December 28, 2018

How Much Attention Is Beto O’Rourke Getting Right Now?

As I think you can guess, there’s not a lot to write about this morning. So how about Beto O’Rourke? Liberals are chattering a lot about how much attention he’s getting—too much? not enough?—and factions are apparently being formed for some kind of war between him and Bernie Sanders. Or maybe just between their supporters. Or something. I’m not really sure about that part. Really, I just want to know if Beto is getting lots of undeserved attention in the early race for the 2020 Democratic primaries.

So let’s take a look. Here is the past 90 days of Google Trends for Beto O’Rourke:

Hmmm. Not much action there for Beto following the election, so let’s zoom in to just the past 30 days:

Still not much. A couple of little blips, but basically flat for the past month. So how does that compare to other potential candidates for 2020?

That’s better! Over the past month Beto is right up there with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a bit ahead of Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. Whether he can keep this up after the mini-war is over is another thing entirely. We’ll see.

UPDATE: The original version of this post used a Google Trends chart showing that Beto O’Rourke was getting less attention than any of the others. It’s been corrected.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists 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 hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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