playbook.

The operative said contests in Iowa, Alaska and Ohio — along with House districts Trump carried by double digits in 2024 — are now firmly in play.

“Republicans are running out of runway here to improve their political fortunes before November,” the operative said.

In Iowa, a new battleground for the GOP, Democratic Senate candidate state Rep. Josh Turek has made the war a touchstone of his stump: “Everywhere I’m going — it doesn’t matter, urban or rural areas — people are telling me they’re struggling just to keep food on the table, a roof above their head, and now with this unnecessary war in Iran, we’re looking at being able to afford gas,” he told Playbook.

Battleground GOPers like Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania and Rep. Tom Barrett in Michigan have been boxed into a corner, forced to choose between toeing the party line on the war while convincing frustrated voters that position isn’t at odds with the conflict’s downstream impact on prices.

Yesterday’s Hopium post was about how Trump’s failed war had - predictably - turned into a global strategic and domestic political disaster for the Trump and the Republicans. Brent crude is over $93 a barrel this morning, gas prices are over $4 a gallon, diesel is back up over $5 a gallon, and bond yields are spiking again (higher interest rates, enormous new costs to US govt/taxpayers).

The budget process in Washington has completely melted down for the Republicans have no idea how they are going to pay for this unauthorized Mad Kingy war that is now running into the many, many hundreds of billions of dollars without any clear end in sight. In essence where the Rs are now is either spend enormous sums to launch a full ground invasion of Iran without a high likelihood of success or spend enormous sums rebuilding Iran after our full surrender. Either way the cost to US taxpayers is going to run into the many hundred billions, perhaps trillions, and our position here at Hopium is that the only people who should pay for this disastrous and illegal war are the oligarchs who put Trump into power and are slavishly propping him up now.

And let us again remind ourselves that every day Americans are already paying an enormous price for this failed war and the broader failures of the regime - higher prices, disrupted supply chains, higher health care costs and reduced access to care, lost markets, tremendous pressure on small business and farmers. In the midst of this new round of higher costs due to his war Trump is also now madly levying enormous new tariffs, to make the pain of these new higher costs even that more acute.

In my Monday post I showed that the true cost of this failed war to the world has been in the many, many trillions, already; and the harm to our standing in the world from just these first 18 months of Trump is incalculable. It’s another reason why “we’re preparing for the bottom to fall out” is a smart political course for Republicans now.

G. Elliott Morris has new data this morning to show why Republicans should be so worried about the Novembers elections:

Over the last five election cycles (the extent of my readily available historical data), polls of likely voters have typically leaned more Republican than polls of registered voters or all U.S. adults. That’s because Democrats have typically held an edge with lower-turnout groups, like young Americans and non-white voters, that skew coarser samples to the left. More reliable voters, historically speaking, have been more Republican-leaning than the population as a whole (this was not true in 2024).

But data on likely voter turnout this election cycle points the other direction. According to a new analysis of pooled survey interviews from Strength In Numbers/Verasight polls since January 2026, Americans who say they are most likely to vote in November are actually more pro-Democratic than registered voters.

………..

Our July poll has Democrats leading the generic congressional ballot by 7 points among registered voters, 50% to 43%. That 7-point advantage itself would be enough to flip the House majority (Democrats need to win the popular vote by about 3 points to win 218 seats) and to make the Senate majority competitive, and would be a swing of 9 points since the 2024 presidential race (about the same swing as from 2016 to 2018).

But when we filter our polling data to the people who say they’ll definitely or probably vote in November, the Democratic Party’s lead grows to almost 9 points — a boost of about a point and a half on average across polls. The size of the premium bounces around from month to month (see image below), but the direction never changes. In all seven surveys since we started asking the turnout question in January, likely voters have leaned bluer than registered voters, by anywhere from one to two and a half points.

I want to be clear that this +9 with likely voters is far closer to what we are seeing in Senate polls across the battleground that show Democrats competitive in states Trump won by +11 or more. Note we’ve added the promising new UNH poll of Maine that has Troy Jackson ahead of Susan Collins, 49%-46%.

Two months before people start voting the Trumpy Republican thing feels like it is collapsing under the weight of their fanaticism, idiocy, corruption, and fealty to the worst leader America has ever seen. “We’re preparing for the bottom to fall out” is a smart political course for Republicans now. For us, here’s the course I recommended this past weekend:

National Democrats - Schumer, Jeffries, The Governors, The AGs, DNC/State Parties, Marc Elias, other democracy groups - should come together and create a unified front to defend our elections and our democracy. Right now our leaders are working in silos and it just isn’t enough given the gravity of what Trump is attempting. They should speak with one voice to educate and prepare the American people for what is to come, and build an integrated coordinating council or war room to counter it all - for we are stronger together than apart.

As part of that effort Democrats should announce a simple agenda to let voters know what we will do when back in power. We’ve offered some ideas for can be in a national agenda in our evolving Agenda Project. Whatever our leaders come up with it is essential they offer a clearly articulated accountability and renewing democracy agenda as part of this broader agenda. For as Hardy Merriman told us a few months ago the global democracy movement has learned that those parties attempting to enact far reaching accountability and democratic reforms fair far better when they’ve campaigned on the reforms and earned a clear mandate from voters. And we also know from polling that voters want us to be talking about us preserving their rights and freedoms (No Kings) and not just “kitchen table issues” and that there is nothing more intrinsically American than fighting for freedom and democracy.

We also know from polling, lots and lots of polling, that voters believe that our hearts are in right place but question our toughness, and whether we are strong enough to be able to fight and deliver for them. So we should see this fight for our rights and liberties as a real test of our character, resolve, “toughness to govern” and the ability do hard things - one we simply must pass.

For truly beating MAGA, truly creating accountability, truly restoring our democracy, and truly giving the American people a better tomorrow will be the hardest thing our leaders - and all of us - have ever done; there is no easy path ahead; and we need to get on with it now.

OpenAI Model Goes Rogue - In what is a major moment in the evolution of AI the American company OpenAI has acknowledged that in its testing of a new, more advanced model the AI broke out of containment and hacked into another company to solve a problem - all on its own. Here is one cybersecurity expert’s plain language explanation of what happened:

"Our AI model tried really hard to hack out of its sandbox, a computer with no internet access, in order to find the answer to a test problem it had been given. To do this, it found previously unknown software bugs that allowed it to reach an OpenAI computer it wasn't supposed to be able to access. Then it started hacking other computers on OpenAI's networks until it found one that had Internet access.

After gaining Internet access, the AI model thought about where it could find the answers to the test question and figured the AI platform Hugging Face might have the data it was looking for. It then found ways to hack Hugging Face to steal the information it could use to cheat the test. The AI model used several hacking techniques together, including using a stolen password and finding several totally new security bugs in Hugging Face's computers, allowing the AI model to take control of those computers."

We have not spoken much about AI here at Hopium. That’s going to change now as it’s clear that ensuring a safe and peaceful transition into this new age of AI is becoming one of our most important governing challenges, one that cannot be trusted to the failed, corrupt regime temporarily running our country.

Yes, my friends, as they prepare for the bottom to fall out, it is time for us to…..

Get To Work People!!!!!!!!!!!

Winning The House and Senate In 2026

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Friends, if these twelve courageous candidates win, the House will flip, even with Callais and their rancid mid-decade redistricting. So eyes on the prize here everyone!

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A donation to the Second Wave Fund is split evenly among these twelves, and more as other worthy candidates emerge from their primaries. Our total above includes money we’ve raised for directly for each candidate. You can watch interviews with those who’ve interviewed so far here. We are off to a great start here everyone!

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Winning Maine (New) - $67,700 raised, $75,000 goal - Donate | Right now this fund is only supporting the Maine Democratic Party to help them get through this challenging process of selecting a new Senate nominee. It will expand in coming days to include both our gubernatorial candidate, Hannah Pingree, and our eventual Senate nominee too. Thanks to all of you who have rallied for the Maine Dems in the past few days - it’s a big deal! | Watch our new interview with the inspiring Executive Director of the Maine Dems Devon Murphy-Anderson

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Current 2026 Election Analysis

• On The Necessity Of Dems Getting A Clear Mandate From Voters This November - Revisiting My Conversation With Hardy Merriman

• The Importance Of Character And Virtue In The 2026 Elections

• It’s Time To Move On From The “Democrats Suck” Narrative - It’s Wrong, And We Have An Election To Win

• In Defense Of Vetting

A Few More Things To Do

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