Why I Am Optimistic About 2024, Enormous Victory in Wisconsin, Do More/Worry Less

Come Listen To My New Interview with Leigh McGowan, PoliticsGirl

Happy Tuesday all. Hope you had a good President’s Day weekend. A few things for you today:

Why I Am Optimistic About Winning This November - Many of you have asked about the writing of the latest commentator to freak everyone out. I am hesitant to do it, for if I had to respond to everyone each day who said something I didn’t agree with that would be all I do, every day. But let’s dive in. First, please begin with all recent takes on why I am optimistic about why we will win this November. The three best right now are:

• Our Monthly Hopium Gathering With Special Guest Tom Suozzi - my latest take on 2024, with a great cameo by the Congressman-elect

• Democrats Keep Winning, Overperforming, Republicans Keep Struggling - Something I published last week after our huge Suozzi win which goes into what I think is the most important electoral data out there right now - our continued strong performance in elections since Dobbs.

• My New Interview with Leigh McGowan, PoliticsGirl - a good one!

The 2024 election is Biden-Harris versus Trump - We have our ticket, and they will soon have theirs. MAGA has struggled in 2018, 2020, 2022, 2023 and early 2024, and will struggle this fall if we do the work. Heads down folks, don’t get distracted.

On Biden’s age, more here, and two key points: 1) they are not going to win a debate who is more fit to be President 2) Biden has been successful because of his age, his wisdom, his experience not in spite of it.

I challenged Ezra Klein’s views as a guest on his podcast a few weeks ago. Listen here. He called our interview “The Strongest Democratic That Any Of Us Have Ever Seen.” Enjoy.

Trump is not winning the election, or favored, and analysts simply must stop claiming he is - They way our post-Dobbs electoral success and increasingly powerful grassroots is being overly discounted and Trump’s strength as a candidate is being exaggerated has begun to feel a lot like the false red wave media narrative of 2022.

Take a look at these four independent polls of registered voters (not adults) released in the past week. What they find is a close, competitive election:

• Emerson 44-45

• Economist/YouGov 44-44

• Morning Consult 42-43

• Lord Ashcroft 40-40

And for some reason, that the last NYT poll released in December has Biden actually ahead of Trump, 47-45 (+2), seems to be continually ignored by everyone.

What all of this tells you is that the race is close and competitive, and we have to do to out and win this thing the way we’ve been winning elections all across the country. Suozzi’s polls had the race very close and he won by 8, in part supercharged by our enormously powerful grassroots. Here’s something I got from the campaign:

In the space of five weeks people knocked on over 150,000 doors, made over 2 million phone calls, and wrote hundreds of thousands of postcards. Our campaign estimates that every Democrat household in the NY-03 received, on average, five handwritten postcards.

We have work to do, no doubt, but let’s look at this chart from Morning Consult, below. Do the math on what happens when the Biden campaign really engages, and gets Democrats to where Trump’s vote is with Republicans - we go ahead by a few points. That is the likely scenario in the next few months. They have had a primary and we haven’t. Their coalition is more engaged, ours is still wandering. This is normal, folks. The work we have to do is doable work. I have no idea how you make Trump look like a serious candidate for President again.

No poll, no election, no commentator can predict the future. But you can make reasonable assumptions with the data that’s in front of you. That’s what I try to do here every day. And to me the likely scenario - not the only scenario - is Biden-Harris keeping our winning streak alive this November and MAGA loses yet another election.

Respond less, go on offense more. Do not get blown off course. Tell our story, not theirs - I don’t really pay much attention to what others are saying about us and the election. I just do my work here with all of you, make my case, put my head down and go to work every day. I do not let others dictate my understandings of the world, blow me around, and neither should you. We have to get better at this everyone. In the War Room in 1992 our goal was to go offense every day, win the daily info war, respond if attacked. If the central way you engage with politics is by responding you are letting others define the debate, set the agenda, dictate your understanding. And this regular freakout that happens on our side with a single poll, or a single article, is self-indulgent. We don’t have time for it. Let people who do this commentary every day do that stuff. We have elections to win, a democracy to save, MAGA to beat. And we’ve been pretty good at it. In fact the very first election our Hopium community helped win was the Wisconsin Supreme Court race last April, and look what just happened with the power we gained from that win. From WI Dem Chair Ben Wickler:

The long, dark night of ultra-partisan gerrymandering is over, and a new day for democracy now dawns in the Badger State. The stroke of Governor Evers’s pen today marks the end of the shameful period that began in 2011, when Republican lawmakers—bound in secrecy by nondisclosure agreements as they worked with operatives at a lobbying firm—drew legislative lines that guaranteed that even landslide election losses wouldn’t cost them their majorities. The result was one of the most egregious, extreme partisan gerrymanders in American political history.

Ever since, Republican politicians in Wisconsin have used their power to take more power away from the people of our state—restricting access to the ballot, removing authorities that voters had entrusted to statewide elected officials like the Governor and Attorney General, and smashing the freedoms of workers to organize and advocate for themselves. For thirteen years, the democracy-proof legislature has been laying siege to democracy itself.

Last April, years of tireless organizing culminated with Wisconsinites electing Justice Janet Protasiewicz in a landslide, charting a new course for our state that has led us to the new, vastly fairer maps signed into law by Gov. Evers today. In November, at long last, Wisconsin voters will have a real choice in who represents them in Madison. The majority will determine the majority.

The candidate recruitment process now goes into overdrive. And at the same time, we remain vigilant in case Republican politicians in Madison and their allies once again, through the courts or any other strategy, attempt to thwart majority rule.

Today, we made progress towards true democracy in Wisconsin—thanks to the efforts of so many grassroots activists, tireless supporters, and elected leaders. We stand ready to fight back against any attempt by Republicans to undermine the path towards democracy and accountability, and we commit to doing everything in our power to ending the Speakership of Robin Vos and paving the way towards a Democratic trifecta that can, at long last, translate the will of the people of Wisconsin into the law of the land.

Think about what we’ve done together in the past year. This big in Wisconsin. We took away Jacksonville, Florida, the state’s largest city, from DeSantis and Trump. We took away the 6 week abortion ban in Ohio. We took away the Virginia Assembly, and delivered a huge blown to Glenn Youngkin’s national standing and his fantasy of the 15 week abortion ban as a safe haven. Last month the Virginia Assembly elected Don Scott its speaker, the first black Speaker in the capital of the Confederacy - we helped do that. We took away another seat in Florida last month, and we took away NY-3 last week, bigly. We just keep winning, expanding, taking stuff away from them - and they keep struggling. It’s the central reason I am so optimistic about 2024. And, oh, Trump is far weaker than 2024, a far worse and far uglier candidate, the most unfit person to ever run for President in all our history.

Remember:

Joe Biden is a good President. The country is better off. The Democratic Party is strong and winning elections all across the country. And they have Trump.

More on why I am optimistic about 2024:

• Hopium Posts - As We Keep Kicking Their Ass, MAGA Is Melting Down, Since Dobbs, Democrats Keep Overperforming, Winning and Republicans Keep Struggling, Building The Most Powerful Democratic Machine We’ve Ever Had, Another Huge Jobs Report, Notes on Recent Polling, New Biden NATO Ad (New)

• Hopium Presentations/Videos - Our Monthly Hopium Gathering With Special Guest Tom Suozzi (New), With Democrats, Things Get Better

• Op-eds/Essays/Print Interviews - Biden’s Chances Are Much Stronger Than People Realize (MSNBC), 4 Things Biden Should Do Now (New Republic), Simon Rosenberg on the Trump electoral albatross (Aaron Rupar’s Public Notice)

• Video Interviews - MSNBC’s Last Word, CNN’s Amanpour

• Podcasts (Audio) - PoliticsGirl (New), That Trippi Show, Deep State Radio with David Rothkopf, The Ezra Klein Show

Let’s Do More, Worry Less - Core to the Hopium project is that we channel all this worry and anxiety we have about our current moment into concrete action - do more, worry less - as we say here. We do this by working on campaigns and being info warriors for our democracy. I try to give you a bit of direction about where to channel your work by endorsing campaigns and projects. Together we just made a big difference in NY-3, and if you looking at ways to help I am encouraging people to take two steps today (donate/learn more here):

• Donate and join the Biden-Harris campaign

• Make an early investment into North Carolina, our most important 2024 expansion state

I will be offering some new recommendations in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!

Anne Applebaum on Navalny’s “Civic Courage” - On Morning Joe this morning the great Anne Applebaum talked about Navalny’s “civic courage.” It’s a powerful reminder why we have to keep doing more and worrying less:

Sinclair and Negative Sentiment In Our Discourse - One of the things we talk about here at Hopium is how one of MAGA’s core strategies is to pump negative sentiment into our discourse everyday, with the goal of having Americans feel bad about our democracy, our country, our leaders, our institutions, each other - all of it. That America is failed, rather than prosperous and strong, is a necessary sentiment for the kind of radical authoritarian Trump is now offering. It’s why their “noise machine” just keeps pumping this negative sentiment, daily, with everything they got.

We know about Fox News, now Twitter, Tucker Carlson. Meet Sinclair Broadcasting:

Every year, local television news stations owned by Sinclair Broadcasting conduct short surveys among viewers to help guide the year’s coverage.

A key question in each poll, according to David Smith, the company’s executive chairman: “What are you most afraid of?”

The answers are evident in Sinclair’s programming. Crime, homelessness, illegal drug use, failing schools and other societal ills have long been core elements of local TV news coverage. But on Sinclair’s growing nationwide roster of stations, the editorial focus reflects Smith’s conservative views and plays on its audience’s fears that America’s cities are falling apart, according to media observers, Smith associates, and current and former staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal company matters.

Smith, an enthusiastic supporter of Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump who has built Sinclair into one of the largest television station operators in the country, purchased the Baltimore Sun last month. In a private meeting with the Sun’s journalists, he urged them to emulate coverage at the local Sinclair station, Fox45, which in 2021 produced a documentary titled simply “Baltimore Is Dying.”

Sinclair’s local network of 185 stations across the country makes it an influential player in shaping the views of millions of Americans, especially at a time when local newspapers are rapidly being gutted — or closed altogether.

As Sinclair increasingly fills the void, it offers its viewers a perspective that aligns with Trump’s oft-stated opinion that America’s cities, especially those run by Democratic politicians, are dangerous and dysfunctional.

“Sinclair stations deliver messages that appeal to older, White, suburban audiences, and they play up crime stories in a way that is disproportionate to their statistical presence,” said Anne Nelson, a journalist and author of “Shadow Network: Media, Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right.” “All of it is fearmongering and feeds into a racialized view of cities.”

Countering all this is one of the central reasons why we are here at Hopium. Why you do the work. Why we aspire to become a community of 2-3m info warriors countering their noise machine every day with positive stories about this great country, its wonderful people, our successful President, our strong and inspiring party. It’s why why do not obey in advance, why we express love of country and “civic courage” every day in the work we do, together.

Keep working hard all. We are winning, and they are not - Simon