Hopium Chronicles With Simon Rosenberg Podcast

Good morning all. First up today is a new interview I recorded this morning with Harvard’s John Della Volpe on what happened with the youth vote in 2024. John is the director of polling at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and one of the leading experts on the youth vote in America. Our talk is the latest installment in our new What Happened/What Comes Next series that kicked off last week with an interview with Joe Trippi on the power of networks.

John and I dive into the one of the biggest stories of the 2024 election, Trump’s big gains with young voters, particularly young men. In our discussion we explore what happened, and begin a necessary conversation about what to do now. As background, John just posted a big overview of the 2024 youth vote on his Substack, and also published a must read essay in the NYT last week, Democrats Could Have Won. Our Excuses Mask A Devastating Reality (gift link). I discussed the importance of Democrats mounting an unprecedented campaign to fight for the youth vote in a New Republic essay earlier this year.

Here’s how John’s new Substack essay begins:

On paper, 2024 should have been a Democratic youth vote triumph. With abortion rights under threat, climate change accelerating, and student debt relief on the ballot, the conventional wisdom saw young voters as Harris's firewall. Instead, her narrow margin among voters under 30 (NEP: +11; AP VoteCast: +5) revealed something far more consequential: a generation of voters breaking free from traditional political patterns.

The signs were visible as early as spring 2023. While Democrats celebrated their youth-powered midterm success, early polling revealed something more complex brewing. As I wrote on this Substack and in New York Times op-eds (here and here), the data pointed to significant shifts: unprecedented gender divides, erosion among young men, and an increasingly independent approach to evaluating leadership.

The youth vote that emerged in 2024 defied every partisan prediction and stereotype - it was something entirely new. Generation Z maintained progressive positions on social issues while showing deep skepticism of foreign intervention. They combined concerns about economic inequality with support for free trade. They rated Trump higher on pure leadership while backing Harris overall. As we look to 2028, the party that succeeds won't be the one that best packages traditional ideology - it will be the one that recognizes these voters aren't moving left or right, but forging their own path based on lived experience.

Lots to chew on in these essays and in our discussion. Hope you can get to it all in the coming days. The bottom line - we have a lot of work ahead us for re-establish or re-imagine the majority coalition that propelled us over the last four Presidential elections.

Fighting Trump’s Unacceptable 4 - Still asking folks to call their Senators and Representative to let them know your dissatisfaction with Trump’s pick of Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Matt Gaetz 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 every 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, perhaps weaken Trump for what I think were serious mistakes, and not let such outrageous actions go unchallenged. While weary, heartbroken and desperately in need of rest, we still have to fight everyone. Do what you can. I’m to keep fighting.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, November 19th, 1pm ET - With Democrats, Things Get Better - Join me for the next live showing of my big picture presentation on American politics, With Democrats, Things Get Better. It is newly updated with each showing, so even if you caught it earlier this year there will be new data and fresh analysis. Please register here. The arguments in this presentation are foundational to our work at Hopium, and will be helpful to those wrestling with where we go from here.

My favorite graph from With Dems:

Notes On The 2024 Election - While I am still working on my big, comprehensive take on the 2024 election, and today have far more questions than answers, here are some initial thoughts on what happened this year (updated daily):

2024 was a close election. Trump will not reach 50% of the national vote and his final margin will be give or take 1.5 points. In the battlegrounds it will be 0.9 points in WI, 1.4 in MI, 1.9 in PA and 2.2 in GA. A shift of 1.9 points in MI, PA, WI and Harris wins. 2024 was not a landslide, not a blowout. It was a close election, aided by illicit interventions by the Supreme Court and Judge Cannon which kept Trump’s trials for his disqualifying, serial betrayals of the country from coming before voters this year.

The Senate today is at 52-48 (PA is still counting) and Rs will have at most a 3 seat advantage in the House, making the chamber once again challenging to manage for a factious party. While Harris lost the 7 battleground states, we had important down ballot wins, including AZ, MI, NV, WI Senate and NC Governor. We had other important wins across the US, won the blue dot again in Nebraska and in the state where the Hopium community invested the most money, North Carolina, we won elections for Governor, Lt. Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State, Superintendent of Public Instruction, State Supreme Court, NC-01 and we broke the GOP’s state legislative supermajority.

Kamala Harris was given a very tough assignment. To come into and win the race starting three points down in late July was no easy thing. I think she then put in one of the greatest political performances we’ve seen in the modern era of American politics, taking the baton from President Biden, uniting the party around her, making a great VP pick, putting on the best and most inspiring Convention in my lifetime, crafting a powerful narrative and story for her campaign, kicking Trump’s blubbering ass in their only debate and then campaigning with a level of intensity and power we’ve seldom seen. There can be no question that she left it all out there on the playing field for us this year.

Despite all this, and despite him being a rapist, fraudster, traitor and 34 times felon there was a 5.8 point shift in the national popular vote towards Trump this cycle, and Trump is on track to be only the second Republican to win the national popular vote since 1988. Our underperformance with Hispanic voters and young people this year was a grave blow to the coalition that got us on average 51% of the vote over the past 4 Presidential election. It is an urgent priority to figure out what went wrong with these two groups, and to come with up with a party wide plan to regain lost ground. We also need a big discussion on why late deciders broke towards Trump, despite our ground and paid media closing advantage.

I also think we need a very big conversation on why the threat of MAGA, which drove our elections in 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2023 failed to do so in 2024 when it was a far more dangerous and extreme iteration of MAGA than any of its previous manifestations. A particular focus will need to be on why the Harris SuperPAC, Future Forward, armed with an unprecedented budget of $700m, was unable to make the historical ugliness of Trump and MAGA material enough to voters who had repeatedly rejected it in these previous elections.

If we had successfully disqualified Trump, as many campaigns have been able to do to their opponents with far less money and far less to work with, it is far less likely late deciders would have broken to Trump and handed him the election. From the Exit Polls:

While there were bright spots for us in the 2024 election, particularly in the battleground states, this was a very bad election for our party, our freedoms, our democracy and our future and there is a lot of important work ahead of us.

What leaves me most optimistic about what comes next is the strength of our rising generation of political leaders. It is a remarkably strong and capable crew, and I look forward to having them lead us in this time of ferocious opposition.

Here is where our 15 endorsed House candidates today:

* Flips (4) - Whitesides (CA-27), Gillen NY-4, Riley NY-19, Bynum OR-5

* Too Close To Call/Still Counting (3) - Gray CA-13, Tran CA-45, Bohannan IA-1

* Losses (8) - Shah AZ-01, Engel AZ-06, Salas CA-22, Rollins CA-41, Vargas NE-02, Jones NY-17, Altman NJ-07, Stelson PA-10

While the House officially went to the Rs on 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.

Ballot curing opportunities for Gray and Tran with Grassroots Democrats HQ -

Virtual Ballot Curing In California

CA-13 Adam Gray Ballot Curing Phone Bank

CA-45 Derek Tran Ballot Curing Phone Bank

CA-45 Derek Tran Recruitment Phone Bank

In-Person Ballot Curing In California

CA-13 Adam Gray Ballot Curing Canvass

CA-45 Derek Tran Ballot Curing Canvass in Placentia

Post-Election Pods, Posts and Videos - I got together with Tara McGowan and David Rothkopf last Thursday for one of our Deep State Radio discussions about US politics. This is the first of what will be many discussions I will be participating in about what happened and where we go from here.

A few more things to chew if you haven’t gotten to them yet:

* My big thank yous to members of the Hopium community who left it all out there on the playing field this cycle - Post and Video

* I’ve offered a series of post-election posts on the need for us to get louder (here, here, and here), something we also discussed in my recent Closing Strong conversation with Dan Pfeiffer and Tara McGowan, and in my talk with Joe Trippi from Wednesday

I had a great time seeing Hopium members in Los Angeles on Friday. It was a packed house! More on that tomorrow, and for now this great photograph of all of us, together:

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