2026 Is Shaping Up To Be A Year Of Opportunity For Us - If We Seize It (New Video, Written Analysis)The big lesson of 2025 - when we fight Trump, we can win. It should make us confident and ambitious as we approach 2026.
Morning all. Last night, before Trump’s unhinged and disastrous address to the nation, our community gathered and I offered some thoughts on where we are in our battle against Trump and Trumpism. A video recording of our get together is above, and a transcript of my opening remarks are below. You can find a transcript of the entire discussion, including the lively Q and A, here. A few notes this morning summarizing my current take on things: 1 - Trump’s terrible Presidency has created an extraordinary backlash with voters, which has weakened him and his regime. So while the country suffered in 2025, our political and electoral efforts to weaken the regime and win back power were perhaps more successful than we could have anticipated six months ago. As MTG said this week “the dam is breaking,” and Republicans of all kinds are growing increasingly weary of defending the indefensible. For me the central lesson of 2025 is that when we fight him we can win; and that our successes should be giving us more confidence and ambition in 2026. For we are strong now, and he is weak - and we must act accordingly. 2 - After last night’s disturbing performance, without question the most disturbing speech by a major American politician in modern times, we must make his declining health, his clear madness, his loss of reason and perpetual delusions central to our engagement. For simply this man cannot be trusted to lead us any more. It’s not clear he understands the consequences of his actions, what is happening around him, or the harms he is doing to our national interest and to all of us. We are here now, in a dangerous place, and the time for polite deference has ended. 3 - We should be pleased with how our movement has engaged on affordability/tariffs and health care this year. In 2026 we should develop a third leg to our messaging stool around the threat he poses to democracy here and abroad (No Kings), and his unprecedented corruption. For we must open up additional fronts, and not rely on any one approach (as the encouraging inflation numbers today should remind us). As for a national narrative or story, a rallying cry, I am recommending that we develop something along the lines of “he is for the oligarchs, we are for the people.”
4 - 2026 is shaping up to be a year of opportunity for us. Flipping the House, putting the Senate in play, winning a majority of governorships, and running up the score in state and local races across the country are all things that can happen - and we need to go for it brothers and sisters!!!!!!
5 - While 2026 can be a year of opportunity for us we should plan on Trump and his allies - including foreign governments - to do everything they can to keep the regime in power. In that regard 2026 will not be a typical midterm, fought out state by state, and district by district. Trump is going to spend whatever it takes, and use all the tools he has at his disposal to replicate what he did successfully in 2023-2024 - repair his broken image with voters and drive the national discourse. As I head into 2026 I remain haunted by this graph, which shows that despite all of our efforts in 2023-2024 Trump was able to move from -20 in job approval in mid December of 2022 to -7 on Election Day, 2024.
Finally, thank you. This community did not check out in 2025. It went to work. We helped elect good candidates and win elections of all kinds this year. We marched to No Kings, called our Senators and Congressman, raised money, wrote postcards, door knocked and info warred with vigor, intensity, grit, and love of country. We were determined to beat MAGA this year, as we did in 2018, 2020, 2022, 2023 and in many down ballot races in 2024. And we did. Congratulations everyone. So I end with a full throated and hearty thank you to this community of proud, plucky patriots who, when their country called this year, enthusiastically answered. Electorally and politically 2025 was a very good year for us. Now, let us commit to make 2026 even better. That’s what we talked about last night…..enjoy the video, read the transcript, hit like so more can see it all, and share with friends and colleagues….. and now…… Let’s Get To Work People!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!Winning The Midterms - Support Our 2026 Candidates
Expanding The Senate and Electoral College Maps, Winning In Red States and Red Places (2026-2032)
In two new essays (here, here) I talk about how one of the ways we win the 2026 midterms is by providing early support to our candidates and parties to allow them to staff up now, be loud now, define the terms of the debate now, before the inevitable onslaught on AI slop, Russian disinfo, and Trumpian lies funded through bribes and corruption wash across the land. The midterms could be won or lost in these next few months - not in the fall of 2026 - and we need be fighting now with everything we got. Winning The Big Arguments With Trump - We have two recommended actions today: 1 - Call Your Senators and Member Of The House And Demand They Act Upon Our Five-Part Agenda - We need to be loud people, very, very loud and make the case for our now five part agenda:
2 - Celebrate America, Our Constitution, Our 250th Birthday By Bringing Our Resolutions Project To Your Community - Next year, on July 4th, America celebrates it’s 250th birthday. We need to make this holiday, a celebration of our Declaration Of Independence from a mad king, our day, and not allow it to become his. One way we can do this is by bringing our Resolutions Project to your community or state. Imagine if by July 4th of next year a large number of towns, counties and states had passed formal resolutions, in the spirit of our Declaration of Independence, defending our Constitution and condemning the “injuries,” “abuses,” and “usurpations” of our mad king. For as our Founders wrote in the Declaration:
So far Hopium members have introduced or passed resolutions in 85 communities in 23 states. In the coming days we will be convening to discuss how to bring this campaign to more places and start planning to Own The Fourth next year. Finally, please self-report your activities to our daily paid subscriber chat. These reports help inspire all of us to do more and fight harder! Keep working hard everyone! - Simon Simon Rosenberg Presentation To Hopium Paid Subscribers Transcript - 12/17/25Welcome, everyone. Simon Rosenberg, Hopium Chronicles, back with our weekly gathering here of the proud plucky patriots of the Hopium community. Wherever you’re watching this, whether it’s live or you are seeing it as a recording on Substack, or Spotify and Apple Podcasts and YouTube, welcome, welcome, welcome. It’s great to have you here. If you enjoy it, please hit like and subscribe and share it with everybody you know. More the merrier in this holiday season. You know, what we try to do here every week is sort of level set, take a step back from the day to day and assess where we are in this grand battle against Trump and Trumpism and MAGA. And so let me try to look back at the year and give you some thoughts about where we are, and then we’ll get to questions. I have plenty of time for questions tonight. So I think I see the world, I’ve often talked about it as two things that we have to keep in our head at the same time. And I’ve now expanded that to three, which is, what are we really trying to do here at Hopium and in this pro-democracy movement? And I think there really are three things that we’re attempting. Number one is to mitigate the damage he’s doing, to weaken the regime. Number two, to advance our agenda and our values and tell our story, right? And then three is to win back power. I think that we have been very successful this year, politically and electorally, while also recognizing that Trump has probably been a far more damaging and malevolent president than we could have anticipated, I think. I mean, I think that on this band of how much damage he would do to the country and how quickly he would do it, we’re sort of at the upper end of that. And because of that, to a great degree, it has helped make this a very successful electoral and political year. And both of these things can be true at the same time. I want to talk first about the electoral and political year. I think that the fact that Trump now is in many polls is in the high 30s and low 40s in approval with very intense disapproval, with his agenda being even in worse shape than that, given that he remember he got 50 of the vote this time and he did better than he did eight years ago. And he’s in disastrous shape with the public… I think that when we look back at this year, the fact that there has been this kind of dramatic rejection of him and his politics has to be very reassuring for us because it could have been otherwise. And you’ve seen this dramatic rejection of him, of his agenda, and in elections of his party. And this is really important… that not only did we outperform expectations in special elections and local elections all across the country this year, in very encouraging ways, but in November it was a blowout election. I mean, I’ve been doing this, I’ve been in politics full-time working in national politics since the 1992 campaign, and this last November election was one of the most remarkable that we’ve had during this whole period. We won all different types of races with all sorts of different candidates all over the country. We won in California and in Maine and in Pennsylvania and in Georgia by more than 20 points in statewide votes that took place. Incredible numbers. You don’t see 20 point margins in these kinds of states oftentimes. And then Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill each won by 13 points, 15 points, complete blowout victories. And in every case, the Republicans contested these races. And we also know that we won down ballot in city council races and mayoral races and county elections all across the country where they had off-year elections. It was a rout. It was a blue wave. It was a clear, unequivocal repudiation of Trump and Trumpism in about as dramatic a fashion as you could have in an off-year election like this. And then it continued when Aftyn Behn sort of dramatically overperformed and forced the Republicans to come in and spend millions and millions and millions of dollars in a +22 Republican congressional district. And then we had the great wins last week… we won the mayoralty of Miami for the first time since the 1990s, winning by 19 points. Again, this huge margin. Our candidate for mayor in Albuquerque, Tim Keller, who was running for reelection, you know, won, I think it was by 16 points in his runoff race, 58–42. And then we also flipped that deep red state house seat in Georgia last week. So we had this continuation of this very dramatic success. And, you know… we have to, I think, recognize that as down as we were and as much as our confidence had been shaken after 2024, these wins were enormous, and they were blowouts. And we know from history that the likely scenario then is that this continues throughout 2026. It’s not a guarantee, but it’s just the likely scenario. And it reminds us that this kind of strength of the Democratic Party and these kinds of wins, we saw this in 2018. We saw it in 2020. We saw our huge overperformance in the red wave election that never came in 2022. We saw it through elections throughout 2023 and early 2024. And we saw it in many of the down ballot races in 2024 underneath the presidential election. And so we have to remind ourselves that we’ve actually been fighting and beating MAGA again and again and again and again. And that we shouldn’t be intimidated and spooked. We need to be strong and not weak. And we, a year ago, we were weak and not strong. He was strong and we were weak. It’s reversed now. He is clearly weakened and we are strong as a national party. And I know that it isn’t how people necessarily feel, but I think it’s objectively true. And we have to use this strength to have greater ambition as we head into 2026. That gets me to the first part of my little formula, which is the mitigate the damage and weaken the regime. I think there’s more we can do here. And I think that what’s happened, that what we’ve seen through the No Kings movement, 7 million people rallying in October, which played a major role, I think, in getting the Democratic Party to wake up to the sort of big election we had in November. We’ve now seen in just recent weeks, right? We’ve seen the Senate vote three times to repeal Trump’s terrible tariffs. We saw this historic rebuke of Trump on the Epstein files where the entire Congress voted unanimously, except one, against the sitting president. I haven’t done my research on this, but I’m willing to bet this may be the only time in American history that something like that has happened, this kind of clear, unequivocal rebuke of a sitting president by people in both parties, by this unanimous vote on something, by the way, that is so disgraceful and disgusting, which is him covering up for sex crimes and one of the greatest sex traffickers in history. It took the Congress to rebuke him, to force him to release these files. We just saw today that we now have 218 votes on a discharge petition to get to vote on the ACA subsidy, to restore the ACA subsidies. Another profound rebuke. We saw even during the fight when Schumer and Jeffries led us through this battle on the government shutdown, we saw the country, you know, his numbers went way down. And so that was another place, that was another form of rebuke by the country… what we’re learning, and I think as I wrote the other day, the big lesson of 2025 that we have to take into 2026 is that when we fight him, we can win. And so therefore we should fight him more in more places and have more ambition in the way that we’re taking the fight to him and mitigate the damage and to weaken the regime. And I think this concept of weakening the regime has got to become more important. That’s not about winning elections. It’s about weakening their ability to execute on their agenda. It’s going after their cabinet officials like Pete Hegseth. They’re the ones that have committed crimes. Pete Hegseth has committed war crimes. Kristi Noem has clearly broken the law serially on many things. We saw the Democrats last week have an amazing… one of the probably the most inspiring hearings that we’ve had so far this year where Kristi Noem got taken to the woodshed and she ran out of the hearing screaming basically and ran away because she’d been getting beat up so much because they were throwing her illegality, her crimes in her face and they weren’t backing off. You are seeing Democrats now having greater ambition. And I want to give, you know, Robert Garcia, the ranking member on the Oversight Committee in the House, a lot of credit for having orchestrated all of the Epstein stuff that’s happened. That was, you know, that thing was dead in the water and they revived it and it’s a way to weaken the regime. It’s a way to weaken Trump, right? To make it less likely that he’s effective at carrying out his agenda and driving down his poll numbers, splitting his coalition. We’ve also seen, I should have mentioned, the other kind of extraordinary ongoing rebuke of him has come from Marjorie Taylor Greene. I think that part of what’s happened is that she’s going through the equivalent of deprogramming from a cult, where she’s trying to extricate herself and restore her sense of self, having given that over to Trump and the MAGA cult… the reason why this is so important is that she’s creating an example of somebody who can now create distance between her and Trump and the cult and to criticize it and to be open about it and to expose its… core corruption and betrayal. I mean, she seems like a person who’s been personally betrayed, right? She feels betrayed. And I think she’s become a very powerful opposition figure in recent weeks. And it’s encouraging because she will encourage others to join her and is an example for others to join her. Remember, we’ve just had really important victories in Georgia in the last few weeks. And certainly, I think her beating up on Trump and the Republican Party contributed to these significant wins that we had. And so I think that we need to figure out, I think, how to continue to do what we did today, which is to split off the Republicans from Trump. The only way that we can really mitigate the damage before the elections next year is if we get a group of Republicans to structurally break from Trump and to start blocking his agenda. Well, that’s happened, right? We had it on the tariffs. We had it on Epstein. We had it on the ACA subsidies today. And as I’ve tried to explain to you, one of the things that’s driving all of this is that there are thousands of Republicans all across the country who are running in 2026 in competitive races for state house, for city council, governor, for attorney general, for Senate, for Congress. And they are now facing much tougher elections, and there is now a high likelihood that people who thought they were in safe seats may lose, or people that believed they were going to win and make the jump to the next level in their careers now are going to have a much harder time and may lose. And what’s happening is they’re becoming disquiet and a sense… is emerging… that Trump has let them down and has forced them into very difficult circumstances. And they’re pissed. And you saw that pissed thing explode in the House today where four of these most vulnerable House members flipped over in protest against Mike Johnson today. And I cannot tell you as somebody who’s been here and worked with politicians for all these years how significant… this dynamic is now, that you’ve got these ambitious, powerful Republicans all across the country who no longer believe that they can run with Trump and they can be connected to him and that being with him is dangerous for them. And what starts happening is this is another way the regime gets weakened, as we saw today in the House. This is a very significant development, and we have to be open in understanding this. And I think it’s something that’s going to become far worse, as I’ve talked about, because just starting in a few weeks, every city council, every county council, every state legislature in the country is going to be coming back together to now have to budget and govern against the harms that Trump has done to the country. The slowing economy means that they have less government revenue to spend. Their own people have been damaged by the weakening of the social safety net and by job loss and by higher prices brought about through the tariffs. We’re going to have all the carnage that’s going to come due to this assault on our health care system, the combination of the Medicaid cuts and the ACA subsidy reductions. We’ve taken hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars out of health care. They’re going to have to start legislating and governing against that now, not next year. This is a now thing. The higher electricity prices that, you know, I sent out an email tonight, an interview with Jay Inslee about this, the higher electricity prices, which is also something that’s creating destabilization in communities all across the country. And then also, obviously, the attacks on communities all across the country from DHS and ICE, and what that’s doing to the sense of security that people have and the way that our rights and liberties are being trampled. All of these things now… every single Republican politician in the country, at every level of government, is now going to have to legislate and govern against the harms that Trump has brought to the country. There is no way to retreat back into a Fox News bubble and pretend that these things are happening. When you hear Trump tonight tell us that inflation has gone away and the economy is booming and people are doing better and all these things. That’s not true. And it won’t be true. They won’t be able to make it true in every one of these jurisdictions. And so the likelihood is that the anger at Trump and the frustration of the political hand that he’s dealt all these politicians around the country is going to get far worse for him. And it also is going to give Democrats and all of you who work with groups that work with Democratic politicians in your communities, you need to be contacting them now and getting them ready to take these legislative sessions, these hearings. We should be having hearings all over the country in January and February at every level of government about the harms the tariffs have done, the attack on our health care. We need to help bring the electricity price increases, the gutting of our clean energy subsidies, and the attack on our citizens and the people of America through DHS and ICE. Every government can be holding days and days of hearings about this, bringing people and experts in to explain to their communities about what Trump has done to all of them. It was the impetus behind our resolutions project about how we should be bringing the usurpations and injuries and abuses of Trump and his abandonment of the constitutional order to every community in the country. But now that process is going to become universal. And you should be encouraging your local electeds to seize this opportunity to communicate powerfully about his agenda of sabotage, plunder and betrayal, about the corruption, about his absolute contempt for working people, his politics that I call “more for me and less for all of you,” or that “he’s for the oligarchs and we’re for the people.” Whatever your structure, frame, narrative, story, message is, right? We have an incredible opportunity to talk to the American people in the coming months through our governments, not through our campaigns. And this is a really important evolution in this step. In the interview that I just released with Wes Moore, Governor Wes Moore of Maryland, we had a direct conversation about this. And I talked to him about how he’s prepping for the legislative session in January of next year when Maryland… arguably Maryland has taken more hits from this administration than any state in the country because of the loss of federal jobs that have taken place, the sort of the gutting of the NIH and other huge research institutions that exist and sit in Montgomery County. It’s a very thoughtful conversation about how one of our leading governors is going to be approaching this in just a few weeks. I can tell you that it means that we have this incredible opportunity to further weaken the regime, to mitigate the damage they’re doing together. And I think that we have to really continue to, as we do every day, to contact our electeds and to encourage them to act with greater courage, confidence, and ambition in fighting Trump. Because when we fight Trump, we can beat him. We’ve seen that. We’ve learned that lesson. And then finally, I guess my last thing I’d like to say tonight is that I do think one of the things that I’ll be working on a lot is something I’ve been writing about sort of directly, indirectly, which is the national security strategy and Trump’s foreign policy and his seeming desire now to want to carve the world up into spheres of influence of China and Russia and the Gulf Arab states, and America, and have it be that there are these four great, you know, these great powers that are running the world and plundering along the way, right… which is a rejection of the American-led global order for the last 80 years, an abandonment of America’s historic role as a champion of democracy and freedom here and around the world. The gravity of what’s happening with these negotiations in Europe, I think with Witkoff and Kushner, selling out America, our democracy, our European allies in Ukraine to Putin, it’s a serious matter. And while we’ve been able to sort of surface a lot of other parts of the harms that he’s done, the affordability agenda and healthcare, we have a whole basket of issues around his threat to democracy here and around the world and his corruption, his unprecedented corruption that I think are inadequately surfaced in our daily discourse, that we have an opportunity together to lead in what is necessary. I think we’ve gotten to a place of tremendous comfort and success on affordability, tariffs and on health care. We need to build this third leg of the messaging stool, as I call it, around threats to democracy here and abroad and corruption, because it’s all connected. At the end of the day, Donald Trump is no longer governing for America. He’s no longer governing even for the white tribe and for his voters. He’s governing for a couple hundred oligarchs in the United States and the allied oligarchs in other countries. And I think the level of betrayal that he is exhibiting, not only domestically, but what he’s doing to America abroad is… and to our national security is… something that we have to develop our voice on. It’s inadequate. I think that what’s going to happen with Venezuela, whatever it is, and the illegitimacy of it, the illegality of it, the ridiculousness in some ways of it, is going to be a tool for us to get into that conversation. But we have to recognize that the real game here isn’t what’s happening today in Venezuela, the Caribbean, or even the Pacific. It’s about what’s happening with his relationship with Russia and China, and whether his, intentional or not, set of strategies that appear to be doing everything he can to embolden, and empower and strengthen China and Russia at our expense. And this is where, to me, the great core of the betrayal is, that he betrayed the American people by not lowering prices and doing all the things that he promised during the campaign. He’s betrayed our democracy in the way that he’s governed, but he’s betraying us as a nation in ways that I don’t think we have adequately articulated and that I’m going to be spending time with all of you, I hope, in really bringing this to light. I mean, imagine that we’re now in a place, and I think that part of the reason why the American people have engaged on these issues is they’re seeing the videos of other people in this country having their windows smashed in and assaulted. We saw a video today of a pregnant Somali woman in Minneapolis getting dragged through the streets and having cops lay, put their knee on top of her back when she’s on the ground. A pregnant woman who was telling them that she was pregnant was treated like cattle today. And this is unacceptable. And we need to be doing more as Democrats. We have to, yes, lean into affordability and health care, but we need to be great defenders of America too. And we have to defend America at home and abroad. And we have to really lean in to the corruption, which is itself this ongoing, extraordinary betrayal of all of us. So I want to conclude by saying two things. One is that I think that Trump… when I got asked in a press interview today to assess the year… I think that Trump has done far more harm to us than, domestically and abroad, than I would have expected. And that I think we have to recognize that this president, he is an incredible threat to our way of life, to our security, to our opportunities, to our future. And that it’s why we have to fight with incredible vigor and intensity every day. Because the harms that he’s doing are extraordinary and historic. And he’s weakening this great country profoundly. But we’ve also learned that when we fight him, we can win, and that he is weakened, and he’s in decline, and that he’s struggling, and he’s in ill health. And in his addled state, he’s making terrible decisions about the future of the country and his own politics. But we should not expect that they’re going to take all this laying down. Part of what happened in 2023 and 2024 is Donald Trump ended 2022 in a similar place in polling to where he is now. He was down on average about minus 20. He’s now minus 15, 16. He had gone through an incredible decline in his approval rating. But between December of 2022 and the election last year, he went from minus 20 in his approval to minus 7. That all the ads that we ran, all the campaigns that we ran, all the messaging that we did… Donald Trump was able to restore his standing with the public during that period and make an election that shouldn’t have been competitive, competitive. They’re going to try to do the exact same thing in 2026. I know there’s a lot of fear about him rigging elections. I’m much more, frankly, today fearful of how he’s going to spend unprecedented amounts of money working with his foreign allies to try to dominate the information space in order to memory hole all the negative things that he’s done, the harms that he’s done, and to restore his standing so they can be competitive in the elections in 2026, and to denigrate our candidates. Trump has access to unprecedented amounts of money. We’ve never been up against a money machine like we’re going to be up against next year, which is why our money and our work is not something that has to happen in the summer and the fall. It has to happen now. This early money really matters. It strengthens our candidates and our campaigns and makes it more likely that we’re going to be successful. But I think that… for all the good that we’ve done… I think we can’t in any way take our eye off the ball here in that there are going to be a lot of very powerful forces that are going to do everything possible to ensure that the Republicans stay in power. And I don’t think they’re solely limited to domestic forces. I think there are going to be foreign governments that will also be. Remember, I mean, Russia intervened in our election in 2016 successfully. This has already happened in America, right? There’s a precedent for this. And so I think it’s why we have to take time off during the holidays, hang with family, rest and restore, regenerate, get our groove back, read books, take long walks, drink good wine… whatever it is that you need to do to sort of restore your strength and to check out and get away from the ugliness of the day-to-day. Because next year is a year of opportunity for us, but opportunities only become success when we seize them. And together, we need to rest up and get ready to go seize this big opportunity we have on behalf of our kids and our grandkids and the American people next year. I think we can have a great election next year. I think we can win back power. I think we can continue to mitigate the damage and beat him in these fights. But we need to recognize that we’re going to have to work our asses off. And that next year may be the hardest year of all the work, the amazing work we’ve all done together over these years since Trump came down the escalator, next year may be the most important of all. And so rest up everybody. And I just want to say thank you for all that you’ve done to have made this year electorally and politically wildly successful for us. It sets us up for what comes next. But what comes next is a big one. And I look forward to being in this fight with all of you every day. Thank you so much. Those are my thoughts. Let me get to questions……. 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Thursday, December 18, 2025
2026 Is Shaping Up To Be A Year Of Opportunity For Us - If We Seize It (New Video, Written Analysis)
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