Why Your Political Substack Needs to Be Free Until the Election

If you really want Trump to lose these midterms, it’s time to stop worrying about money and open your Substack and comment areas to everyone for a month

The other day, I began reading a Substack that advertised itself in its headline as an interview with a Democratic Senate candidate. I wanted to read it. But a paywall blocked my way.

This is normally fine. It’s a business decision. Paywall away. I’ll read someone else.

But I’ve been told by people like the Substacker in question that we are in an all-hands-on-deck situation, especially as the U.S. midterm elections approach.

I would argue that this should be the one month in your Substack writing career that you make all your posts free. Your paid subscribers will not only understand, they’ll applaud you for it. You don’t need more subscribers, probably, but you’ll still get a few anyway just for being cool beans.

Few can afford all the Substack subscriptions now available. Shouldn’t we be spending what little money we have these days on the candidate you interviewed?

Should Substackers be cannibalizing the communal Democratic election treasury, which is considerably smaller than the megalith that is the Republican election budget, by forcing readers to choose between their Substack and the candidates?

Musk has said he’d spend $400 million on this election. Other oligarchs are spending a lot, too. The flood of negative advertising hammering Democrats has begun. We can argue about whether all these negative ads full of lies work on a jaded electorate, but to ignore the Republican flood of cash is dangerous.

AHOD

All Hands On Deck means that everyone in the resistance community needs to help each other spread information about how to vote and work against the grifting regime that will surely continue to keep trying to make voting difficult.

So your comment areas need to be free, too. This area is a gift from Substack, which, I should add, has oligarch investors like Marc Andreessen, who is a right-wing nutter himself:

The comments area can be used by the community to pass along important information.

Will you end up with a troll problem if you open your comment area? Maybe, but we in the resistance are pretty good at shouting those people down, or, even better, tuning them out.

If you have assistants, you can ask them to help by deleting troll comments without a reply and blocking the trolls. I’ve never seen a Substack that has so many comments that this isn’t possible. It’s just for a month, anyway. Close it up after the election again, if that’s your jam.

Comment areas are also a place to fundraise and cheerlead. Will you see bogus fundraisers? Maybe, but again, the community is great at self-policing these things. Trust your readers to help you. They will. And they’ll do it eagerly.

Nobody has much tolerance for bullshit right now. They will not let your Substack comment area get polluted by fraudsters, right-wing trolls, or even bots.

Make posts and your comment areas free for the rest of the month and until Election Day.

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If your Substack is making money, you can afford to make all your posts free for a month

Easy for me to say, right? Well, I can’t speak to it directly because I only make vending machine money here. My Substack business model has always been based on NPR’s: Free content. My generous contributors are mostly showing appreciation or saying “thank-you” with their wallets, and I’m greatly appreciative of that. I try saying “thank-you” in return with a few perks, but that’s it.

So I’m speaking mostly to those political writers who are making a lot more money than I am here on Substack, and who paywall some or most of their content.

This is the one month where you can forego trying to collect money through the Substack anti-Trump industrial complex, which is a virtual cottage industry of anti-Trump blogs.

There are basically two kinds of monetarily successful political Substackers.

There’s the old guard, the early adopters, who got in on the ground floor, and there are the refugees from mainstream media who arrived with name recognition and some street cred.

There are exceptions, of course, but those are the two major categories.

Most of the people who fall into these categories are making a ton of money on Substack. If you lose a few dollars making your posts free for a month — unlikely, by the way — isn’t that small price worth it in the name of the nation’s survival?

This is an election that I view as a last-chance election. I thought the last presidential election would end us, but the nation has decided to put its collapse on hold until the midterm results come in. But we’re clinging by thin vines from the top of a tall building here.

If we fail at this mission, if we lose the midterms, it’s checkmate.

Make your posts free this month. Make your comment area free this month.

Help all of us communicate with one another.

If you don’t, you might be contributing to your own demise, because this nation cannot survive another two years of Republicans running all three branches of government.

If we lose the midterms, we lose this nation. And you’ll lose your Substack, too.

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If you agree with this, please restack so that it has a chance to reach at least a few folks who need to read it.

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