Obama: Just Vote For a Democrat, Any Damn Democrat

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Barack Obama was in office for eight years and never managed to convince all his fellow Democrats of this, but now he’s giving it another try:

You cannot sit back and wait for a savior. You can’t opt out because you don’t feel sufficiently inspired by this or that particular candidate. This is not a rock concert. This is not Coachella. We don’t need a messiah. All we need are decent, honest, hard-working people who are accountable and who have America’s best interests at heart. And they’ll step up and they’ll join our government, and they will make things better if they have support.

Say what you will about Republicans all voting for Donald Trump even though he’s obviously a grandstanding moron, but when it finally came down to Election Day they put him in office anyway. Obama is telling Democrats to be more like that: when the opposition party has become what the GOP has become, your job is to vote for the party, not the candidate. After all, at this point if you still think there’s something more important than putting the party of Donald Trump solidly out of business, there’s really not much more to say to you. What more could it take to convince you?

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We need to start raising significantly more in donations from our online community of readers, especially from those who read Mother Jones regularly but have never decided to pitch in because you figured others always will. We also need long-time and new donors, everyone, to keep showing up for us.

In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

Please learn more about how Mother Jones works and our 47-year history of doing nonprofit journalism that you don't elsewhere—and help us do it with a donation if you can. We've already cut expenses and hitting our online goal is critical right now.

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