Here’s My Underinformed Take on the Democratic Field

Tracy Barbutes/ZUMA

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I am deliberately not following the Democratic primary race closely yet. I figure there’s no point in getting too worked up at this early stage, and I’ll be better able to make a reasoned judgment later if I try to avoid making strong judgments now. However, I do have gut feelings about what I’ve seen so far. How could I not? So for better or worse, here they are:

Joe Biden: A perfectly fine guy, but he represents a past generation. It wouldn’t kill me if he got the nomination, but I wouldn’t be thrilled either.

Cory Booker: Seems a little too scripted, no? But it’s early days. He has plenty of time to show he can fulfill his potential.

Pete Buttigieg: A pure creation of PR. He’s been carefully building his persona for years, but it’s never been clear if there’s anything behind it. He may be young, white, and articulate, but he’s also massively unqualified.

Kamala Harris: Serious, experienced, and has acquitted herself well in the Senate. Progressive, but not so progressive that she can’t appeal to moderates. I’d be happy to see her nominated.

Jay Inslee: Takes climate change seriously. I love that, but I don’t know much more about him.

Beto O’Rourke: “I’m just born to be in it.” This is not a good reason to think you should be president.

Bernie Sanders: Old, crotchety, and takes himself way too seriously these days.

Elizabeth Warren: Serious and principled. A little too much of a single-issue obsessive for my taste, but I’d be happy to see her nominated too.

Julián Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar: I don’t know enough about these candidates to have even a sense of whether I like them.

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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.

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