The Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, and Stephen Wolf, with additional contributions from the Daily Kos Elections team.
This is the last Digest of 2023! We'll see you again in January of 2024. Happy holidays!
Leading Off
● 2023 was an amazing year at the ballot box—and a very difficult one here at Daily Kos.
While Democrats were winning races up and down the ticket from coast to coast, the same trends that have devastated the media industry have dealt us a serious blow as well. News consumption has dropped ever since Donald Trump left the White House, and monopolistic tactics by Google have led to a precipitous drop in ad revenues. (There's a reason why the Department of Justice has brought an antitrust suit against the tech giant.)
On top of that, unscrupulous spammers have decimated our email list-building business. Why pay more for our strictly opt-in service when you can pay bargain basement prices to shady vendors who will hand over a million random email addresses—whether or not those people actually want to hear from you?
As a result of all this, Daily Kos experienced its first-ever layoffs earlier this year, affecting a third of the company. The Elections team, already very small, wasn't spared.
Yet our commitment to you, our readers, has never wavered. We have continued to publish the smartest elections coverage you'll find anywhere in this newsletter, the Morning Digest, every single weekday. We've also churned out best-of-breed data sets month after month, all of which you can find—for free—at dailykosdata.com. (That data was used to create the map at the top of this post—another special Daily Kos Elections creation.) And we've brought you our one-of-a-kind podcast, The Downballot, week in and week out.
The reason Daily Kos is still here, despite all of our struggles, is because of you—and we're damn lucky to have you. Reader donations now make up our most important source of revenue, and that's something very few media outlets can say. But over the years (we just celebrated our 20th anniversary at Daily Kos Elections), you have forged the strongest online progressive community anywhere in the country.
It's that strength that keeps us going. It's an enormous privilege to do what we do, and we hope we can keep doing it for many years to come. We are grateful to you for giving us this opportunity, so if that feeling of gratitude is mutual, we would be extremely appreciative if you could make a donation to support us this holiday season.
In spite of everything, we are incredibly excited about what's in store for 2024, and we want to make sure we can continue to provide the same awesome data and analysis that's been helping progressives win elections for two decades. Thank you so much for your loyal readership—none of this would have been possible without you. Happy holidays!
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