Watch Midterm Candidates Mention President Obama More Than 500 Times in Less Than 100 Seconds

The midterms! They’re almost over—Dear God, sweet God, merciful God, let them be over soon—but not yet! Tomorrow, the House will be decided and the Senate will be decided and various gubernatorial races will be decided and the Presidency will be deci…what’s that? The presidency won’t be decided, you say? Not until 2016?

It’s true, but it’s hard to tell based on what the candidates actually running are saying. “Obama this! Obama that!” They do not like Obama on a train. They do not like him in the rain. The Huffington Post went through the debate transcripts of more than 125 races and found more than 500 references to the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This makes a certain bit of sense, because it’s obviously easier for both Democrats and Republicans alike to run against the president—who isn’t terribly popular at the moment—than to run on whatever issues they would otherwise run on.

Here’s the video, which reminds us that although elections certainly mater, the things politicians say in campaigns almost surely don’t.

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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.

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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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