January 27, 2020

Survey Results: Climate Change, Health Care On Top

My little weekend survey is finished and the results are in. Here are the top ten policy issues among my readership:

I’m a little surprised that climate change scored only 81 percent. Who are the 19 percent of you who didn’t even put it in your top five?

One thing of note is that most of the top ten consists of economic-ish issues, not hot button culture war stuff—although that doesn’t necessarily mean the culture war stuff is less important to you. I didn’t put abortion in my top five, for example, but that’s not because I don’t care about it. It’s because every Dem candidate shares virtually the same position on it.

For the record, my top five were: climate change, health care, unions, income inequality, and pre-K.

Here are the also-rans:

You guys don’t care about Iran and Iraq at all! Child care, family leave, and pre-K also rate pretty low. Is that because my readership skews male? Or childless? I don’t know.

Based solely on this—which nothing should be—Democratic presidential candidates should probably be talking more about gun control and unions, and less about family leave and opioids. And reparations should be off the table completely.

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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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