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I suppose this is hopeless, but I want to try one more time on the Comey thing. The most common response to the suggestion that James Comey’s letter was the turning point in the 2016 campaign is this:

In a race this close, lots of things could have tipped the result. The Comey letter is just one of many.

But this isn’t true. Take a look at 538’s polling numbers in the final two weeks of the campaign:

On the day before Comey sent his letter, Hillary Clinton had a 6-point lead. There is no ordinary campaign event that plausibly could have turned that into a loss. Not dumb ad buys. Not bad internal polling. Not bad speeches by the candidate. Nothing. It’s just too big a lead.

The Comey letter was a bolt from the blue and it cost Clinton three percentage points. This is the only thing that made the race close to begin with. Once Clinton’s lead had been cut by three points, then an extra point of support for Trump in the last couple of days—which 538 and others missed—was just enough for Trump to eke out a 2-point popular vote loss and a miracle Electoral College victory.

That wouldn’t have mattered without the Comey letter. None of those little things that everyone keeps pointing to would have produced a Trump win. It’s true that in a tight race lots of things can make the difference between winning and losing, but it wasn’t a tight race. Not until James Comey sent out that letter, anyway.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT.

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.

You're here for reporting like that, not fundraising, but one cannot exist without the other, and it's vitally important that we hit our intimidating $390,000 number in online donations by June 30.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. It's going to be a nail-biter, and we really need to see donations from this specific ask coming in strong if we're going to get there.

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