Winning The House, Bynum Rocks It In OR-5, Good New Battleground Polling, Trump Wants to Wreck The US Economy,

We Gather Tonight at 7pm ET. Lots To Discuss, Register Today!

Happy Wednesday all. Got a few things for you today:

I’m Talking The 2024 Election Tonight, Other Upcoming Events - I’m doing my monthly political briefing for all of you tonight at 7pm ET. If you can’t make it live a recording will be available here tomorrow. Note that we’ve added a few new events to the Hopium calendar including these:

• Wed, May 22, 7pm ET - Monthly Hopium Community Wide Get Together w/Simon - Register

• Thur, May 23, 730pm ET - Simon speaks to Northwest Bronx Indivisible via Zoom. Register here.

• Tue, June 4, 7pm ET - Monthly Hopium Paid Subscriber Get Together

• Wed, June 5, 1pm ET - Monthly Hopium Founding Members Get Together

If you want to join our subscriber only events and are not yet a subscriber you can sign up here. Many thanks to all our paid subscribers - you keep this place going, and the Hopium flowing!

Winning The House - Our campaign to win the House has gotten off to a great start my friends - together we’ve already raised over $80,000 for our 10 candidates in our first 24 hours! Thanks to all of you who’ve stepped and made a contribution so far. As I wrote yesterday, time and again our community has answered when called, and you all are doing it once again. I am so grateful, so inspired, and oh so ready to go kick their ass.

My endorsements yesterday were in 10 of the 11 Cook Republican-Held Toss Up races. Last night in Oregon Janelle Bynum decisively won the Democratic Primary in the 11th seat, Oregon’s 5th district. Her 69%-31% win was impressive, and signals she has a very good chance of flipping this seat in November. She will be added to our list later today, bringing our “Winning The House” list to 11.

Thanks again everyone - this campaign is off to a great start!

The 2024 Election - Let’s talk the Electoral College today. Here are the results of new Bloomberg/Morning Consult polling of the battleground states, Biden-Trump:

• AZ 44-49 Biden gains 2 since last poll

• GA 44-47 Biden gains 3, within margin of error

• MI 46-45 Biden gains 1

• NV 46-46 Biden gains 8

• NC 42-49 Biden gains 2

• PA 46-48 Trump gains 1, within margin of error

• WI 46-47 Biden gains 3, within margin of error

These are good polls for us. For Trump to win he needs to win AZ, GA, NV, keep NC, and win one of MI, PA, WI. He lost all these states except NC in 2020. So he has to go get a lot of stuff he didn’t have in 2020. In this poll, and in the three other recent battleground state polls (NYT Likely Voters, Not Registered Voters) he is not ahead, outside of the margin of error, in MI, PA or WI, or any combination of states getting to 270. The map is hard for him, and today, simply and plainly, he is not leading or ahead in the 2024 election. He is not where he wants to be right now.

Our path to 270 is much clearer. Assuming we win the single Nebraska Electoral College vote we just need to win MI, PA, WI - all states we won last time, and all states where we have strong Dem governors who won in 2022. There are polls now with Biden ahead in AZ, MI, WI and tied in NV (yes this NV result is embarrassing for the New York Times). All four of these battleground polls have PA within margin of error, and a new poll about to be released in North Carolina has the Biden-Trump race there within margin of error, 43-45 Biden-Trump. This is the third poll taken in NC in recent weeks showing the election a toss up in North Carolina. Also note for those worried about Michigan that there are more polls showing us ahead in there than any other battleground state.

My big point here is that not all the data in front of us is pointing in the same direction - thus folks need to be cautious about jumping to conclusions or letting a single influential poll dictate our understandings.

The blue wall states - MI, PA, WI - are clearly within margin of error, tied now. We have recent polls showing AZ, GA, NC, NV also within margin of error, tied. Given all this it is simply impossible, wrong and inaccurate to argue that Trump leads or is favored. The election is close and competitive. Our path to 270 is easier. We have enormous financial and organizational advantages now, a better candidate and far, far better arguments. Senate and House polling remains encouraging, and we’ve made meaningful gains in the Congressional Generic. We’ve been winning elections of all kinds across the country since Dobbs and they keep struggling, a dynamic we’ve seen show up in voting in 2024 too……

We are not where we want to be, and have a lot of work to do. But in every way imaginable, four months before voting begins, I would much rather be us than them.

Helpful recent posts - I Would Much Rather Be Us Than Them, Trump 2024 Is Weak Not Strong, America’s Start Up Boom, Dems Need A Big Reform and Renewal Agenda

Key themes we continue to explore:

• The main GOP attacks on Biden are evaporating and losing their power

• Why Biden’s strength with likely voters matters, and how Dems just keep winning and Rs keep struggling

• Democrats have significant financial and organization advantages now

• The GOP’s “bad candidate” problems in the battleground states have returned

• Six new things voters are going to learn that will make it hard for Trump to win

New Jawdropping Details Of Trump’s Unprecedented, Historic Betrayal Of The Country - From Politico this morning:

Four months after the FBI raided his Mar-a-Lago estate, Donald Trump’s attorneys discovered four documents marked “classified” in his personal bedroom.

That revelation was among several cited by U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell in a newly unsealed 2023 opinion that found prosecutors had presented compelling evidence that Trump knowingly stashed national security documents in his home and then tried to conceal them when the Justice Department tried to retrieve them.

In her 87-page opinion, Howell said the likelihood that Trump committed crimes was a basis to permit special counsel Jack Smith to question the former president’s attorney Evan Corcoran on topics that would normally be shielded by attorney-client privilege. Prosecutors, Howell said, had demonstrated that Trump knew Corcoran had been tasked in June 2022 with informing the government that all classified materials had been returned, “a representation that the former president … knew to be wrong.”

The FBI’s August 2022 search of Mar-a-Lago confirmed that dozens of other classified documents remained on the property — but as Howell notes, there were at least two more rounds of classified materials found on Trump’s property following additional searches.

Throughout the opinion, Howell — who was chief judge of the Washington, D.C. federal district court at the time — described with varying degrees of incredulity how four documents with classification markings could have been discovered in Trump’s private quarters months after prosecutors had subpoenaed them and the FBI conducted its own exhaustive search of the property.

“Notably, no excuse is provided as to how the former president could miss the classified-marked documents found in his own bedroom at Mar-a-Lago,” Howell, an Obama appointee, wrote.

In a footnote, Howell also noted that another Trump adviser connected to his Save America PAC had acknowledged scanning the contents of the box that contained the classified materials in 2021 and storing them on a personal laptop provided by the PAC.

Rob Shapiro: “Trump’s Plan For Mass Deportations Would Be An Economic Disaster” - In the coming weeks we are going to start spending more time with Trump’s various economic plans, which seemed designed to do significant harm to the American economy and the country.

Yesterday my good friend, long time colleague and influential economist Rob Shapiro published a new analysis in the Washington Monthly about the impact of Trump’s mass deportation plan. Shapiro concludes:

Besides being cruel, deporting 11 million unauthorized immigrants would cause labor shortages and slash national wage and salary income, likely triggering a recession and reigniting inflation.

Here are a few more excerpts:

Donald Trump’s fierce enmity towards immigrants is a central theme of his campaign, as it was in 2016. This time, though, he is offering detailed plans that, if carried out, would inflict misery on a mass level and major costs for taxpayers and the economy….

….By any measure, a policy that eliminated 4.5 percent of the current workforce, including large numbers of college and high school graduates, would set off serious economic tremors. Using Okun’s Law on the relationship between rising unemployment and GDP, a 4.5 percent drop in employment is associated with depressing GDP growth by more than 9 percentage points. This estimate also includes the impact on other jobs. A recent study of much more modest programs to deport immigrants found clear evidence that they cost other American jobs. By one calculation, deporting 1 million immigrants would lead to 88,000 additional employment losses by other Americans, suggesting that Trump’s program could cost up to 968,000 Americans their jobs on top of the 7.1 million jobs held by immigrants up for deportation.

The application of Okun’s law to mass deportations is not precise. Nevertheless, it suggests that if Trump’s program were carried out over three years, it would produce a downturn that could approximate the Great Recession in 2009, when GDP fell 2.6 percent and sluggish growth persisted for years…..

…..There would be more costs because a mass deportation program could revive inflation. Labor costs account for about 60 percent of business costs, which increase when companies have to replace large numbers of workers—as happened when restaurants, bars, and hotels reopened after COVID-19 crested. Businesses facing significant labor shortages have three main options: Pay more overtime, pay more to recruit new workers, or live with lower productivity. In all cases, the additional costs are typically passed on through higher prices. While Federal Reserve researchers have found that tight labor markets usually have modest effects on overall inflation, the impact is greater when the tightness is severe and persistent—as it would be if a new administration moved to deport more than 7 million current workers in construction, hospitality, manufacturing, retail, and other industries.

On top of these blows, mass deportations would involve enormous costs for taxpayers. One study found that apprehending, detaining, transporting, processing, and finally deporting unauthorized immigrants in 2015 cost the government an average of $18,214 per deportee or $24,094 in current dollars. Using the latest DHS estimates, the taxpayer costs to deport 11 million people would come to $265 billion—without including their American children or the costs to build and maintain large detention camps. For perspective, $265 billion is equivalent to 11 percent of all projected income tax revenues in 2024 and 30 percent of the Pentagon’s 2024 budget.

Yes the MAGA wrecking ball will be much bigger in the Trump second term. It’s why we are, doing the work and leaving it all on the playing field.

Keep working hard all. Proud to be in this fight with all of you - Simon