Voters Are Angry, Voters Are Fed Up, Voters Are Blah Blah Blah

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Oh please:

The surging candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are fueled by people’s anger with the status quo and desire for authenticity in political leaders.

We hear this every four years. Voters are always angry. They always prize straight talk. They are endlessly entranced by outsiders. And it’s always a surprising new phenomenon.

Can we just stop it? This isn’t new. It’s an evergreen. But political reporters always believe it, and every four years at least a few of them take a tour of “real” America and find exactly what they set out to find. People are fed up! And yet, every four years a fairly ordinary mainstream politician is eventually sent to the White House anyway. Go figure.

POSTSCRIPT: Someone with access to Nexis should do a stroll through the archives. I’ll bet you can easily find at least one example of this in a major newspaper during the early stages of every election cycle for at least the past 40 years.

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE ON MOTHER JONES' FINANCES

We need to start being more upfront about how hard it is keeping a newsroom like Mother Jones afloat these days.

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Urgent, for sure. But it's not all doom and gloom!

Because over the challenging last year, and thanks to feedback from readers, we've started to see a better way to go about asking you to support our work: Level-headedly communicating the urgency of hitting our fundraising goals, being transparent about our finances, challenges, and opportunities, and explaining how being funded primarily by donations big and small, from ordinary (and extraordinary!) people like you, is the thing that lets us do the type of journalism you look to Mother Jones for—that is so very much needed right now.

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