Maybe Democrats Can Turn Paul Ryan Into a Minority Leader After All

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For the time being, Hillary Clinton has settled into a lead of about 8 points over Donald Trump. The Senate looks tight: most forecasters figure it’s going to end up very close to 50-50. And the House will, of course, stay safely in Republican hands. Here is Sam Wang’s latest snapshot:

Wait a second. Except for a brief blip during the Republican convention, Democrats have been over the threshold necessary to take back control of the House ever since June? How ’bout them apples?

Now, Sam says generic congressional poll questions are “highly predictive of the actual popular vote,” which I’m skeptical of. I’ve watched liberals get excited about strong generic congressional polls for many years, and they usually don’t last past summer. At least, that’s my sense. But I’ll bet Sam has real numbers and stuff to back up his claim. So we’ll see.

One reason to be extra cautious here is that this is simply not a normal election year. If Republicans start to back away from Trump, and if presidential money dries up in favor of down-ballot races, we could see Republicans spending a historic amount on congressional seats. There’s a limit to how much good this can do, but we probably haven’t quite reached that limit yet.

Still, interesting stuff. It would be cosmic justice if embracing Trump not only cost Republicans the presidency, but also both houses of Congress. I’m not sure what lesson they’d learn from that—probably that next time they need to run a real conservative—but it would be justice nonetheless.

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We have a considerable $390,000 gap in our online fundraising budget that we have to close by June 30. There is no wiggle room, we've already cut everything we can, and we urgently need more readers to pitch in—especially from this specific blurb you're reading right now.

We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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