Democrats Can Have Ginormous Spending Gaps Too

An actual flood of donations.<a href="http://flickr.com/link-to-source-image">fortuna777 </a>/Shutterstock

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The big news from Tuesday, rightly, is that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker cruised to victory in his recall election with help from a handful of out-of-state billionaires. Walker raised $30 million; his challenger, Democrat Tom Barrett, raised $3.9 million. Money doesn’t buy elections, but it definitely makes them a lot easier to win—otherwise there’d be no point in giving.

But the recall wasn’t the only election on Tuesday and it wasn’t the only race in which a massive spending gap tipped the scales. As MoJo alum Mike Beckel noted at iWatch News, Democrats spent big bucks to take down an independent candidate in a California primary. In the 26th district, Democrat Julie Brownley squeaked past independent Linda Parks for the second spot on the ballot in November:

Records show four outside groups, including two super PACs, have collectively spent more than $1 million on independent expenditures to help Brownley.

The two pro-Brownley super PACs in the race are the “House Majority PAC,” whose primary purpose is to “win back the House majority for Democrats,” and “Women Vote,” a project of EMILY’s List, which works to elect Democratic women supportive of abortion rights.

By contrast, the only outside group supporting Parks, centrist super-PAC icPurple, spent just $52,000—a roughly 20 to 1 gap. For Democratic donors, it was money well spent. The 26th is a blue district they’ll need to win in November to have any chance of taking back the House.

Elsewhere in California, Democrats failed to put a candidate on the November ballot in the Democratic-leaning 31st district despite picking up nearly half the vote. That’s because they never settled on a candidate, splitting their portion of the vote four ways. (In California’s new “jungle primary” system, the top two vote-getters in the primary, regardless of party, appear on the ballot in November.) Birther dentist Orly Taitz, meanwhile, received 113,000 votes in the US Senate primary, but did not qualify for the November ballot. Maybe next time.

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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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