Wed, June 10th, 7pm ET - Our Weekly Hopium Paid Subscriber Get Together
Trump's ugly meltdown today/Hopium and Platner/Welcome new subscribers!
Friends,
A few things tonight. First, I don’t ask you to watch him very often but this one is a must watch. From Meet The Press today. Ugly, angry, petulant, disrespectful, delusional - a leader in profound decline:
Next, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about Graham Platner. Here’s a version of something I wrote in the Hopium chat yesterday in response to some subscriber questions and comments……
There are strong feelings here in the Hopium community about Graham Platner, for and against. So it is my hope that we have our discussion about him and this challenging moment as we do all our discussions - respectfully, earnestly, truthfully, strategically. For we all want the same thing - to defeat MAGA - even if we have different ideas on how to do so.
My basic take is this: 1) there is a reason party committees have a bias towards candidates who have won before, and have been vetted. As a general rule it is hard for first time candidates to win, and it gets harder the higher the office a first time candidate seeks 2) What’s happened this past week will make it harder and much more expensive for Platner to win, and thus could impact other competitive Senate races. It’s no small thing 3) Let’s see what happens in Tuesday’s primary, how effective he and his campaign are in managing the crisis, and how polling shakes out in the coming days.
But to be clear what happened this week is not about a former girlfriend, a Republican activist, trashing him as some have tried to argue here. It is about the whole series of things we are being asked to accept - an ugly tattoo, terrible Reddit postings, disturbing staff turnover, serial infidelity in the early days of a new marriage, and then the stuff that came out in the NYT this week. Taken together it is a lot, regardless of his other virtues. And Mainers will come to know every bit of it through tens of millions of dollars of brutal ads coming very soon…..
My advice to everyone here - do your own homework. Read the articles. Come to your own conclusions, and don’t let anyone bully you into any take, one way or the other. Let’s be open minded - we don’t know what is going to happen. But as this race could determine control of the Senate next year it is very material to our work here (and we’ve invested a lot of money in Maine this cycle) so of course it is something we will be discussing, debating, and working to better understand - as we do all the big things happening in our politics.
Finally, Hopium paid subscribers will gather this Wednesday, June 10th at 7pm ET.
We’ll follow the usual format - I’ll offer up my latest take on things and then open it up for questions until 8pm ET. For those who can’t make it live our discussion will be recorded and released on the Hopium site Thursday morning.
If you are not yet a paid subscriber and want to join us tomorrow you can sign up here or below.
