There’s Panic in MAGAstan with Simon Rosenberg
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Hey everyone, it's me, Reed Galen. As you may have noticed, I don't host the Lincoln Project podcast anymore, but I'm so excited to share with you my brand new show, The Homefront.

On the home front, you'll get the same incisive discourse about the pro-democracy movement from the smartest, most driven people in the fight today. If you're listening to this episode on the Lincoln Project podcast channel, I invite you to subscribe to the home front on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your shows. I want to say thank you to all of you in the pro-democracy movement, and I look forward to continuing our American journey together. And now, the home front.

Welcome to the Homefront. I'm your host, Reid Galen. Today, I'm joined by veteran political analyst, strategist, and commentator, Simon Rosenberg. Simon is the founder and author of the Substack newsletter, The Hopium Chronicles. Prior to Hopium, he was founder and president of the center-left think tank, the New Democratic Network, served in senior roles for the DNC and the DCCC, and is a veteran of two presidential campaigns, including the 1992 Clinton War Room.

Simon is a frequent political commentator on cable news, and his work is often featured in the country's leading newspapers, magazines and websites. Today, he's coming to us from Washington, D.C. Simon, welcome back. It's great to be here.

All right. So let's just start that. The reason why your substack is called the Hopium Chronicles is because during the 2022 cycle, you predominantly, but also our friend Joe Trippi, were much more bullish on Democrats chances in the 22 midterm than people thought that you should be. And and I don't remember which one it was, but somebody said that you were smoking hopium.

Nate Silver. Nate Silver. Well, OK, we could do a whole hour on him. That would probably make him happy. Let's not do that. I know. Exactly. So now let's look forward here. We've got 50 some days as folks are listening to this. It's Saturday, September 14th. Some voters are receiving their ballots or will receive their ballots within days. Some are able to vote.

in certain places around the country. So now this week, so give us a little bit of hopium post-debate, post-convention, post-Kamala. Yeah, look, it's been a great week for our politics. She was commanding and powerful and prepared and just, you know, took them apart. I think for all of us, I think that one of the things we're coming to realize now is that Kamala Harris is one of the most talented politicians that

we've all ever seen in every way. And, and,

She has run an extraordinary campaign. I mean, I think if we had put the script of the last two months as a script for the West Wing for an entire season, it would have been rejected as being too improbable. And so it's incredible how she's been performing with a very high degree of difficulty and not making any major mistakes. And I go back to this basic foundational understanding of the election and her when I think about this is that

When she came out in Wilmington and gave her first set of remarks as the new candidate, she began by saying, many of you know me as vice president and a senator, but I was a prosecutor and I was a district attorney and I was an attorney general. And I know people like Donald Trump. I put them in jail. I took fraudsters and prosecuted them. I prosecuted people for sexual assault. And I think when we look back,

Right.

and strong. She's made him weak and pathetic and ridiculous, which is what was necessary. We had to pull the curtain back from the wizard. We had to tell everybody the orange emperor had no clothes. And she's done all that. And I think it's been core to the power. She's been better at ripping Trump apart and explaining who he is to all of us than any Democratic politician in the last nine years. And so she had a great debate and we should feel good. But the polling is also...

I mean, even before the debate, we were up two to three points in the national polls. We were up two to three points in the congressional generic, which is how people are going to vote for Congress. We were doing better in the battlegrounds than Trump. We had clear... The Senate polling continues to be remarkably encouraging all across the country.

And we also have a huge enthusiasm, financial and organizational advantage over them, meaning that, you know, we should be able to close stronger than Trump, which is stuff that you know very well and we can talk about. So I always felt that we were entering the debate in a stronger position and we were more likely to win. I think we got some polling on, you know, got immediate. We've gotten five polls now taken after the debate.

She's ahead by an average of four points in those polls. So let's say she gained a point. She may gain a point or two coming out of the debate. And it just means that we're more likely to win. I mean, we have a lot of work ahead of us and you're working your butt off right now, right? But, you know, we're in a stronger position than they are. And if we do the work, I think we can have the election we all want to have. Well, and, you know, so I want to go back to the debate for a second and the idea of the power that the vice president demonstrated, because there...

Earlier in the year, I had a Berkeley professor, Stephen Fish on political science professor, and he in his book, Simon, posited that when it comes to campaigning, not necessarily governing, but when it comes to campaigning, Democrats should be a little bit more like Republicans, frankly, which is.

Voters are appreciative of the idea of dominance, that someone is in charge. And that has really been Trump's secret sauce, even as insane as he has. But I thought the moment that she took that away from him, to your point, was at the very beginning. At the moment she strode across the stage, walked up to him and shook his hand. He wasn't going to come to her.

He didn't want her to come to him. And so she sticks her hands out and you can sort of see he sort of bows up a little bit. He gets a little bit tense. Right. And then it went from overt dominance to covert dominance, which is she throws in a barb here. She throws in a barb there. We all know exactly what she's doing. He might even know it, too. But because he's such an id, right, he's such a walking lizard brain, he couldn't control himself.

Yeah, look, I think, Reed, you and I have discussed this before in our private conversations that the whole, that Trump only has one play here.

And it's he's strong and we're weak. That's their whole campaign. There is no they don't have an agenda that's popular. He's a blubbering mess. Right. Like and it's all about I'm leading in the polls and I'm strong and Democrats are losing in the polls and they're weak. And this whole campaign has been operating in what you guys call the strong man, the strong leader, weak leader direction.

you know, or what Republicans used to call the strong leader, weak leader dimension of the election. The whole election is about this. The whole, the arc at the brand architecture of the Trump enterprise is the foundation of it is he's leading, he's leading in the polls and he's strong because if he's leading in the polls, it allows you to mentally look away from all the ugliness, right? It's a, it's a mechanism to make the ugly, to diminish the,

And marginalized the ugliness of his offering, how unfit and unwell, rapist, fraudster, traitor, felon, all these things, right? Right. And so it was a way of making all that go away. And the thing is, once she got ahead in the polls, and once she started being the stronger candidate as she was, his whole thing melts. Right. And they got nothing. And what they got is they got a lot of ugly. And we saw a lot of that ugly in the debate, right? Is that once...

You know, she and I will tell you, somebody who did Fox News for 17 years and did thousands of appearances on Fox, her the way that she managed his craziness was incredible. They prepped very, very hard. Right. On how to not take the bait, not how to get drawn into the negative, not get down in the mud.

With him, she really, you know, using words like disgrace and, you know, the crowd size stuff. Right. It was, they really were prepared in how to manage him because he's unmanageable. I mean, again, he pulled over the debate, the moderators, right? Right. He does in all these things.

debates. She managed him. She made him look small, pathetic, desperate, and weak, and ridiculous, and unserious, and all these things that he is. And it was incredible. I mean, I was watching the debate at home, and I did the touchdown thing with my arms like 15 times during the debate. And I was screaming at times about

Knowing how hard it is to engage this kind of stuff on live television, as I had to do on Fox all the time, she was incredible. And so what happened, I also think, Reid, if I can just reflect on one other thing, is that I think the other thing that happened, this is a brand new campaign. It's less than two months old. They're still finding their language, their rhetoric, their way around both him and her issues.

Clearly, those days of getting off the trail and sitting back and assessing everything, experimenting, testing, they came up with new powerful ways of indicting him and selling her. There was, I think, a huge evolution in the campaign that happened during the debate prep where their campaign got a lot stronger and more powerful. And we have more tools now.

to sell her and to indict him, in essence. And then we also know that the campaign has already put out three ads based on moments in the campaign. And this campaign, as you know, Reid, if you get two or three good moments out of a debate, you're happy. They got like 15. Right, it's like a football game. Right? Yeah, right. Yeah. They got like 15. When I had to post on Wednesday morning, I had to like

like winnow it down to three or four and it was hard. Right. And, but they reposted, they, I think it was on Twitter yesterday or the day before they said, our new ad is up now. And they reposted the entire debate because, because I think let's just take one other step back here. The theory of this campaigns, I think we all have to like hats off at a strategy level. I think they came to realize in the spring and late winter and they're in their research that,

that people had sort of forgotten about Trump's craziness and how bad things were. And I think, by the way, that wasn't necessarily a strategy or message failure on our party. It was that I think Americans like to think well of their leaders. And I think there is this kind of innate...

kind of whitewashing of his craziness that wasn't malevolent or malpractice. It was kind of human in some ways, right? That this guy was the president. I don't want to think he was a bad guy. And so...

there became kind of a forget, you know, people became forgetful about it. And the campaign was trying to figure out how to break through all that and how to tell. And what they decided was they wanted these early debates because they wanted him, they wanted all of his ugliness to be on display. Because I think they concluded probably based on their own research and ad testing that ads weren't going to do it and the media wasn't going to do it and they needed some other tools. So they

They were worried he wasn't going to debate at all, which frankly was a reasonable assumption. Right. They locked him in. They baited him right into these two debates. The first debate, it's very possible that he did just as poorly as he did, you know, this week. But that was obscured by Joe Biden's collapse. Right. And so the campaign, I think, is also vindicated in this strategy that they felt it was necessary to.

for them to have this live event with him and all of his ugliness on display as a central way of them winning the election, which is why they immediately jump for a third debate. Right. And which I don't think is going to happen. Trump said he won the second one, so he doesn't need to do a third one, right? The champ doesn't go back into the ring, he said. One thing, you know, just to go back to the campaigning itself, I think there's a couple of things. One is

That the Joe Biden campaign, as you know, the old trope is campaigns are reflections of their candidate. That what that campaign was a reflection of Joe Biden.

This campaign is a reflection of Kamala Harris, right? Like she is not going to sit back. She is going to lean forward. I think she fundamentally and the people around her understand campaigning in 2024, not 2004. But I think the other part, too, you talk about strategists, right? Because everybody wants to talk about being a strategist. But the truth is most people in politics are tacticians. They have a particular skill set and looking out and seeing the wide thing. But this is the other part, too, is that there's such a there's such a fear of being wrong.

Simon, that you don't spend enough time saying, OK, where is the moment where we have to strike? Right. Where are we going to find. Right. Because you're going to have you're going to have events coming this way and you have to intersect that moment. Right. And I think that's what the Harris campaign has done, which is in some ways they let the campaign come to them.

Right. And I think that's oftentimes very difficult, especially for presidential campaigns, because we all believe. Right. Whether it's human humanity itself, individual people or presidential campaigns that we can control far more than we can. And I think it's really important more to say, OK, we're going to have, to your point, a couple, three, four moments in the next 50 days. We have to be prepared. No.

Not because we know what it's going to be, but such that when they do appear, we're able to take advantage of it. Does that make sense? Yeah, no. And listen, I wrote my second column that I wrote at Hopium Chronicles when I launched it in March of 2023 was I said my greatest fear about this election was that we weren't going to understand how much was available to us and how ambitious it

Yeah.

And then I argued that my greatest fear was the lack of ambition that we would have. And, you know, that theory has been validated by all these gains we've made. You know, parties in power never make gains. We've been winning elections all across the country. And I think the Biden campaign was not operating out of that sense of ambition and risk-taking. I think it was very much in keeping with

Right.

at allowing this campaign and her, their story, their narrative, the visuals, her blue suit, the convention, right? This stuff has been, this has been the most wildly creative thing

presidential campaign that any of us have ever seen. And because they had to make this whole thing up. And I think that now the zeitgeist is let's roll with it. Let's try. Let's experiment, right? Like we don't know. And there's ambition. She's expanding the coalition. They're bringing in Republicans in a very effective way. They picked up Governor Walz, who can speak to small town, rural America, places that were hard for Democrats to reach. They have embodied

What my hope about what we would be this cycle, which is to have this ambition to grow our coalition, to take stuff away from geographic and demographic terrain away from them in order to make this election a clear repudiation, to run up the score and make this election a clear repudiation of MAGA. They're clearly trying to do that. And it's really encouraging. I mean, I look at.

We all have these little phrases, right, that we've come up with over the years. And one of mine is, if you're not on offense in politics, you're losing. And man, are they on offense right now. So let me switch gears because you brought up something I wanted to discuss with you, which is the experience.

of Harris's presidential coalition. Um, and it includes many Republicans. Um, yours truly included. Uh, I signed the letter of former Bush, uh, Romney McCain staffers. Uh, I think there were 200 of us. I think there's more now. It's amazing. It's amazing. You know, and, and obviously you've got Liz Cheney, Dick Cheney, uh, Adam Kinzinger, Jeff Duncan, you know, and, and others. Uh, I even heard about a congressional candidate down in Florida, uh,

who is running against a MAGA Republican and two of the GOP precinct chairs actually defected and went to her this week or going to her this week, which is really fascinating. But let me ask you this, because, you know, I've gotten some DMs from some of my progressive friends and I've seen some writing that.

Says, you know, OK, these Republicans are voting for Kamala Harris. They say they're supporting for Kamala Harris, but don't trust them. Don't forgive them their sins. Let's remember these aren't good people. And what I have tried to explain to my friends is, do you want to win?

Because this is about winning. And if you want to be upset with someone about what happened in the run up to the Iraq war or during the course of the Iraq war or whatever policy issue, like I think that is a totally legitimate thing for you to be upset about. But what I would say is this. Maybe it could wait until November 6th or January 21st, because for now.

It's winning. And so what would you say to your friends that say that? Because the last piece is, too, is that if this does go south, which I don't think it's going to, Simon, a lot of these people are on a list that a lot of your colleagues are never going to be on. I know. Listen, Reed, as you are aware, because we've done this many times together. Right. My admiration, respect, you know, for all of you who have and the courage that all of you have shown.

in taking on your old party is incredible to me. It's inspiring to me. Um, it's one of those, I'm here today, right? Whenever you ask, I come running. Right. And because, you know, you guys are doing so, I don't know that I could have done if I was in the same situation with my own party. I don't know that I could have done what all of you have done. Cause you've not just backed Harris, you've stayed in the game, right? That's the other thing is that you're still fighting and

As opposed to going off and making money and doing other things and just not engaging. You got many of you who stayed in the battle. It's just, it's showing a great, a high degree of patriotism and love of country and courage. And so I applaud it. And I think that,

But look, the coalition that's emerging here is unusual. It's new. There's going to be bumps. It's going to be both ways. I thought Adam Kinzinger's speech at the convention was kind of amazing in that sense of him being the wonder and kind of wildness and serendipity of what we were all feeling. And I think it's... But to your point, it's necessary. And also, Bill Clinton used to describe...

People who were not who were who were not supporting him as people who were not yet supporters of me. And it was it was always it was always the greatest. One of the great you know, Clinton was such a genius in so many ways. And that was always one of my favorite lines.

Yeah, this is going to, we're in an unusual coalition. And by the way, this unusual coalition could stick around for a while. I mean, we don't really, you know, we don't know that, you know, if we lose the Senate, which could happen, you know, MAGA will not be dead. And, you know, we may still be, you know, having to stay in this

And I think some of you will end up becoming Democrats. Some of you will be the leaders of the next center-right party that gets, you know, eventually gets built. I mean, we don't know. I mean, you know, when I did this event with Stuart Stevens the other day, I felt like Stuart was now a Democrat. I don't know that he would go back to being a Republican. And so I think this is a... What's happening here is something deeply unusual, but deeply powerful and important because...

We are making common cause about the things that matter most to all of us, which is our freedoms, our democracy, and our future. And, you know, and we need... And so, Reed, there is a... At my table, in my house, there is a place...

For all of you, every day I leave an empty place for every Republican. There's Elijah and then the Republican, right? So there's two empty chairs at the table. Yeah. I mean, conservative Republicans, there's always a place at my table for you. And I'm proud.

Look, did any of us ever think we'd be on the same team as Dick Cheney? Absolutely not. Right. But but it's necessary. And we just got to go win this election, kick his ass, and we can sort all this out to your point next year. Well, and I think that's the other part, too, is, look, I'm I'm not a Republican anymore. I'm never going to be a Republican again. I'm not a Democrat, although I would venture to say that you and I are probably the Venn diagram between how you see the world and I see the world, I think, is probably narrowing on a daily basis. But that's enough.

a whole other evolution of things that I think has also come along for a lot of us. But also, Adam, Liz, Jeff, like they don't like they can't go back. Right. Like they're never going to be, at least in the context of their political careers, they're not going to be elected Republicans again.

Right. So in this time. Right. You know, I've always said, you know, like like with with Lincoln, we were sort of like the you know, if the Democrats were the French army, like guys like Lincoln and others were like the British army on the left flank. Right. Like.

We weren't French. We weren't of France, but we're in the fight because it all matters. Right. And and I think that that is an important place for the Adams and the Liz's and the Jeff's to have a home. They're not going to be Democrats, but like don't also cast them aside because Liz represented Wyoming. Right. Adam represented Southern Illinois. Jeff represented Georgia. Right. To your point, there is so much.

you know, field out there for Democrats to take advantage of. Because to your point, Trump has made everything about him and he's more and more insane every day. And now you see that to your point, then we could do a whole other episode about this. Maybe we'll do this post-election. Is it like MAGA is not going away in the near term, right? Because a lot of it is seeped through, but also, and I want to, I'm going to play a clip here, Simon, that just gives you an, you know, an example of this.

They are now so far afield. You know, they started at Dobbs. Dobbs wasn't enough for Republicans or for MAGA. Right. The dog needed to catch the car one more time. And so, Rob, let's go ahead and play this this clip from Congressman John Curtis in Utah, who is running for U.S. Senate. Apologetically pro-life.

Now, look, I get it. If you're a woman, it stinks that most of these legislatures are men. Most of these decisions are made by men. I wish it were other than that. I wish as a man I didn't have to make this decision. I wish. No, Simon, I don't know about your house. Right. But if I said that to my wife, I probably she probably changed the locks on me.

Right. And and I think that that's the kind of thing. And he's running against my good friend, Carolyn Gleick, who's running for the U.S. Senate as the Democrat in Utah. And she's just a terrific individual. But that's the kind of thing that when you hear that, not only do women, I think, across the spectrum, political spectrum go, what the F is that guy talking about? But I think there's a lot of, you know, moderate guys out there, too, who go, what is he talking about? Right. Like what? What?

So I think in 2022, when Dobbs happened, one of the things that Tom Bonior and I talked about a lot was that the pain for the Republican Party is

on abortion and Dobbs was just beginning. And then it was going to get far worse because the abortion bans would come into effect and people would come to understand that it wasn't just stripping the rights and freedoms away at the federal level, but that these were some of the most extreme policies ever put forth in America. And I think that what's been surprising to me, I'm just going to be honest, like I've been, I went on Fox News for years, I'm in the game. I've

But it's like Trump created a permission structure for a level of misogyny and bigotry and xenophobia and racism that remains shocking to me. I'm still not reconciled personally to J.D. Vance. I mean, I cannot believe what a monster he is. And just like he's this...

you know, Peter Thiel, whatever you want to call it, I call him the leader of the handmaid's tale wing of the Republican Party, Comrade Vance, right? Right. I mean, Commander Vance, is that

When he, I didn't know anything about JD Vance. He just got elected. You know, I didn't really pay any attention to him. And then, you know, after he got picked on that first 24 hours, I was on the internet sitting at the same computer where I am now. And I watched a video of JD Vance saying, I believe that women who are getting beaten by their husbands need to stay in their marriage in order for the good of the children. And I couldn't.

believe what I had just heard. I just, I really, like I had this moment where, you know, you and I have been doing this a long time. I mean, nothing kind of surprises us. Right. This shocked me. Right. Like I was unprepared for this level of lunacy and batshit craziness. Right. And all the things that we, however, and just misogyny and hatred. And, and so I do think that this is

Where the Republicans have gone on this is so wild now. I mean, Trump, MAGA, not Republicans. MAGA, where MAGA's gone on this. And the overtaking of this current iteration of MAGA becoming so overtly handmaid's tale, leaning and misogynistic has just been staggering. And because it's an evolution, right? This is not where Trump was in 2015. Yeah.

And I think that Trump actually, you know, I think this politics is actually a little bit uncomfortable for him, actually, as he fumbles around. But I do think that when we look back at this period, you know, that the evolution of MAGA, right? We're now in year nine of MAGA. I'll just make two points. One is that there's no question that when the story of this era is written, Alito's, Samuel Alito's role is,

in accelerating the evolution of the MAGA party into this misogynistic party was critical. And then the second thing is for the Florida ballot initiative. If we, right now, there's an abortion ballot initiative in Florida to roll back the six-week abortion ban that DeSantis promoted. Amendment 4. Yeah, Amendment 4. And it's over 60% right now. It could pass. We don't know. There's going to be a lot of money spent. It's going to be brutal. If that passes...

it is going to be a major moment in the evolution of this iteration of MAGA because it will be in Florida, in DeSantis' home, Magistan, right, in Trump's backyard. The core kind of

of the current ideological direction of MAGA will have been rejected by their home turf. And it's a lot worse for them than getting rejected in Ohio, as bad as that was. So I'm now starting to tell people that if you've got a little spare nickels here and there, putting it into the Florida Ballot Initiative because of the ideological impact it'll have.

MAGA. It will be such... We may not be able to win the Senate race there, but if that passes, it's going to be an unbelievable blow to this extremist movement in the United States in a way that

gives us hope that we can start to unravel the worst of what's happened here in the coming years. Well, and, you know, you're also seeing I think it was just as we were starting to record this morning, Simon, that there was a judge in North Dakota who blocked North Dakota's abortion ban, saying it was too extreme that constitutionally women have a right to an abortion until viability of the fetus and that the that the law that the legislature passed is

was too vague. Right. So and this is North Dakota. Right. This is not this is not, you know, New Mexico. Right. There's no Washington state. There's not Oregon. This is North Dakota. So I think the one thing I think you've always had your your your eye on really in particular was finding those places and finding those races that.

where a competent, confident Democrat would beat the MAGA candidate. And I think you've been more right than you've been wrong. I know that you were very involved in the Jacksonville mayor's race down in Florida also. And I think you're starting to see that, you know, whether or not it's, you know, Whitney Fox or Jennifer Adams, you know, two women running for Congress down there, right? They're making gains because I think I think that.

Amendment four has a big ancillary effect on that, but also because otherwise normal Floridians are sort of shaking the scales off of their eyes and going, what what are we doing here? Right. Like, is this really what we want? And I think you're right. And look, I think it was just a morning consult poll out this week, Simon, that had Trump up one in Florida. Like if you and I were in Mar-a-Lago, like that's a five alarm fire.

Yeah, look, I mean, I think, Reed, the way that you're describing this is exactly right, which is like, you know, we all were married to women. I have a 19-year-old daughter. We work with women every day. And the government of the United States has just stripped fundamental rights and freedoms away from them that are common throughout the world, even common in places like Mexico and Brazil. And women today have fewer rights and freedoms in America than they do in virtually any other developed country in the world. Right.

There's a level of like, you got to be kidding me about this, that, you know, I spoke to a class of at the University of Florida the other night. I did a Zoom class for a lecture series and there I was sitting there watching. There were 125 women in that room who were living under a six week abortion ban. And I had to say that I just want every woman in this room to know that there's a now because of the Republicans, that there's a higher likelihood that you're going to die.

in when you have a child than before. And I can't believe I'm saying this, but it's a reality of your lives. And the governor of the state that you live in is purposefully making it more likely that you could die in childbirth and having childbirth. And it's unbelievable that we're even talking about this, right? And so I do think that what's happened with this abortion issue, to your point,

is that it's now evolved into something that is offensive to men, to women, to everybody as being like, you just, this is like, you got to be kidding me. We got to get out of here. And I think Waltz's line about mind your own business is one of the ways that we're getting into this. And I do think that this is, look, I still will tell you right now, and I have friends running the Florida Ballot Initiative, and I had seen all the polling over the last year and a half.

I was always skeptical that when this thing went on the ballot, it would stay up in the 60s. I just felt like...

the Magistan, you know, kind of nature of Florida. Well, and the nature of ballot measures alone. Right. I mean, listen, we always said we always said, you know, because I did a ballot measures for years in California, like you had to be at 60 going into Election Day. Right. To hopefully get to 50. And this thing is staying in the 60s. Right. And, you know, there is enormous Republican crossover and it's pretty incredible. I mean, whatever happens here, you

There is a very loud and clear signal being sent to MAGA in Florida and MAGA all across the country that this is they've gone too far. And there's going to have to be some ideological movement on the right to start to roll back and fight some of these things. Because Samuel Alito, you know, if the Republican Party goes the way of the Whigs.

there are going to be three people that were most responsible for it in my mind, right? Samuel Alito, Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump. And that they were the ones that

pushed all of this impulse far too, you know, too far and sabotaged. Trump did it through January 6th in trying to attack our democracy. He did it through Dobbs. But Dobbs was something that was foisted upon him, right? Like he accepted that as part of the deal, right? But Samuel Alito and all of the extremists who have been pushing this crazy politics, you know, have

lassoed the Republican Party to a set of the most unpopular and outrageous public policies in the modern era of American politics. And I think that, you know, trying to overturn our democracy and stripping the rights and freedoms away of half the population are the kind of things that keep you out of power for a long time. Well, also, you know, just broadly speaking, as I think you and I might have discussed before, the Republicans tend to campaign in the context of values, not necessarily issues, right?

And all of the things that you're describing, whether or not that's the Dobbs decision, whether or not that's J.D. Vance saying women should stay in marriages even if they're being abused, this mass deportation piece of this, all of the things about, oh, if I win, I'm taking on – I'm going to come after this group and that group and that group and this group, and I assume you and I are both in one of those groups.

is that it's also completely antithetical to the Republican Party of my childhood and my early career, which was, again, mind your own damn business, right? The idea of individual liberty, of local control, of the idea of unelected or even elected voters.

officials telling you how you could and should live your life was just not something that we ever caught into. That wasn't going to be OK with us. And I think that's the other part about this, this idea that that I think that the Harris campaign and the Democrats more broadly have been so smart about is the recapturing freedom. As I as I talked to another another guest, Charlie Sykes, when I had him on last week about the idea that at the convention, as you know,

you know, on night one, USA, USA on night four flags everywhere. Right. So I think it's been a very smart strategic thing. OK, we've only got you for a few more minutes. So we've got 50 some days to election here. I'm seeing this election, Simon, it really in two phases between now and when the polls close.

on November 5th and from when the polls close to January 20th, 2025. So give us your sense of, in that context, how you see things. Because my fear is that the guy's never gone quietly into the night, and I don't believe he's going to do that in eight weeks either. I think there are a couple of things I would say about that, and it's a great question. Number one is, if you're worried about the aftermath, the most important thing you can do now is to help drive up

Right.

vote on day one or vote as early as they possibly can. Because when you vote early, it helps us grow our vote, push lower propensity voters. We have more time to reach lower propensity voters. It grows our coalition. But we also need...

Right.

how dispiriting that will be for him. And also to set the context that the election is working properly, million, tens of millions of people are voting without problems. And that we know from data that those, you know, that Democrats are outperforming Republicans. And so one of the ways that I think we make it much less likely that they do anything afterwards is

is by having this very robust early vote period where Americans are watching with their own eyes the American electoral system work without incident. And then when he claims that somehow we've been cheating when you've watched this work for three weeks, it seems absurd, right? The third thing is that, and this is something I'm going to be doing much more, is that I think that the red wave in 2022 was something constructed by Republicans

a bunch of several million dollars of Republican money that went into funding these fake polls that went in, and even if they did these polls, that helped push the polling averages to a place where Republicans believe they were winning the election. They're going to try the same thing because Trump needs to go into election day with a set of polls showing him winning in order for him to argue that the election's been stolen from him.

So in the last few days, you've actually started to see the team Red Wave reassemble. WIC, Trafalgar, Insider Advantage, Rasmussen. There's another one, SoCal. And there's been a series of these events.

right, you know, Republican pollsters producing polls, particularly in the states, because it's much easier to manipulate polling averages in places where there are fewer polls. Starting to generate exactly the same kind of polls that we saw in 2022, which is polls showing the Republicans doing three to four points better than the independent polling. It is remarkably consistent. It's the same actors. And the thing is, the question is why? And it's my view that they need...

Not just to keep the Republican family in the game. I think that's part of it, right? They don't want to feel like they're losing. They don't want it to demobilize their coalition. It's also to establish a narrative that we stole the election. And so I'm going to be doing what I did in 2022 is that I'm going to be starting this weekend basically –

To start really going after this because I can tell you on my Twitter feed today when I posted that these five polls showing Democrats leading, you know, up by four points since the convention. The most common attack on me from the Republican artificial engagement was you may be winning in the national vote, but you're losing in the states. Right.

And that's where they're going to go, right? They don't care about the national vote. They're going to push the polling averages in the states by flooding the averages like they did two years ago. Which also gets the media more reticent to take him on because they don't want to be wrong. And if, God forbid, he did win, they don't want to be on the wrong side of him.

Right, right. And it's because, right, because his whole theory is that I'm leading in the polls and I'm strong and you have to get behind me despite me being the ugliest political thing that anyone's ever seen in American history. Right. It's an intimidation tactic. It's a fascist, it's a fascistic tactic. Right. Of intimidation. And so they can't, they need to reestablish that.

him being ahead in the polls, this is an existential issue for them. And it's why the fact the polls are moving now. And we also know, and you know this, Reid, better than anyone, those of you who've worked in Republican Party campaigns are aware that the relationship of polling, Republicans have a different relationship to polling than we do. Right.

And they're far more willing to play games with polling than we are. I mean, I'm just going to say this. And the guy running the lead pollster for the Trump campaign is not somebody that one should assume is not capable of actually flooding the zone with fake polls. Right. Well, and he's got to do it for his own guy, because if he shows his own guy he's losing, he'll be out the door. He'll be out the door. And so all of a sudden you've started seeing, you know, again, I want everyone to here's the thing to watch. Right.

What they're going to do is they're always three to four points more Republican than the average, than the independent polls. They're not six, they're not eight, and they're not one, right? So what you've seen is...

A lot of these polls now in the battleground states have Trump up two points, not six and not tied. Right. And this is the way it's going to go. Rasmussen has him up to this is exactly because it has to be believable. Right. It has to be believable. It has to be credible. Right. And and it's and what happened in 2022. Yeah. Right. In 2022.

There were days when every single Republican poll had the exact same margin in different states. And they made a decision that today it's going to be 45-47, and every poll was 45-47 in every state. And it's unbelievable that this actually happened in the United States, that there wasn't a serious conversation in the plowing industrial complex in Washington about the level of manipulation that happened. But the guy who laundered that data...

Right.

And so I don't think people realize how existential it is for Donald Trump in the campaign that he's got data showing him leading. Remember, the Real Clear Politics Average in 2022- Which is now a right-wing organization that I used to write for a lot. Right, right. You know, it was a right-leaning but not captive to MAGA, is that their last map in

In 2022 had Republicans winning at 54 seats in the right based on the averages that were gamed and they won 49. Right. It was the fact that even survive that right is just unbelievable. And it shows the level of manipulation that went on during the election in 2022. They're going to try it. We've learned our lesson. We're not going to let this happen again. We're going to expose all this crap again.

It's a challenge, though, for the national media not to take the bait once again. And I need your help in this, Reid, by the way. We need to do this together. Yeah. But also I would say this, and this is one thing that I think is a January 21st, 2025 project, right, which is...

It's not just that they have these polls, Simon. It's that they have the money for these polls that we have not really come to terms with the fact that like the Republican Party is just the political wing of a much broader movement. Right. That is well resourced. Look, I'll just say this is that Harris wins. Right.

She and Tim Walz take the oath of office. Donald Trump won't show up, not surprisingly. Right. But I have a hard time believing whether or not it's the Leonard Leo. Right. Who's the sugar daddy of a guy like Sam Alito and all his other brethren are going to take office.

50 years and billions of dollars worth of work and infrastructure they've collected and just say, oh, you know what? Trump lost. We're out. Right. Like I just and so I think that what you're describing is just the tip of the iceberg against a much bigger thing that we've still got to knock down. Look, we just saw the fact that Republican, I mean, MAGA influencers were willing to take money from the Russian government in order to advance their politics. And I think the fact that

We know that there was an illicit campaign funded to your point. I mean, I wanted to say this about the red wave polling. This is something I've sort of figured out how to describe. Right. The reason we don't do polls like this is because we take all of our money and we try to win elections. Right. And.

And so do Republicans, right? So you have to view this millions of dollars going into these independent Republican polls as something they view as being necessary to win the election. Sure. They're not trying to inform the public. Which is the same with gutting the Voting Rights Act, making it more difficult to register, making it more difficult to vote. Right. They have to change the rules of the game because the game itself is leaning against them.

Right. I mean, we have averaged 51% of the vote in the last four elections. We're a majority party in America. The last time we averaged 51% of the vote was during FDR's four elections in the 1930s and 40s. And I think that the point is what's been exposed by this conversation and in reality is...

is the willingness of the machine for people to take money. Yes. And to push fake and false things because large, very wealthy interests are,

are on, you know, that Republicans are just, you know, because they see this as a business, right? And they just take money at outrageous levels to advance this rancid, you know, dangerous politics. And whether that money comes from Russia or Saudi Arabia, you know, I mean, the thing I keep trying to explain to people is that the way MAGA views Russia is the way that Republicans used to view the Chamber of Commerce, right? They're like, you know, they have a lot of money. They can help us.

And, you know, they got some issues we got to deal with on the other end when we get into power. They're a constituency group. They view them as a constituency group. Right. And and this idea that there is this entire ecosystem of people who are making lots of money being paid by illicit interests.

And and that including Supreme Court justices and and by the way, everybody. I mean, one of the things I say is so if these influencers were paid 10 million dollars by the Russian government, how much do we think they pay Trump? Or as Pete Strzok said on my last episode, how many how many members of Congress?

Right. And, and we, and the idea, you know, I, they, the Russians pay off politicians all over the world. Right. And this isn't a new thing either. Right. Like they've done this forever. I mean, right. And the idea that, you know, Marjorie Taylor green, you know, the likelihood of her having an offshore bank account somewhere that has got, you know, 50 million bucks in it is pretty fucking high. Right. You know? And, and so it's, we, part of what's also happened here is we, after we win, we,

is there's going to have to be a huge structural campaign

To unmask all of the influence operations that are illicitly influencing public opinion and Washington, an anti-corruption campaign. Efforts to restore the integrity of our discourse, to recognize now that the Republicans are starting to sort of capture legacy media like Twitter and Univision and, you know, otherwise they're starting to expand their reach. St. Clair at the local level.

Sinclair and that this is all part of the most extraordinary propaganda machine in the Western world. And that it is also because of our very loose laws and because of the nature of our capitalist system that, you know, Donald Trump now is doing things where it wasn't enough that you could buy his apartments through some kind of cut out organization and put millions of bucks into his pocket or, right, get a membership. They call them Russian safety deposit boxes. Right.

Right, right. The Mar-a-Lago $100 million membership fee, which puts money directly in his pocket. Now you can buy his meme stock and now you can do cryptocurrency. And this is all ways of him laundering foreign money. Give his son-in-law $2 billion.

Yeah, give his son-in-law $2 billion. This has all become this new way. He's finding new ways to launder foreign money and illicit money into the political system. And it's just outrageous. And there has to become a pro-democracy movement. Yes. To sort of, if I can use these words, to kind of unfuck all of this stuff, right? For sure. Because it's become so, it's become, this is the reason why MAGA has been successful. Right.

It's not because they have the support of the people. MAGA's agenda is wildly unpopular. Right. Is that they have built this illicit, you know, in many cases illegal, you know, mechanism for, you know, driving the daily discourse in America. It's why you have this

It's why you do the work that you do. It's why I do the work that I do is that, you know, we're up against, you know, a very dark machine on the other side that is, you know, loaded with foreign money and foreign interests who and many of whose interests want to see America destroyed.

you know, become something less than it was. These aren't our allies. These are our adversaries. And so this is a major part of what happens next. Right. Reid and I look forward to working with you closely on this after we kick his ass in the election. Absolutely. Lots of work left to do. All right, Simon, before I let you go, first and foremost, thanks for joining me. Where can everybody find the Hopium Chronicles and where can we where else can we find?

Yeah. I mean, I have a site and a newsletter. It's now seven days a week because we're in the end game here at hopiumchronicles.com. Subscribing is free. If you want to become a paid subscriber, that's also awesome. We're up to 110,000 people now in our community. Yeah, it's been a lot of fun. We have a lot of fun there. It's not just, we don't just work hard, but we have a good time. Yeah.

And then I'm also on Twitter, as I still call it, and all the socials. But the best way to stay in touch with me is through Hopium Chronicles because you can get –

Loads of Simon's hopium in your inbox seven days a week. And I work really hard. I mean, this has become a lot of fun and I'm busting my ass to get everybody the best information I can get them every day. Right. And thank you so much for doing it. And everybody, I am in Pennsylvania as we speak. We're hitting the...

The Lehigh Valley on Saturday. We're hitting Bucks County on Sunday and Pittsburgh on Monday. And we'll be in North Carolina and Michigan and Arizona and Wisconsin coming up. So, yes, we're all going to be out there doing whatever we can. As always, gang, you can find me also on Substack over at the home front on Twitter and TikTok at Reed Galen on threads and Instagram at Reed underscore Galen USA.

As always, go to jointheunion.us. Get involved, everybody. 2,000 volunteer opportunities. Wherever you live, you can do your part. Simon Rosenberg, thanks for joining me. Reid, thank you so much. And thank you for what you're doing for our democracy. Amen. And everybody else, we'll see you next time.