June 24, 2016

Sure, Donald Trump Could Win. Here’s How.

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Paul Waldman asks: “In Britain, cultural resentments won out over stability. Can Donald Trump create the same result here?”

Sure. The odds may be against it, but of course Trump can win in November. Let’s set the stage with the observation that both candidates start with about 45 percent support. Like it or not, that’s where we are right now. Republicans could nominate Donald Duck and he’d start off with 45 percent support. Ditto for Democrats. That said, here’s the most likely path to a Trump victory:

  1. Trump gets smart and dials back the cretinism a bit. It wouldn’t take long for the #NeverTrumpers to fall in line. The key tells would be statements like “He seems to be finally growing into his role,” or “He’s right that we can’t afford three or four Hillary nominees to the Supreme Court.” A few weeks after you hear stuff like this, #NeverTrump will be relegated to the ash heap of history.
  2. Bernie Sanders remains bitter and fails to rally his troops, who remain convinced that Hillary Clinton is a corrupt, corporate shill. So they stay home in a funk instead of working to defeat Trump.
  3. The media continues its practice of giving Trump air time to spread wild lies whenever he wants. This is fairly likely since they still haven’t internalized the corollary to the Lesley Stahl lesson: fact checks don’t matter. Only the loud, confident assertion matters.
  4. Hillary’s email troubles don’t get resolved and continue to dog her throughout the campaign.

None of this relies on any kind of big external event, like a terrorist attack or an economic plunge. It just relies on Trump getting a little smarter and then a few things going his way. It could happen 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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