The Democratic Party's Spam Machine

Speaker 1 This is on the media's midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Speaker 1 If you've ever donated to a Democratic candidate, you've probably been rewarded with an inbox full of never-ending streams of pleas for more money. We're not talking about polite reminders here.

Speaker 1 Demands come in all caps sometimes, attached to the names of celebrities like George Clooney or Taylor Swift, and warnings that something awful is about to happen.

Speaker 1 Adam Bonica is a professor of political science at Stanford University.

Speaker 1 He reached his breaking point with Democratic Party spam last year, which spurred him to investigate why they landed on this strategy and whether it actually works.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it sort of came to a head in, you know, the run-up to the 2024 election. So I did an analysis of like how many fundraising emails I got from Democratic campaigns.

Speaker 2 It was 3,600 in that year alone, which is a lot. Yeah.
Right. We're being spammed in a pretty serious way.
It's something that people talk about all the time.

Speaker 2 They say, oh, I gave to this candidate, and then they never left me alone. And one of the aspects of this is that not just that we're getting tons of these text messages, but they're really bizarre.

Speaker 2 One came that said, we're close to tears, or one from the earlier that day from that same organization saying, not mad, just disappointed.

Speaker 1 So let's talk about the system then. Who is writing and sending these out?

Speaker 2 So there is a whole cottage industry of what are called digital fundraising consultants.

Speaker 2 They are the ones who have developed these strategies, convinced candidates and the official campaign committees to use these strategies.

Speaker 2 The main firm that anchored this whole approach is called Mothership Strategies.

Speaker 2 Now, this firm was founded in 2014 by three former employees of the DCCC, which is the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. So the main official campaign arm for the Democratic Party.

Speaker 2 They had been experimenting, had found that these sort of over-the-top emotional appeals, creating panic, these tactics were effective at some scale.

Speaker 2 And now it's just these desperate pleas for money and they never stop. They go on for years and years and years.

Speaker 1 Messages that employ these tactics come from three different sources, right? You have the consulting firms like Mothership and plenty of other operations like them.

Speaker 1 Then you have the official campaign arms of the Democratic Party. They also send out these non-stop messages, and sometimes they're working with those firms.

Speaker 1 And then you have what you call spam packs, who are sending out desperate pleas for donations too.

Speaker 2 Okay, so spam packs. They're sort of on the fringes of the party.
They're not technically like an official arm of the party.

Speaker 2 But if you've received these text messages, you probably recognize some of the names. Progressive Turnout Project, Stop Republicans, Democrats who win.

Speaker 2 They often use these sort of generic names that make you think that they're part of the party. And they'll get these donor lists, and then they will just spam those donor lists incessantly.

Speaker 2 They seem like they're these independent operations, but in fact, they're actually clusters of PACs that are run by some centralizing like operative or treasurer.

Speaker 2 So you can actually see this in the data. So many of these spam packs are, they're like seven, eight, sometimes 20 of them associated with a network.

Speaker 2 And if you block one of the spam packs, the reason why it's so hard to get off of these lists is because they have another like dozen waiting in line to start spamming you with.

Speaker 2 These spam packs often are very closely connected to these digital fundraising consulting firms.

Speaker 2 Like they seem to be funneling much of the money that they're raising back to these digital fundraising consulting firms.

Speaker 1 Trevor Burrus You took issue with some of the outright lies you saw being spread in these messages.

Speaker 1 If you don't donate by midnight, democracy will end is actually more hyperbole than a lie, but there are some real lies, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So one of the tactics you see used quite often is this, we're going to do a four times match or eight times match.

Speaker 2 I actually got a text from one of these spam packs saying that Taylor Swift was going to 8x my donation.

Speaker 2 These matches are just sort of phantom matches. Like they may be moving some money from one account to another, but it's not actually being matched by anyone.
Certainly not Taylor Swift.

Speaker 1 I just want to say that our matches are real.

Speaker 2 Yes, it is a legitimate form of fundraising, but it's very likely that even if these matches did exist, they would violate campaign finance law because you can't donate for someone else and you would exceed donation limits in most contexts.

Speaker 2 So a lot of those are very clearly not even

Speaker 2 possible, legal or possible, but they're very effective because a lot of people believe, like they'll show a picture of Barack Obama above the 400% match and it will borrow from his legitimacy.

Speaker 2 And these tactics are used from organizations like the DCCC.

Speaker 1 You wrote about a big push for NPR that really wasn't about NPR.

Speaker 2 Whatever the cause of the day is that might raise the most donations, they jump in on. And so for a while there, it was NPR.

Speaker 2 So you would get these messages saying, give us money so that we can fight off these attacks against NPR. In fact, I got one saying Ken Burns' earth-shattering statement shook us to our core.

Speaker 2 I saw some saying, donate, because we need to, you know, back up Rick Steves and Ken Burns.

Speaker 2 And I think the reason why npr was such a irresistible target is that you already have an established set of people who are used to donating to support npr yeah and public broadcasting so it was an easy crossover population for them to target

Speaker 1 Some describe these spam packs, often affiliated with consulting firms, as using a tactic called churn and burn because of their rapid, high-volume callouts for money.

Speaker 1 But you think a more apt description would be hook and squeeze because of who they're targeting, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 If you look at who these spam packs are raising money from, basically all of it is coming from seniors, people who are 65 or older and actually skewing much older than that.

Speaker 1 $540 million

Speaker 1 of money raised by these PACs since 2020 has come from this group of captivated donors.

Speaker 1 Give me an example of what we're talking about here.

Speaker 2 When I was looking through the data, you can see who donated and every sort of single itemized donation. So, for instance, there's an 89-year-old woman from Indianapolis.

Speaker 2 She has given $69,000 over the last few years through 7,500 separate donations. That's like 10 a day over a two-year period.

Speaker 2 This is not like normal behavior. And then you see this pattern that she's not alone.
There's thousands of elderly donors who are donating like this.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there was an 84-year-old man from Oxford, Ohio, who gave $194 plus thousand dollars through more than 2,200 individual transactions.

Speaker 1 A 79-year-old woman in Missoula, Montana made nearly 3,200 donations. An 80-year-old in Niceville, Florida was solicited for over $100,000.

Speaker 1 And your research suggests these are not particularly wealthy people.

Speaker 2 No, most of them are living in relatively like middle class or rural neighborhoods with estimated home values that are in the range of like $300,000 to $500,000.

Speaker 2 They're not poor, but this looks like it very much

Speaker 2 represents, you know, years and decades of savings that they have donated through these tactics.

Speaker 2 And what appears to be happening is these spam packs and organizations will catch these people who are usually experiencing some form of cognitive decline or disability and no longer have the same sort of cognitive defenses that many of us can rely upon.

Speaker 2 And they will just donate repeatedly over and over and over again.

Speaker 1 And you found striking similarities between the language in these messages that were used by,

Speaker 1 should we call them, fraudsters to target target older people? Can you tell me what sort of language tropes you encountered?

Speaker 2 So, one of them is the use of party branding or candidate branding that looks legitimate.

Speaker 2 Those line up or parallel a similar type of tactic used where it's like you'll get a message from the IRS and it will seem like it's coming from the government.

Speaker 2 So, like, they're borrowing this legitimacy. And other ones are these fabricated deadlines or doomsday crisis rhetoric.
Those are often related to manufactured urgency and fear.

Speaker 2 It's supposed to induce a state of panic or anxiety, and it's supposed to bypass rational thought and force an immediate emotional decision before someone can perform due diligence.

Speaker 2 Another are these 400% matches, those parallel sort of sweet stakes or lottery scams where you prey on the desire for a disproportionate reward.

Speaker 2 Then there's also what would be considered like dark patterns. I got a message from the DSCC this morning with Barack Obama and Michelle Obama saying, we really need your support for voting rights.

Speaker 2 One of those messages. And if you click on it, it's basically a phishing page where it asks for your personal contact information.
You know, I put in an email and it would ask survey questions.

Speaker 2 And by the time you get to the fundraising page, it said, how much do you want to donate? It didn't say nothing. You didn't have that option.

Speaker 2 And it would populate a page that not only, if you clicked further, you would end up donating. There's a little checkbox that says, do I want to make this monthly?

Speaker 2 So a lot of people are falling prey to that.

Speaker 2 And then the other one, which is pretty worrisome, is these threats to notify friends or family of non-voting or like, what?

Speaker 2 Yes. You get messages that say, our records say you're voting for Trump.
Donate now to correct that. Or we're going to tell people, you know, these parallel extortion or social shaming scams.

Speaker 1 You wrote that the most valuable asset a political party possesses is its brand. In the relentless pursuit of online donations, the Democratic Party is systematically destroying its own.

Speaker 2 Yes.

Speaker 2 It's hard to imagine a company sending messages like this, right? Like if you leave your Amazon card empty, you don't get a message from Amazon saying that Jeff Bezos is in tears.

Speaker 2 There's this near obsession among the upper echelons of the Democratic Party that the thing that matters is raising more money than Republicans.

Speaker 2 Then go back to 2024 where Democrats vastly outspent Republicans on campaign advertising. You didn't see the returns to that.

Speaker 2 But the other thing that is harder to measure but is very clearly part of this problem is if I'm a very concerned citizen who is a Democrat, who is concerned about the state of our democracy, who is concerned about the rise of authoritarianism, the party that's supposed to be the opposition party, the only answer they're giving us is give us money.

Speaker 2 The only answer they're giving us is these desperate messages, as opposed to treating people like partners and allies in a shared cause. And that's just not an effective opposition strategy.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 1 So the question that all of our listeners are asking right now is...

Speaker 1 How does the Republican Party fundraising compare?

Speaker 2 So it is so much worse, right? So the

Speaker 2 Republicans develop these really sketchy tactics, borrowing from elder financial fraud, for longer than Democrats.

Speaker 2 And there's usually like a two-year leg or period before Democrats start using those same tactics.

Speaker 2 But the other thing is Republicans are really not doing very well in small fundraising because they have sort of depleted that population.

Speaker 2 They've extracted as much money as they were going to get, and they have shifted towards mega donors. So

Speaker 2 in the 2024 election, I had calculated this, half of the money going to Republicans came from just 100 donors, which was a huge uptick. Back in 2008, it was about like 2% to 6% for both parties.

Speaker 2 And what's really tragic from a strategic standpoint for Democrats is Democrats have such a huge advantage right now in the individual fundraising population.

Speaker 2 So most of the like bread and butter money going to the parties or historically has come from like the professional class. So like lawyers and doctors and

Speaker 2 then professors and like the groups that have a good amount of money and they can give a few thousand dollars.

Speaker 2 And it's only growing because like you have these huge generational trends where people who are under 40, about 80% of them are giving exclusively to Democrats now.

Speaker 2 So they have this growing, emerging, massive like individual fundraising advantage that they could lean on.

Speaker 2 And instead of figuring out how to actually tap into that, they're doing these types of tactics, which are really off-putting to that population.

Speaker 1 Aaron Powell, right now, you say the onus is on the Democrats as the opposition party to show a better way forward.

Speaker 2 Are they?

Speaker 1 Any of them?

Speaker 2 The good news is change is possible and it looks to be underway. Act Blue is the primary platform through which Democratic candidates and PACs fundraise.

Speaker 2 So most of the money that's coming from small and individual donors is going directly through ActBlue. So like it's a very big deal in that fundraising ecosystem.

Speaker 2 And so after I had written my article, ActBlue reached out to me and we had a great conversation and they had been preparing, but they released new rules on preventing this type of deceptive fundraising on their platform.

Speaker 1 And you wrote that beyond holding leaders accountable, voters can empower a new kind of politician.

Speaker 2 That too. So one of the less known features of money in politics, so I described how it's not very effective in general elections.

Speaker 2 Like that 50th ad you've seen is not changing a lot of people's minds. But where money is incredibly important to the U.S.

Speaker 2 election system is during primary elections and candidates who are starting up their campaigns, right? So So you need resources to hire staff. You need resources to get your name out there.

Speaker 2 The political science research has been pretty clear in recent years that where money really matters is on selecting candidates and nominating them in the primaries.

Speaker 2 And there are a number of them who are very upset about this type of fundraising.

Speaker 1 So are there any candidates that you'll name who are doing well in this area?

Speaker 2 Well, so a national candidate that people are going to be really familiar with is Mamdami.

Speaker 3 I'm about to say something to you you've never heard a politician say.

Speaker 2 Please stop sending us money.

Speaker 3 Thanks to the close to 18,000 of you that have donated to our campaign, we've now raised the maximum amount of money we can spend in this race, $8 million.

Speaker 3 This means we have the money to be on TV, in your mailbox, on your phone. But there's one more place we need to be, your block.

Speaker 2 Just such night and day messaging from what I get from the Democratic leadership.

Speaker 1 You mentioned a Democrat running for Congress in Illinois, Kat Abugazale.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so she's openly spoken out against this type of spam fundraising.

Speaker 2 And she's promised to set fundraising goals and if she reaches them to not go out of her way to exceed them, but most importantly, says like, I'm not going to engage in these fake deadlines.

Speaker 4 I promise your donation will not be wasted on old ineffective tactics.

Speaker 4 No spammy guilt trip texts, no focus groups to test my views, and no grifty consultants who care more about their paycheck than actually winning.

Speaker 2 As far as I can tell, she's fundraising pretty successfully.

Speaker 2 One of the frustrating parts of the way that this fundraising apparatus works is every time a Democratic candidate does something inspiring, like we saw with Corey Booker, the first thing you get are these fundraising messages that say like, Corey Booker, filibusters, give us money.

Speaker 2 It takes this political courage that we really need and it commodifies it. It doesn't let it exist on its own.
It takes that message and it cheapens it.

Speaker 1 Have these PACs gotten back to you? Has any of the bigger groups?

Speaker 2 As I mentioned, like Act Blue almost immediately pulled the trigger and implemented these new rules. There was a response from Mothership, the group that sort of innovated in these tactics.

Speaker 2 And they basically wrote a post defending themselves. They then said, you know, these types of tactics are really necessary.

Speaker 2 A lot of the defense for these tactics comes down to one claim, which is that they're brutally effective at raising money and we need that money to defeat Republicans.

Speaker 1 Who else did you hear from or not hear from?

Speaker 2 I did not hear from the DCCC, the DSCC.

Speaker 1 They have the power to set standards for the entire Democratic fundraising ecosystem, but they're not. You call this a question of respect.

Speaker 2 Yes. I mean, I was incredibly frustrated by the...
onslaught and fundraising messages I was getting in the run-up to the 2024 election.

Speaker 2 I still get dozens a week, and I know that I'm on the lower lower end of receiving them. In some ways, it's sort of insulting.

Speaker 2 There's just no respect for someone's time. It's very clear that you're trying to be tricked into doing something.

Speaker 2 This is the thing I hear from every single person I talk to about this, that they are so annoyed by it, right?

Speaker 1 They're not being asked to engage. They're just being asked to be an ATM.

Speaker 2 Yeah, they're not seen as allies. They're not seen as participants in this process.
They're seen as money to be extracted. And that never feels good.

Speaker 2 It also is frustrating because there are a lot of people who are fighting the good fight within the Democratic Party. And that's being obscured by this type of messaging, right?

Speaker 2 As a political scientist, the best evidence we have is that the types of strategies that are most effective against authoritarian parties is mass mobilization.

Speaker 1 And what does that look like?

Speaker 2 That looks a lot like what organizations like Indivisible are doing and the No Kings protests.

Speaker 2 So it would be different if you were getting these messages and saying, we need to mobilize to protest, to do all these things that opposition parties that have been successful in fighting off authoritarianism in other countries have tried to leverage.

Speaker 2 Mendami is a good example of someone saying, I don't need your money, but I do need your organization. I would like volunteers.

Speaker 2 That's going to be far more effective for the party moving forward than having more money than Republicans.

Speaker 1 Adam, thank you very much.

Speaker 2 Thanks for having me. This was a really exciting conversation.

Speaker 1 Adam Vonica is associate professor of political science at Stanford University. He writes a newsletter on Substack on data and democracy.

Speaker 1 Since we last spoke to Adam, the Democratic National Committee has publicly disavowed groups and vendors who prey on donors, and one of the firms criticized in the following conversation, Mothership Strategies, shared a statement with us, which said in part, Democrats must fight fire with fire, hard-hitting, urgent language describing the stakes of this moment as part of that.

Speaker 1 We can't unilaterally disarm while Donald Trump and the Republicans try to systematically destroy democracy.

Speaker 1 It goes on to say, It's utterly false to suggest that seniors are being intentionally targeted.

Speaker 1 Seniors are the most politically engaged Americans in both parties, and it's no surprise they make up a large share of grassroots donors.

Speaker 1 By the way, you can find the full statement of mothership strategies at onthemedia.org.

Speaker 1 Thanks for listening to the Midweek Podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
Tune into the big show on Friday for a deep dive into the Democratic Party's identity crisis.