The Presidential Campaign That Made the Least Sense Has Come to an End

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Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick was among the last to arrive in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. And now he’s gone. After earning 0.4 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, Patrick announced Wednesday that he would end his longshot campaign.

Patrick joined the race in November 2019; most of the other candidates had announced their bids by April. And, with neither the name recognition nor the massive wealth of former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who also entered the race in November, Patrick’s campaign was lackluster from the get-go.

“Having delivered health care to 99% of Massachusetts residents, nation leading student achievement and energy efficiency, responsible budgets, and the highest bond rating in Massachusetts history, I believed and still believe we had a strong case to make for being able to deliver better outcomes,” Patrick wrote in an email announcing the suspension of his campaign. “And having shown through legislative initiatives, economic recovery, natural and man-made disasters, and a terrorist attack that we can lead by asking people to turn to each other instead of on each other, I thought we had a pretty good case for a better way as well.”

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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