I Am Ready for the End of Campaign Emails and the Return of my Name

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In the coming postlapsarian winter, I can’t wait for the end of campaign emails, and, I hope, the return of my name.

For the past year or so, I’ve felt the power of my name gradually lessen after the many times it appeared in my inbox, used as a guilt trip after a comma “…, Jacob” or for an emphatic hit at the start of a sentence, “Jacob, …”. Before, like a dog, the utterance of “Jacob” caused me to turn my head and wait for something vaguely good to happen. I felt a certain rush when I got an email. Sometimes, I even clicked! I miss that innocent, dumb dog me who assumed a random message with my name in the subject line might be important, and I think he existed until at least 2015.

Since then, algorithmic templates persuading me to support this person for president, that one for House, this one Senate (many in states in which I do not live!) have somehow managed to avoid the spam filters, and been the death of “Jacob” meaning anything but “here lies a desperate plea for attention or money.”

I think after the election, the emails will stop. After a few months, I’ll adjust. And I will be free. (In part, this is because I am confident that whether Democrats win or lose the White House they have no plan to keep up a robust organizing effort by engaging voters outside of an election year, and Republican ones actually do go to spam.)

Bad campaigns emails started before this year. In the early 2010s we were told that campaign emails were—like its cousin, clickbait headlines—an art. The “geniuses” of the Obama team taught the world to open up messages full of pap and big buttons to DONATE with subject lines that sounded “human.” Maybe I’m being an asshole. But, to me, “hey” is not what a human would ever put in a subject line of an email. Still, the Obama team raked in $690 million in 2012 by asking for small donations online. And so we’ve been stuck with these missives for years. 

The fakeness of these uncanny valley thrusts at “real” messages has crept up on me over the last few years. Changes in speech can erode the previous beauty of a sentence over time. Reading old clips from magazines, or books, one can see how performative “genuine” speech can be—and how writing that speaks to the moment (stylistically, at least) can end up stuck in that moment too.

By the time the next presidential election rolls around, I hope there will be some new fake way of sounding genuine that does not involve my name, over and over, being said in subject lines. —Jacob Rosenberg

THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

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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.

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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.

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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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