October 31, 2020

Businesses Around the Country Are Boarding Up Ahead of Election Season

At least the protest-proofing industry is booming.

A pedestrian passes a boarded up entrance at the Saks Fifth Avenue store, Friday, Oct. 30, 2020.AP Photo/Chris Pizzello

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Businesses in New York; Washington, DC; Los Angeles; San Francisco; and other cities across the country are boarding up in anticipation of election-season unrest. Because a healthy democracy is one that prepares for an election as if it were a gathering tropical cyclone. 

USA Today interviewed Shain Jenkins, the manager of a lumber and hardware store in Seattle, who told them that unfortunately “business is definitely up.”  

America on the eve of a national election is terrified of itself and doing a brisk business in very little but fortifying itself in plywood.

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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.

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