The press has been pounding me for weeks about my "gaffes" and "mistakes."

They don't care why I'm running for President.

So I’m going to get personal with you and explain exactly why I'm running for President. I hope you'll read this email and then donate a few bucks to make sure I win the nomination. Your donation is important >>

You’ve heard me say time and time again that our country is in a battle for the soul of this nation.

We have a president who assigns a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it.

That has to end. If we allow Trump 4 more years, it will fundamentally alter the direction of our country.

So I get up every day with that in mind. Everywhere I go, people ask me if it will get better -- and I am working to ensure the answer is yes. I need to make sure I can look my grandchildren in the eyes and tell them everything will be all right.

And whether you started this with me eleven years ago or are reading an email for the first time, each of us are bound by a common cause: seeking a better future for our country.

But winning this campaign won’t be easy. People on both sides of the aisle want me to lose. Trump is relentlessly attacking me. And right now we are falling short of our end-of-quarter fundraising goal. We need to to bring in 7,000 more donations by Saturday. So, I’m reaching out directly to you before our deadline.

The American Dream is personal to me. I grew up in Scranton. Like many of you, when the town fell on hard times, my Dad had to leave town to find a job he could support our family on. If my parents said it once, they said it a million times: “Champ, it’s not how many times you get knocked down, it’s how quickly you get up.”

Ladies and gentlemen, that’s your story. That’s America’s story. We’ve been knocked down, but we’ve always gotten back up. And if you get back up, you can make it. That’s the America I have always believed in.

My confidence is born out of my own experience, and America’s experience – the American people have never, never, never, ever let their country down when they’ve had leadership willing to support them and to challenge them. I am more optimistic today than ever because of you, because of where we are and who we are.

I know America’s best days are still ahead. But we have a lot of work ahead of us. To defeat Donald Trump, we need to build the most sophisticated campaign this country has ever seen. We need to register thousands of new voters, have authentic one-on-one conversations with voters to tell my story, run sophisticated digital advertisements, radio ads, television ads, and more to persuade everyone to join our campaign. But this effort will be expensive. And I’m not taking a dime of corporate PAC money. I’m funding this campaign the right way: from small donations given by people reading emails like this one. So even though I hate to ask for money -- I have a humble request:

If you believe in me, if you believe we need to keep fighting, even when it’s hard, if you haven’t given up on America’s future -- join me on this journey. Chip in to this email today. Together, we restore the soul of this nation and defeat Donald Trump:

Thank you for your support,

Joe