My Hot Take on Jon Ossoff: Just Calm Down, Everyone

Brian Cahn via ZUMA

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At the risk of sounding a little too Kevin Drummish, everyone should settle down about Jon Ossoff’s loss last night. Also all the other Democratic losses recently. They just don’t tell us very much.

On the one hand, Democrats did a lot better than they had recently. On the other hand, parties always do better in open seats than they do running against incumbents. The “swings” of +20 or +15 or whatever are nice to see, but they don’t mean a whole lot.

It’s also way too early to draw any conclusions anyway. Keep in mind that Republicans haven’t even done anything yet. Twelve months from now, who knows what they will have accomplished? Passed a suicidal health care bill? A huge tax cut for the rich? Gotten us into a two-front war in the Middle East? Withdrawn from NATO? Declared that lead is healthy and mandated that it be put back in gasoline? Who the hell knows?

If Democrats want to win, they just need to do all the usual stuff. Find good candidates. Create an effective message. Close the character assassination gap. Raise lots of money. In other words, all the things they’d do if Hillary Clinton were president instead of Donald Trump.

Oh, and stop sniping at each other. Every district will require a different kind of candidate. Moderates for red places, liberals for purple places, Bernie-approved lefties for blue places. It’s all good.

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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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