December 24, 2019

Do 14% of NYT Readers Really Not Recognize Donald Trump?

The New York Times had a “Can You Identify These Celebrities” quiz on its home page today, and since I’ll be up all night and I’m bored, I took it. Here’s what it showed me at the end:

Assuming they aren’t putting us on, only 86 percent of Times readers recognized Donald Trump. How is this possible? Trump has been a New York City fixture for decades and he is, as some of you may know, currently the president of the United States. I figure there are two possibilities:

  • About 14 percent of Times readers are the kind of annoying twits that simply refuse to acknowledge Trump’s existence even to the extent of typing his name in a box.
  • Times readers truly live in such a bubble that about 14 percent of them don’t recognize Trump.

Opinions? Other alternatives? While you’re pondering this, you might also want to ponder this:

The overall trend is clear: the younger you are, the fewer candidates you recognize, despite the fact that younger cohorts tend to be more Democratic and ought to have more interest in the Democratic primary. But only about 30 percent of Millennials recognize Elizabeth Warren and less than half recognize Joe Biden. Despite the hype, it appears that young people remain relatively uninterested in politics, just like they always have. They can “OK boomer” us all they want, but if they keep this up it’s boomers who are going to elect our next president, whether anyone likes it or not.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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