I Am Ready for the End of Campaign Emails and the Return of my Name

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In the coming postlapsarian winter, I can’t wait for the end of campaign emails, and, I hope, the return of my name.

For the past year or so, I’ve felt the power of my name gradually lessen after the many times it appeared in my inbox, used as a guilt trip after a comma “…, Jacob” or for an emphatic hit at the start of a sentence, “Jacob, …”. Before, like a dog, the utterance of “Jacob” caused me to turn my head and wait for something vaguely good to happen. I felt a certain rush when I got an email. Sometimes, I even clicked! I miss that innocent, dumb dog me who assumed a random message with my name in the subject line might be important, and I think he existed until at least 2015.

Since then, algorithmic templates persuading me to support this person for president, that one for House, this one Senate (many in states in which I do not live!) have somehow managed to avoid the spam filters, and been the death of “Jacob” meaning anything but “here lies a desperate plea for attention or money.”

I think after the election, the emails will stop. After a few months, I’ll adjust. And I will be free. (In part, this is because I am confident that whether Democrats win or lose the White House they have no plan to keep up a robust organizing effort by engaging voters outside of an election year, and Republican ones actually do go to spam.)

Bad campaigns emails started before this year. In the early 2010s we were told that campaign emails were—like its cousin, clickbait headlines—an art. The “geniuses” of the Obama team taught the world to open up messages full of pap and big buttons to DONATE with subject lines that sounded “human.” Maybe I’m being an asshole. But, to me, “hey” is not what a human would ever put in a subject line of an email. Still, the Obama team raked in $690 million in 2012 by asking for small donations online. And so we’ve been stuck with these missives for years. 

The fakeness of these uncanny valley thrusts at “real” messages has crept up on me over the last few years. Changes in speech can erode the previous beauty of a sentence over time. Reading old clips from magazines, or books, one can see how performative “genuine” speech can be—and how writing that speaks to the moment (stylistically, at least) can end up stuck in that moment too.

By the time the next presidential election rolls around, I hope there will be some new fake way of sounding genuine that does not involve my name, over and over, being said in subject lines. —Jacob Rosenberg

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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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