Big Money Is Fleeing the Republican Party

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Donald Trump is right: American elites really do have it in for him. With 25 days to go until an epic bloodbath, rich Republican donors are demanding that the RNC disavow him:

To an elite group of Republican contributors who have donated millions of dollars to the party’s candidates and committees in recent years, the cascade of revelations related to Mr. Trump’s sexual conduct is grounds for the committee to cut ties with the party’s beleaguered standard-bearer, finally and fully.

“At some point, you have to look in the mirror and recognize that you cannot possibly justify support for Trump to your children — especially your daughters,” said David Humphreys, a Missouri business executive who contributed more than $2.5 million to Republicans from the 2012 campaign cycle through this spring and opposed Mr. Trump’s bid from the outset.

Bruce Kovner, a New York investor and philanthropist who with his wife has given $2.7 million to Republicans over the same period, was just as blunt. “He is a dangerous demagogue completely unsuited to the responsibilities of a United States president,” Mr. Kovner wrote in an email, referring to Mr. Trump.

Aside from outright repudiation, these guys are already getting most of what they want. The RNC isn’t providing any money to the Trump campaign, and from what I can tell it’s not providing much of anything else, either. When Election Day finally arrives, it’s likely that Hillary Clinton’s ground game will give her an extra point or two on top of an already lopsided victory.

And then it will be time for yet another Republican “autopsy” about what went wrong. The answer, of course, will be both familiar and obvious: as Sen. Lindsey Graham put it four years ago, “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.” Donald Trump put Graham’s theory to a destruction test this year, and it turned out to be absolutely right. The hard part is figuring out what to do about it. How do you attract more non-white votes without actually embracing any of the usual policy positions that would attract them?

It’s a really hard question. In the meantime, there’s one thing that Republicans still agree on: they hate Hillary Clinton, and from Day 1 they will be united in an effort to oppose everything she does. There will be no Obamacare fixes, no infrastructure bank, no debt ceiling hikes, and no maternity leave plans. They might be having second thoughts about their angry-white-guy strategy, but they still haven’t figured out that pure obstruction isn’t much of a winner either. If they were smart, they’d do a bit of logrolling in the upcoming Congress and rack up a few actual accomplishments they could take home to their supporters. But even after this year’s dumpster fire of an election, I don’t think they’re quite there yet.

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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.

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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.

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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