How to Win Florida on $1 Million a Day

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In the past 10 days, the pro-Mitt Romney super-PAC Restore Our Future and the pro-Newt Gingrich super-PAC Winning Our future dumped $10.4 million trying to sway Republican voters in the Sunshine State. That’s about as much as the total all outside groups had spent at this point in the 2008 election cycle. Where did the money go? MoJo tallied up their spending based on what they’d reported to the Federal Election Commission.

Most of Restore Our Future’s spending went to attacking Gingrich. For every dollar spent promoting Romney, the super-PAC spent $25 dragging Gingrich through the mud.

Of the $12 million Winning Our Future has spent so far in this cycle, more than a third left the PAC’s coffers in the past week. It spent most of the money talking up Gingrich; only a sliver was dedicated to attacking Romney. 

How did they reach their audience? Restore our Future spent the bulk of their money, $5 million, buying up television and radio spots slamming Gingrich for having “tons of baggage.” Since the beginning of January, in Florida alone, Restore our Future has run 3,443 television spots, 1,018 cable ads and 234 radio ads attacking Gingrich.

 

Winning our Future spent $4 million on TV and radio advertising (with at least $1.5 solely on radio).


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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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