Why a top streamer got hundreds of fans to door-knock 40,000 Ohioans during Super Bowl weekend
“Every single thing you do in life, whether it comes to activism, or online tweeting or fighting with people—none of it matters if you don’t vote,” YouTuber Steven Bonnell said in an interview.
👋🏾 Hi, hey, hello! I’m Michael Jones and this is Once Upon a Hill, your twice-weekly guide to the obvious and obscure ways congressional politics shape how you work and live.
I’ll start with my annual demand that the Monday after Super Bowl Sunday is a federal holiday because who is tired is me. It could be because I haven’t stopped listening to Beyoncé’s two new bangers—“16 Carriages” and “Texas Hold ‘Em”—since she released them before the second installment of her Renaissance trilogy late next month. The game was a thriller. (Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) owes Rep. Emmanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) some See’s and Ghirardelli chocolates since her San Francisco 49ers lost to his Kansas City Chiefs). Usher’s halftime performance was what millennial dreams are made of. And Swifties got their happy ending.
The Senate, however, did not, since it was in session during the big game as it slogs through hours of debate and several procedural votes on a $95 billion national security funding package Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) pivoted after Republicans blocked a bipartisan border agreement they demanded months ago. I’ll bring you up to speed in In the Know; don’t worry.
Also, in this evening’s edition: The backstory on how a top YouTube streamer got hundreds of his fans, many of whom were first-time canvassers, to knock on 40,000 doors in Ohio during Super Bowl weekend. The Buckeye State will feature prominently in determining whether Democrats hold the Senate and the presidency this November.
But first, allow me to explain Biden’s public shift in tone against Bibi Netanyahu, details on the House GOP’s Mayorkas impeachment do-over, and what you need to know about the special election to fill George Santos’s vacant seat in New York…
National security supplemental • In a couple of hours, the Senate will take two votes to advance legislation to fulfill an emergency funding request President Biden submitted to Congress last October. If successful, final passage of the bill could come at some point on Wednesday.
The funding request was derailed last fall by congressional Republicans who demanded the package include tighter border security measures, in addition to funding for more border patrol agents and immigration judges to process asylum claims. A bipartisan group of negotiators spent more than four months hammering out a deal only for former President Donald Trump to call on Republicans to sink it so he could campaign on the border crisis in the lead-up to the election. Schumer stripped the border deal from the bill and put it on the floor late last week to bring Congress back to where it started four months ago.
The Senate worked through the weekend to process it after Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) announced he would withhold consent on a time agreement to speed up proceedings. Senate rules empower one senator to slow-walk floor proceedings unless 60 join together to limit debate, a procedure known as invoking cloture.
This afternoon, Paul held the floor in a talking filibuster to express his opposition to the bill, specifically the Ukraine portion. He says the Republicans supporting it prioritize another country over defending the southern border and that their support for the legislation represents a misalignment with the Republican base. Paul voted against advancing the supplemental with the bipartisan border agreement last week and typically opposes most funding bills.
Meanwhile, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) circulated a memo this morning to every congressional Republican because he says it includes an “impeachment time bomb” for the next Trump presidency. It’s worth noting senators are elected to pass laws, not protect candidates from accountability for an office they don’t hold.
The Senate cleared a major hurdle on Sunday when 18 Senate Republicans joined 49 Democrats on Sunday afternoon to limit debate on the legislation. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) was the only member of the Senate Democratic Caucus to vote against advancing the bill. (He opposes providing additional aid to Israel without conditions.)
The package includes $60 billion to support Ukraine, $14.1 billion for Israel, $9.2 billion in humanitarian aid and $4.8 billion for the Indo-Pacific region.
The bill's fate is uncertain in the House, though, where Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) faces opposition from hard-right conservatives who oppose Ukraine funding. Many members of his conference support Israel aid, which could complicate matters for the maladroit top House Republican.
In a statement supporting the borderless supplemental, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) floated the possibility of a discharge petition, a legislative hail mary I explained in Friday’s newsletter.
“House Democrats are prepared to use every legislative tool to make sure we get comprehensive national security legislation over the finished line,” he said. (The signatures of the majority of House members are required for a discharge petition; with all 212 Democrats signing, four Republicans would have to cross the aisle.)
The White House also supports the bill.
War in Gaza • President Biden announced this afternoon after a private meeting with King Abdullah II of Jordan that the two leaders are working with others in the region on a six-week humanitarian pause to facilitate the release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas and deliver aid to the people of Gaza.
Biden said that Palestinians have endured unimaginable pain and loss while acknowledging the enormous death toll of 27,000 Palestinians since the start of the war in Gaza in October, including thousands of children and hundreds of thousands who have no access to food, water and other basic services.
The announcement follows a call between Biden and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday when the two leaders discussed the hostages. Biden told Bibi that a military operation in Rafah, the Palestinian city in the southern Gaza Strip, shouldn’t go forward unless Israel has a workable plan to keep safe and support the more than one million people sheltering there.
Last Thursday, Biden told reporters that Israel’s war in Gaza has gone “over the top,” his most critical public statement against Israel to date.
“We oppose any forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza,” Biden said today.
The Mayorkas impeachment • House Republicans are expected to attempt a do-over on their mission to impeach Homeland Security Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas tomorrow.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) returned to Washington this week after successfully completing treatment for blood cancer and receiving medical clearance to travel. He is in complete remission, according to his office. With full attendance, Scalise could be the deciding vote on the retry. But there’s no guarantee all members will be back. The result will likely be another nail-biter. A cabinet secretary has not been impeached since 1876.
Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, the House Democratic Whip, notified her members last week that attendance is mandatory for first votes tomorrow evening and for the rest of the week’s votes. First votes will give leaders in both parties an idea of their side’s attendance and time to organize members for and against the impeachment effort.
On the substance, the impeachment campaign, led by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), has uncovered little evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors, the standard for the charge. Most critics of the effort say Republicans are pursuing Mayorkas because they disagree with his execution of Biden’s immigration policy and have less evidence to impeach Biden himself.
There’s always the Trump angle, too: The former president was impeached twice, of course. His allies in Congress would love to vindicate him by saying one of Biden’s key lieutenants was also branded with the same badge of dishonor.
And following murmurs of a primary threat to Gallagher from the MAGA right following his no vote, the four-term congressman announced over the weekend that he would not seek reelection this November. It’s a shame: Gallagher is a principled conservative beloved within the GOP conference, respected within the Democratic caucus, and a good-faith legislator. Ideology aside, the institution needs more of him, not less.
As I reported on Friday, the first vote to impeach Mayorkas last week failed dramatically.
House GOP leadership knew they had three no votes on their tally: Reps. Ken Buck of Colorado, Tom McClintock of California and Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin. But Speaker Johnson didn’t account for full attendance from House Democrats.
Rep. Al Green was wheeled into the House chamber to cast his vote against the resolution from the hospital where he had just undergone emergency surgery. Republicans accused Democrats of hiding Green until the last minute. Jeffries said last week that it’s not their party’s responsibility to disclose the status of their members to the other side. Former Speaker Pelosi—known for prolific vote-counting skills—brushed those criticisms: House Republicans did not have to force a party-line vote with no cushion to spare. And the debacle has given way to a new House Democratic leadership talking point: “House Republicans can’t count their votes, so they count on us,” Clark told us last week at their annual policy retreat in northern Virginia.
If House Republicans pass the resolution tomorrow, Leader Schumer declined to speculate on how the Senate will handle it, telling reporters last week: “Let’s see what the House first does.”
NY-03 special election • All eyes will be on Long Island, New York, tomorrow as voters will decide who will represent the district George Santos (R-N.Y.) held before he was expelled from Congress last December. The race—between Republican Nassau County legislator Mazi Pilip and Tom Suozzi, a Democrat who once represented the district for three terms—could indicate which issues are most salient for voters. Suozzi has made his support for abortion rights and previous experience in Congress as pillars of his highly visible campaign. At the same time, Pilip has kept a low profile and relied on the local political machine to mobilize the electorate.
Beyond a test election for the upcoming general in November, the race has immediate ramifications for the House: If Suozzi wins, Democrats will eliminate the GOP’s one-seat majority until two other Republican seats are filled in special elections later this year. A Pilip victory will give Republicans an extra vote to work with.
New York is under a winter storm warning until early Tuesday morning, which could bring snow and sleet and cause major travel disruptions. Specials are low-turnout elections, so the outcome may depend on how many voters brave the elements to decide the winner.
In related news, Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York announced the special election for the state’s 26th congressional district to replace former Rep. Brian Higgins (D-N.Y.), who resigned on Feb. 2, will be Apr. 30. Higgins announced his plan to retire in Nov., citing growing dysfunction in Congress following a tumultuous year for the chamber last year. The Western New York district is a safe blue seat that Biden won by 27 points in 2020.
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The general election is 267 days away, but while millions of Americans were preparing for Super Bowl parties and watching the Big Game, YouTuber and progressive political commentator Steven Bonnell, known as Destiny by his quarter-million fans, was mobilizing hundreds of them to knock on 40,000 doors in Ohio.
During an interview before the canvassing campaign, Bonnell told me the idea is to knock on doors and ensure people are registered to vote. If they’re not, show them how to do so. The goal is to make sure everyone in as many neighborhoods as possible has signed up to make their voice heard in the upcoming election.
In addition to the 300-plus volunteers, 20-plus streamers and Ohio legislators and candidates joined the event. Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) also streamed into a canvassing roundtable to discuss his experience as the youngest member of Congress.
Bonnell told me that the relatively early start to the grassroots campaign enables the canvassers and organizers to evolve ahead of later months when voters become more engaged in the election.
“Ideally, you would want to tell every single person the day before an election to go vote, but realistically, you don’t have the resources to do that,” he said. “So you kind of spread yourself out a bit, and you start earlier, and then you work through some number of months,” he said. “Another part of is that there’s always an easing into the canvassing process. So it’s good to start up, run an event or two to see everybody’s working and then you can kind of iterate on that and refine it and make sure that it’s working well.”
Bonnell leads this work under the banner of Progressive Victory, a political organization designed to mobilize people from different camps of the left together under a larger tent and channel their energy for online politics into a measurable movement that affects real-world politics.
“I think sometimes there’s a lot of energy behind complaining about stuff online. But we don’t actually do anything with that energy—it’s just kind of that restless, nervous, anxious energy that isn’t really channeled in any productive way other than figuring out how we can insult whatever person we’ve deemed the enemy of the day on X, or Meta, or whatever,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s just because I’m left-leaning, but it feels like left-leaning spaces have a really big problem purity-testing each other like crazy.”
Nonetheless, Bonnell heads into the 2024 election optimistic, despite Biden’s low approval numbers.
“I think that as the economy improves, or people realize the economy’s improved, and as we hopefully are done with the inflation stuff, and then hopefully as the overseas stuff, foreign policy kind of calms down, I only see things getting better for Biden.”
Biden’s predecessor, of course, has his own issues.
“With all the potential cases that Trump is facing, I don’t really see things getting better for Trump. With the Republican Party still kind of tearing itself apart trying to figure out which direction it wants to go—are they going to be a party of Trump or not?” he said. “So I think I’m actually really optimistic, but we shall see what happens.”
I asked Bonnell why some young people claim not to share his optimism.
“Millennials came out of high school right into 2007, 2008 [during the Great Recession]. I graduated in 2007, so that sucked. And then we had COVID, which also sucked,” he said. “So I think you have really highly visible events that seem to have deleterious impacts on our lives, which absolutely suck. I think everybody agrees with that.”
Bonnell told me that the good stuff he mentioned as the source of his upbeat vibes is less visible.
Revisionist history also distorts how we see the present compared to the past.
“I saw a Gen Zer do this the other day on Twitter where they were saying 20 years ago on minimum wage, you can get a nice huge apartment, you can buy a house, and blah, blah, blah,” he said. “And being 35, I worked [at] McDonald’s when I was 16, 17. We made $5.15 an hour back then. I lived in Omaha, Nebraska, and you could never get an apartment on your own on minimum wage.
While Bonnell clearly acknowledged the challenges and struggles affecting younger generations, people also tend to look at the past through rose-tinted goggles, especially if we weren’t there.
“And then it’s bad events in our lives because they’re highly visible and then with social media and everything, it’s very easy to kind of share those things.”
But young people and communities of color will be crucial to President Biden’s path to reelection. And while White House and Biden campaign officials exalt for supposedly eschewing traditional media in favor of social influencers and digital creators with direct relationships to young voters who live online and are unplugged from daily national politics. Bonnell said the key to this kind of engagement is authenticity.
“People can tell very, very, very quickly when things are not authentic and it feels like you’re pandering to them.”
The campaign must have been taking notes: It launched its first TikTok—a Q&A with President Biden on Super Bowl LVII, featuring a Dark Brandon cameo and a shout-out to Travis and Jason Kelce’s mom, Donna—which received over five million views and 500,000 likes and counting. (President Biden’s “Dark Brandon” meme post generated 800,000-plus likes on Instagram and 150 million views and nearly 200,000 reposts on X.)
But for Bonnell, political awareness isn’t enough.
Suppose you’re ever confused about why your city looks the way it does or why a particular policy is the way it is. Bonnell suggests it’s probably because the people who vote in your area—the 30 percent that do—are older, whiter, and wealthier.
“Every single thing you do in life, whether it comes to activism, or online tweeting or fighting with people—all that political energy, none of it matters if you don’t vote. Literally, nothing matters if you do not vote,” he said. “At the end of the day, the only people the politicians care about, as they rightfully should, are their voters. It’s not their potential voters, it’s definitely not the people online—it is the people that vote.”
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See you Thursday,
Michael