(New York) “Hopium”: portmanteau combining words hope (hope) and opium. On the eve of the 2022 midterm elections, political prediction guru Nate Silver coined it to mock Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg. At the time, the latter was one of the very few voices to deny the imminence of a Republican electoral sweep in the US Congress.
” I’ve never seen [quelqu’un] smoking so much hopium,” Silver said during a podcast broadcast on the FiveThirtyEight website on November 2, 2022, referring to Rosenberg, former member of Bill Clinton’s famous “War Room” and external advisor to the Obama administration.
Six days later, the results of the midterm elections proved Rosenberg right: Democrats added to their majority in the Senate and limited their losses in the House of Representatives to a handful of seats. And this, despite the unpopularity of Joe Biden, high inflation and the rise in the price of gasoline, which foreshadowed a red wave, as Republicans and most commentators kept predicting.
Since then, the Nate Silver insult has become part of the brand image of Simon Rosenberg, who publishes a newsletter called Hopium Chronicleswhere he reinforces the message he delivered last Wednesday evening during a webinar: Joe Biden will be re-elected in 2024, and his victory will be more decisive than in 2020.
We have more ammunition to define Donald Trump as unfit and outside the mainstream than any campaign has ever had in modern US history. We can win by eight, nine, ten points. We can not only win, but crush the MAGA movement.
Excerpt from Simon Rosenberg’s webinar
Simon Rosenberg made the prediction during a week when Bloomberg released a poll showing Donald Trump enjoying a two to nine percentage point lead over Joe Biden in seven key states. In the same week, it should be noted, Reuters presented a very different snapshot. His poll, conducted by Ipsos, gave the Democratic president a lead of four percentage points over his predecessor in the same seven key states where Bloomberg gauged the pulse of the electorate.
Polls have Rosenberg saying the two candidates are tied. The media, he notes, tend to highlight those who give Donald Trump the lead, but he counts at least eight since the party of Thanksgiving who credit Joe Biden with a lead.
PHOTO FROM SIMON ROSENBERG’S X ACCOUNT
Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg
“No one should worry about the polls,” he said. Part of our coalition is wandering at the moment and we will have to recover it. We shouldn’t be surprised by this. We are 11 months away from the presidential election. Our campaign has not yet launched, unlike that of the Republicans. »
“A remarkable year”
In listing reasons Democrats should be optimistic heading into 2024, Simon Rosenberg starts with the economy. He threads the data: gross domestic product at more than 5% in the last quarter, inflation at 0% in October and 0.1% in November, unemployment at its lowest peacetime level since the Second World War, market booming stock market and three likely interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve in 2024.
He goes on to list the electoral successes of the Democrats since the decision of the Supreme Court of the United States repealing the ruling Roe v. Wade on abortion, in June 2022.
“We have had an extraordinary journey since this decision,” he said, mentioning in particular the success of Democratic candidates in special elections as well as those in the midterms.
It was a remarkable year. We won seats in the Senate. We won rooms in state legislatures. We took two governorships from the Republicans. In a year that was supposed to be a red wave, we actually gained ground across the country.
Excerpt from Simon Rosenberg’s webinar
In 2023, a “blue wave” continued to sweep across the United States, according to Rosenberg, who cites in particular the crucial election of a progressive justice to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, the victory of a referendum guaranteeing the right to abortion in Ohio and the conquest of one of the houses of Parliament in Virginia.
“This is a real election,” Rosenberg said. These are not polls. This is not about data manipulation. These are voters who are on the move. Candidates presenting their arguments. And election after election, we kick their butt. »
“The über MAGA”
When the 2024 presidential election becomes “a binary choice,” Rosenberg is confident that a 55% majority of voters will choose Joe Biden, whose share of the electorate rose to 51.3% in 2020.
“We have a very strong argument to make for our re-election,” he said. And what do they have? They have Donald Trump. And they have MAGA politics that keeps losing. They lost in 2018. They lost in 2020. They lost in 2022. And they lost in 2023. The country is not MAGA. »
“And the problem for the Republicans is that their candidate in 2024 is falling into super MAGA, into über MAGA, into MAGA on steroids. Donald Trump is a much more depraved, damaged and dangerous character than he already was in 2020,” he adds before discussing the former president’s legal troubles.
But isn’t Joe Biden too old to convey this message to an electorate who doubts his abilities?
“I think we need to view Biden’s age not as a liability, but as an asset. He succeeded thanks to his age, and not in spite of it, in my opinion,” replies Simon Rosenberg.
Too much “hopium”? We will know the answer in November 2024.