1 Down, 3 More To Go! More Notes On What Happened, Contesting The Right's Info Superiority And What Comes NextThanks to everyone who has already given to Abigail Spanberger!
Good morning all. A reminder that Hopium is back to 5 days a week during this post-election, rest and recover, Holiday period. So my next post will be on Monday. I’ve left you plenty of stuff to chew on below if you need to check in over the weekend. In the coming weeks expect more What Happened, What Comes Next discussions, a Simon/Tom Bonier debrief, conversations with the leading candidates for DNC Chair and much, much more! Now, let’s get to it on a cold and snowy Friday in DC: Trump’s Outrageous 4 Is Now 3: Gaetz Goes Down, Growing Trouble for Hegseth and Gabbard - Still asking folks to call their Senators and Representative to let them know your dissatisfaction with Trump’s pick of Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth and Robert Kennedy, and to inform them of your expectation that they will leave it all out there on the playing field to block these profoundly dangerous nominations. We should be demanding that our party leaders do everything they can to block them, and build a national campaign to encourage other Americans to join us. We may not win, but we can grow our networks and power, weaken the impulsive, idiotic Trump for these reckless choices, and make it clear that the ferocious opposition is going to stand and fight. Matt Gaetz’s withdrawal yesterday was a big win for our efforts to block these terrible picks. Congratulations all! I am also very grateful to those of you who’ve self-reported that you have called your Senators and House Members, and to those who have contacted the White House asking President Biden to order the FBI to begin background checks into Trump’s nominees immediately. The case against Pete Hegseth got far more serious yesterday, as a newly released police report sure suggests he raped a woman in a Monterey, CA hotel room. The rapist-in-chief’s efforts to normalize sexual assault while perhaps predictable remains shocking and unacceptable - and another reason we have to keep fighting.
There are also growing concerns from Republican Senators about Tulsi Gabbard, as we all hoped. From Punchbowl News, a DC-insider publication:
1 down, 3 more to go. We need to keep fighting everyone. Update On The House and Senate - After a recount, the PA Senate race was called for Bob Casey’s opponent last night, giving the Republicans a 53 seat majority next year. The final margin in the race was 16,000 votes out of almost 7m votes cast. Yes, another reminder that our work in these races really does matter. In the House Derek Tran grew his lead yesterday in CA-45, and Adam Gray has almost caught up in CA-13! Let’s keep working the ballot curing process folks. We have two more House seats to win!
Here’s where our 15 endorsed House candidates stand today:
While the House officially went to the Rs last Wednesday, I remain very proud of the good we’ve done, together, this cycle. We made deeply strategic investments and got important wins in a tough year in AZ, NC, NE, WI and critical House races across the country. Of the 6 House seats Dems flipped this cycle, our community aggressively backed 5 of them - George Whitesides CA-27, Tom Suozzi NY-3, Laura Gillen NY-4, Josh Riley NY-19 and Janelle Bynum OR-5. There are still ballot curing opportunities for Gray and Tran with Grassroots Democrats HQ. We need to keep working it people! Sign up to help keep curing ballots for both here. What Happened, What Comes Next - Our approach here has been to go slow, listen and learn, and be full of more questions than answers. Here are some initial things I’ve put out:
To help us learn from others throughout the family, I’ve launched a new What Happened, What Comes Next discussion series. Here are the first four of those talks, along with 2 relevant segments from my fall Closing Strong series with Tara McGowan and COURIER Newsroom:
From Closing Strong:
I’ve also set up a thread for paid subscribers to offer their thoughts on what this wonderful and plucky community should do next. I’m grateful for the many comments we’ve received so far. Weigh in if you can in the coming days.
Going On Offense And Getting Louder, Much Louder - Finally, on this Friday before Thanksgiving, I return to something I wrote about in the immediate aftermath of the election. While a loss like 2024 came for many small reasons, there were a couple of big ones. To me the failure of Future Forward, our SuperPAC, to define and disqualify Trump, the ugliest, most criminal, and most extreme candidate for President ever early, in the spring/summer/fall, was the biggest mistake of all. Look at this data from a new post-election poll from Navigator Research. Trump had better favs/unfavs with the “swing” voters who determined in the election at the end. How in the world was that possible given all that Trump had done, proposed, is? It’s a sign of the failure of our campaigns, and the success of theirs.
Here’s what I wrote the Thursday after the election: …… Been doing a lot of thinking about my 2022 Two Elections take that postulated there were two elections in 2022 - a bluer one inside the battleground, a redder one outside. The reason the battlegrounds were bluer in 2022 the theory goes was due to our financial and organizational advantage (all of you) that allowed us to control the information environment and push our on the ground performance to the upper end of what was possible. However, where we did not have those campaigns, and the right maintained information superiority, we fell behind. This trend was most acute in large Dem states like CA and NY, where we saw a huge Dem drop-off in performance. We are seeing some of that same dynamic this time. While the nation moved about six points to the right from 2020 it moved less in the battlegrounds where we deployed our big campaigns and where the Dem Senate did too. But this year we once again saw drop-off in big Dem states where we did not have competitive campaigns. To me all this means two things:
We have a loudness problem on our side that simply must be addressed strategically across the entire party in every state and across the country. Our muscular campaigns allow us to close the info and loudness gap with the right every two years. And while our rigorous targeting allows us to concentrate our firepower and be competitive, we have to do more to be competitive and win the national conversation every day, something all of our hyper-targeting of media markets and narrow persuadable groups doesn’t do for us. We have to be speaking every day to all parts of our coalition, and not just a handful of swing voters and their concerns in a few battleground states. For if we don’t do this, our campaigns will end up always playing defense in a right-constructed frame, that, among other things, discourages us from talking about all the good we do as a party - for right-adjacent groups never believe any of that. All they know is the bad - high inflation, trans, the border, crime - and thus the campaign and data ecosystem tells us not to even try to challenge it. It’s too baked in. Over time this means we never get to make the case for us which is one reason why no one knows all the good Biden-Harris had done. For right-adjacent swing voters don’t believe it, and thus even though our economy today is arguably stronger than it has been in 60 years, we spent the general election talking about the harms of inflation rather than our success in getting to the other side of it and orchestrating a soft landing. Look at this data from last week’s Economist/YouGov tracking poll. The US has had more jobs created under Biden than any four year period in US history. Only 19% of independent voters think jobs are increasing right now, and a whopping 80% say there is no job growth or jobs are decreasing (34%). So the way our campaign data ecosystem works is that a candidate would be told not to talk about the growing economy for our target voters don’t believe it. Even though it is true, and no one will know it is true unless we tell them.
……….. My point here is that at the core of our go-forward strategy has to be an understanding that we must challenge and contest the right-infused national discourse far more aggressively - change people’s understandings, go on offense, create greater 24/7/365 capacity, not hold ads until late but go up early - or our campaigns will always be living inside a right-constructed narrative structure which elevates them and denigrates us. We have enough money to do it. If we don’t we should not expect to win. Here is how the Cook Report summarized why we did so well in the battleground Senate races:
We need to be loud and proud as I say here, loud and proud. Not timid, micro-targeted and late for then we are letting the other side dictate the terms of the debate - and that’s how they win even with the ugliest candidate for President in our all our history. Keep working hard all. Proud to be in this fight with all of you - Simon You're currently a free subscriber to Hopium Chronicles By Simon Rosenberg. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
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Friday, November 22, 2024
1 Down, 3 More To Go! More Notes On What Happened, Contesting The Right's Info Superiority And What Comes Next
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