December 5, 2020

The Washington Post Asked Every Congressional Republican if Biden Won. Damn, This Is Depressing.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP

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This week, my colleague Kevin Drum asked the question on everyone’s mind: “How long will it be until Donald Trump goes away?” Trump, Kevin had thought, “was a blip, not a harbinger of things to come.” But Kevin’s optimism is slipping. Trump’s aggressive post-election fundraising campaign, he worries, “suggests pretty strongly that Trump plans to stay very, very active.”

Whatever this torrent of cash reveals about Trump’s next moves, and his plans for the next four years, one thing is sure: He has GOP support. Over a month after the election, Trump retains an iron grip on congressional Republicans, who remain unwilling or unable to say publicly what we all know: Joe Biden will be the president on January 20, 2021. On Saturday, the Washington Post published the results of a survey asking every Republican in the House and Senate if they believed Biden won, among other questions. The numbers are predictably depressing.

Just 25 respondents acknowledged Trump’s defeat, while two said Trump won outright. The vast bulk of them—222 Republicans, or 90 percent—wouldn’t say. Of that, more than 70 percent simply didn’t respond—content, for now, to allow Trump to continue his reckless attempt to subvert the election in court, while spreading outrageous lies about a widespread voter fraud conspiracy.

Read the full Washington Post report here.

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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.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

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.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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