October 20, 2020

Freaking Out About the Election? I’ve Got Some Advice for You.

The Scream, Edvard Munch

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I’ve seen and heard from a surprising number of liberals who feel like they need to be talked off the ledge over the upcoming election. In one sense, this is hardly surprising after 2016. If Donald Trump could pull an election victory out of thin air four years ago, what’s to say he can’t do it again? I am here to talk you down from this particular ledge. Consider:

  • First off, it turns out that the 2016 polls weren’t actually off by more than one or two points at most. There’s really no reason to worry that this year’s polls are likely to be wildly off.
  • What’s more, in this year’s polls Joe Biden is much farther ahead than Hillary Clinton was in 2016. The Economist has him 8.4 points ahead. 538 has him 10.2 points ahead. Real Clear Politics has him 8.6 points ahead. Even an error of two or three points wouldn’t change things much, and there’s a limit to how much the national polls and the Electoral College can diverge. If Biden ends up five or six points ahead nationally on Election Day, it’s all but impossible for him to lose the Electoral College.
  • That said, pollsters are being much more careful this year and they’re paying a lot more attention to important state polls. Both the Economist and 538 have Biden ahead of Trump in the Electoral College by more than 50 votes.
  • The COVID-19 pandemic is a huge headwind for Trump. He’s doing his best to insist that he’s handled it better than any leader in the world, but nobody outside his base believes him. The evidence of the real world is just too strong.
  • Trump’s biggest weakness is among women, especially suburban women, and he is literally doing nothing to address that. Instead he’s dismissing concerns about the coronavirus and then heading off to his rallies to yell and scream about locking everyone up. This is losing him support among women.
  • In 2016, Trump benefited from the last-minute effect of the Comey letter. Fair or not, it played into the public perception of Hillary as a little shady and hurt her badly. This year’s last-minute surprise, the Hunter Biden laptop, is a joke. Not only is it getting very little play outside the fever swamps, but it’s an effort to portray Biden as corrupt. This is a sure loser since there simply isn’t any public perception that Biden, who served in public office for nearly half a century, is corrupt.
  • I hate to bring this up, and it is a lamentable retrograde truth in politics, but Biden is a standard-issue white guy. There won’t be any last-minute defections from voters who decide they just can’t support a woman.

Both the Economist and 538 give Biden about a 90 percent chance of winning, but I suspect they’re hedging their bets a little and Biden’s odds are actually a bit better than that. In any case, if you’re on the ledge because Trump still has a 5-10 percent chance of being reelected, I can’t help you much. That’s just the reality. But I do have this advice: you should probably pay a lot less attention to anecdotal reports from a few of your friends. Likewise, with the periodic news stories about towns that still love Trump. I mean, even if he loses he’s probably still going to rack up 60 million votes or so (experts project a total turnout of around 150 million.) Of course you have friends who are either still dithering or else are committed to voting for the guy. What do you expect?

Finally, since everyone agrees that Trump could win, get out there and do some door knocking or phone banking if you’re truly on the ledge right now. It will take your mind off things and help reduce Trump’s chances at the same time.

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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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