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Speaking of California, are you wondering why Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina lost? Is it because they had corporate baggage? Because people didn’t like the millions of dollars they lavished on their own campaign? Nah. It’s because they were Republicans.

Here are the winning margins for Democrats in seven out of eight statewide races this Tuesday: 13, 9, 10, 18, 14, 19, 13. California is still two states (coastal and inland, not north and south), but the blue part of the state is just a lot bigger than the red part and it’s really hard for Republicans to win statewide offices. Whitman and Fiorina lost by big margins, but no bigger than any of the other Republican candidates.

(The exception here is the attorney general’s race, where Democrat Kamala Harris had a hard time fighting off her San Francisco anti-death penalty rep against LA Republican Steve Cooley. At the moment, the race is still neck and neck.)

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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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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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