January 29, 2018

The Democrat Challenging Ted Cruz Is Raising Huge Sums of Money

Live-streamed haircuts, early morning jogs, and a whole lot of campaign cash.

Beto O'Rourke

John Glaser/CSM via ZUMA Wire

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No one in America is running a campaign quite like Beto O’Rourke’s. The Democratic congressman from El Paso, Texas, who is campaigning for Senate against Republican Ted Cruz, has turned his underdog bid into a sort of never-ending reality show, broadcasting nearly every campaign function, pit stop, and road-trip musing on Facebook. In August, 12,000 people tuned in to watch him get a haircut.

And O’Rourke is, literally, running. On Sunday, he kicked of a 24-hour live-stream event by going to a park in Houston for what is becoming a campaign trail routine—a 5:45 a.m. jog with supporters. People actually showed up:

The day culminated with a 1:30 a.m. town hall meeting at a coffee shop near the University of Texas at Austin, followed by a trip to the airport for a flight back to DC.

The most enticing Democratic opportunities this year in Texas are probably further down the ballot, but O’Rourke’s unorthodox campaign is kind of working. On Sunday, as he was somewhere on the road between Houston and Austin, his campaign announced it had raised $2.4 million in the last quarter, its biggest haul to date.

It shouldn’t come as too much of a shock that a Texas Democrat raised a lot of money—there are a lot of people in Texas, and many of them are even Democrats. But this is the second time O’Rourke has out-raised his opponent, and he trailed Cruz by just 8 percentage points in the most recent poll. The smart money is still on the Republican incumbent in Texas. But if you need more evidence that the Resistance has hit Houston hard, look no further.

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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.

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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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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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