Good News and Bad News on the Census

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The relentless drive of Republicans to maintain their gerrymandering edge in elections is truly a wonder. In Pennsylvania they’re outraged that a judge has made district maps only mildly pro-Republican instead of comically pro-Republican. In North Carolina, they’d allow blacks to cast only three-fifths of a vote if they could get away with it. On a national level they’ve tried to sabotage the census, because the people who are hardest to count are mostly Democrats. They’ve finally sort of caved on that—admitting they need more money and giving up on trying to appoint a Census director who thought that North Carolina’s approach to redistricting was just peachy—so now they’ve moved on their latest wheeze: a citizenship question. Their hope is that this will scare people away from filling out the census form, thus reducing the recorded population of Hispanic-heavy states. There’s also a very subtle effect of this on the state level that might help Republicans keep their gerrymandering edge in 2020.

They just never quit. Some of their scams are obvious and some are subtle, but the goal is always the same: to reduce the voting power of anyone who’s likely to lean Democratic. Ladies and gentlemen, this is your 21st century Republican Party.

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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.

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