Chart of the Day: The Kids Are Finally Turning Out

According to a quickie analysis from the folks at CIRCLE, youth turnout was pretty ho-hum in New Jersey but through the roof in Virginia: up from 26 percent in 2013 to 34 percent in 2017. And young people voted massively in favor of the Democrat:

If this is correct, it’s big news. I mean, even if you buy the idea that kids just didn’t like Hillary Clinton much, it’s pretty startling that they’d vote for Ralph Northam in such wildly bigger numbers. Northam isn’t exactly Bernie Sanders, after all.

The most obvious explanation is that (a) Trump’s victory galvanized them and (b) the racial crap at the end of the Virginia campaign really pissed them off. What’s more, Virginia was expected to be a close race. New Jersey wasn’t, so turnout stayed about the same as in the past.

This is all guesswork at the moment, and might change when we get more solid numbers. But along with reports that minority turnout was also up in Virginia—which powered a huge Democratic shift in the state legislature that nobody predicted—it provides some hope for 2018 and 2020. If Donald Trump has finally provided the magic formula for motivating Democratic constituencies to vote in midterm elections, the Trumpublican era may turn out to be a blessedly short one.

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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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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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