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Speaking of California, are you wondering why Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina lost? Is it because they had corporate baggage? Because people didn’t like the millions of dollars they lavished on their own campaign? Nah. It’s because they were Republicans.

Here are the winning margins for Democrats in seven out of eight statewide races this Tuesday: 13, 9, 10, 18, 14, 19, 13. California is still two states (coastal and inland, not north and south), but the blue part of the state is just a lot bigger than the red part and it’s really hard for Republicans to win statewide offices. Whitman and Fiorina lost by big margins, but no bigger than any of the other Republican candidates.

(The exception here is the attorney general’s race, where Democrat Kamala Harris had a hard time fighting off her San Francisco anti-death penalty rep against LA Republican Steve Cooley. At the moment, the race is still neck and neck.)

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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.

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