August 3, 2020

Trump’s Attack on Mail Voting Is Good for Democrats

Patrick Fallon/ZUMA

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This is so bugfuck nuts:

President Trump’s unfounded attacks on mail balloting are discouraging his own supporters from embracing the practice, according to polls and Republican leaders across the country, prompting growing alarm that one of the central strategies of his campaign is threatening GOP prospects in November.

Voting by mail has always been viewed as favorable to Republicans—or at worst a wash. Democrats embraced it this year because it makes sense in the middle of a pandemic, but Donald Trump simply refused to believe that anybody, let alone Democrats, could possibly be acting altruistically. The only thing that made sense to him was that mail voting must be some kind of Democratic trick and therefore he was opposed to it.

That’s what happens when you’re so transactional and so cynical that you don’t believe non-selfish behavior is even possible. This should have been a no-brainer bipartisan initiative, but Trump didn’t believe it and no one in the Republican Party had the guts to tell him the truth. Now they’re getting exactly what they deserve.

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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.

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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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