Silver Lining in Florida’s GOP Romp

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If you’re a Democrat in Florida, Election Day was a brutal one. Not only did conservative Marco Rubio cruise to victory in his state’s Senate race, but Republican Rick Scott is poised to claim the governor’s mansion, tea party favorite Allen West defeated incumbent Ron Klein by nearly 10 points, and incumbent Democratic congressmen Alan Grayson and Suzanne Kosmas both lost by nearly 20 points each. With so many Republicans taking power in the Sunshine State, and with Republicans winning a two-thirds majority in the state legislature, the fear is that the party in control will use its power to redraw district lines and try to solidify its hold on government.

But there’s something of a silver lining in Florida’s elections. At the same time they elected numerous Republicans to office, Florida voters approved two constitutional amendments making it more difficult for the party in power to redraw state legislative and congressional districts in their favor. At 1:30 am on Wednesday, both amendments had 63 percent of the public’s backing. (In Florida, constitutional amendments need 60 percent support to pass.)

The kind of pro-incumbent political redistricting these two amendments aim to prevent is exactly what the GOP wants. As my colleague Nick Baumann wrote on Monday, redistricting power is everything: “The real prize in Tuesday’s midterm elections is the power to draw congressional seats and determine the country’s balance of power for the next decade.” He added:

If either party can achieve what politicos call the “trifecta”—control of the governorship and both chambers of the state legislature—in a given state, it will be able to draw congressional districts within that state unencumbered by any need to compromise with the other party. That’s the kind of power that creates electoral maps like the one former GOP Majority Leader Tom Delay helped bring to Texas in 2003—a map that pushed four of the state’s Democrats out of their seats.

But with Floridians choosing to block this kind of political scheming, they’ve gone a long way toward preventing the Florida GOP from abusing their power to the point where that party can create a near-permanent majority of their own.

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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.

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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