Those Democratic fundraising texts you keep getting? They're scams

You've probably heard me muttering before about the proliferation of political fundraising texts and emails and the strong possibility that many of the ones you're receiving aren't actually from the campaigns they claim to represent. Some of them are simply scams. Any money you send isn't going to the campaign, or even to a company vaguely affiliated with a campaign, but is being transferred to Some Dude Who Wants To Buy A Maserati.

The big question has been whether such scams are only a "big" problem or are an "enormous" one, but there's good news on that front: We don't have to care anymore. As it turns out, nearly all political fundraising texts are scams. It's a rigged game from top to bottom, and you should not, under any circumstances, ever donate to any fundraising ask that comes to your phone or email address.

Ever.

A new piece by Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach in The New Republic takes a good hard look at the Democratic consultant class and comes to the same conclusion that most earlier ones have. The consultants and vendors servicing Democratic candidates are a cancer on the party, and it's been getting exponentially worse.

"The Democratic Party," they write, "is being devoured by an ecosystem of consultants."

This same consultant class pushes Democratic campaigns toward short-term money over long-term growth and sells campaign strategies that are lucrative for them but ineffective for the party. In pursuing their financial incentives, the consultant class has reshaped who runs for office, how the party raises and spends money, what it says and claims to stand for, and how it relates to its own supporters. They have made the party older, weaker, less honest, and less capable of fighting the most serious authoritarian threat in American history.

It's a long piece that dives in with analysis of not only of vendor spoils but of consultant effectiveness, but it's worth a full read. Its bluntest conclusion, which I am going to state far more rudely than they are willing to, is that the Democratic consultant class really does contribute next to nothing to Democratic campaign victories.

The big reveal is an updated look at where the money raised by those incessant spam messages really goes. You won't be surprised to hear that even with supposedly "legitimate" vendors, the campaigns you're donating to hardly see any of it.

Suppose you donate $100:

If your $100 was in response to a fundraising text or email, the single most expensive way to raise money in American politics, $65 is instantly consumed by the cost of asking you for it. Asking this often, and this aggressively, is expensive. It means paying the data brokers who traffic in your personal information, the digital copywriters who draft the inexplicably bizarre messaging, the email and SMS providers who specialize in slipping past spam filters, the compliance lawyers, and, of course, the fundraising consultants. Another $2 goes to strategic consultants for advice on how to spend what’s left, and $14 to administration, travel, and staff. Of the $19 that finally goes toward advertising for the actual candidate, $6 is skimmed off the top as a placement commission before a single ad airs. In the end, barely $13 of your $100 buys real airtime or digital ads.

So about $3 out of every $4 you think you're donating to a candidate is actually going to the consultancy running the fundraiser. If political campaigns were charities, this would land waaaaay in "scam charity" territory. Charities are generally ranked in effectiveness by the percentage of their income they spend doing Their Actual Charitable Work, rather than on salaries, office space and fundraising mailers, and a 75ish percent overhead rate might have gotten your charity a 60 Minutes expose back when 60 Minutes was a thing.

This is an extremely extractive supposed industry, and you're not wrong in your instinct that it's gotten overwhelmingly worse each election.

Even averaged across all itemized donations, including the wealthy mega-donors writing checks, Democratic campaigns now spend 45 cents of every dollar on fundraising costs, a fourfold increase since 2004. Today’s campaigns like to imagine themselves as efficient machines, remade by big data and microtargeting. In reality, they are less efficient and more extractive than at any point in modern history. Most charity watchdogs will not certify an organization that spends more than 35 percent of its revenue on fundraising.

Everyone reading this is a political junkie, and among left-of-center political junkies one of the major grievances with the Democratic Party has been the flippancy with which is now abuses our phones and inboxes. But are we just being precious? Do we just not understand how technology has transformed campaigning?

No, this is a profit center. And not for the Democratic Party, but for an increasingly insular stable of party vendors that do not give a particular damn whether you run from the party screaming so long as they get $3 out of every $4 they do squeeze out.

Across both parties, spending on donor contact lists exploded from $20 million in 2004 to $351 million by 2020. Your contact information is a commodity, bought and resold by list brokers who profit not by cultivating you as a reliable member of the party but by churning through you.

Also, these people are horrid dirtbags and if Democratic Party leadership had any spine whatsoever they would be blacklisting a whole bunch of these vendors right here and now.

This model selects for vulnerability. A 79-year-old Kansas resident was charged up to 352 times in a single day, and 45,331 times since 2018, for a total of $153,856. A 76-year-old in Connecticut donated 22,335 times for $62,580. There are thousands of cases like these in the FEC records—elderly donors charged dozens or hundreds of times a day by the PACs and candidates spamming them. Federal regulators list “abnormally frequent” transfers by an older customer as a red flag for elder financial exploitation and tell banks to watch for it. In political fundraising, it is now the business model.

Okay, see, I'm done. I don't care what else you have to say; keeping tabs on abusive behavior like this would be trivially easy and if it's not being done it's not being done for a reason.

But wait, you (correctly) say: Democratic campaign vendors aren't a charity. Of course most of the money being raised by text messages is being spent mostly on sending more and more text messages: It takes money to make money. And you can't run a major political campaign without consultants to determine your strategies and vendors to handle your money.

All right, then, let's agree that it's not fair to judge campaign consultants as if they were a charity. Let's judge them as a business.

And that's the piece's second uncomfortable revelation about the consultant class that has turned your phone into an intolerable wasteland of spam and grift. As it turns out, as a "business" the Democratic consultancy class is even more sketchy than it would be as a charity.

There is no significant correlation between each company's success and the success of the candidates they oversee.

The election ads that the strategists are producing with your donated dollars and are flooding every nook and cranny of your life with do not, with very rare exceptions, even work.

Few questions in our academic discipline have been tested as often or as carefully, and the studies have produced one of the most robust sets of findings in the field: Political ads have essentially zero persuasive effect in general elections. The conclusion is among the least controversial statements a political scientist can make, and among the least known outside the profession. A major study conducted 59 randomized experiments on 34,000 voters during the 2016 election cycle, testing 49 real ads from real races. The average effect on vote choice was 0.7 percentage points, and even that was not statistically distinguishable from zero.

[...] A massive 2020 randomized controlled trial involving over 60,000 Facebook and Instagram users found that removing all political ads from users’ feeds had “no measurable impact” on attitudes or voting.

That section of Bonica and Grumbach's piece is worth a full read. Not only do general election campaign ads typically do nothing, but the campaign consultant mantras about what kind of ads produce impacts don't hold up in the first place. The extensive spamming required to raise money for the ads may, if our own personal experiences are any indication, be seeding resentment in the party base in exchange for nothing.

And all of it, in the end, is happening because Democratic campaigns would rather have $1 of every $4 raised than $0 of $0 raised, so campaigns go along with the grift to squeeze out what money they can while the people doing the squeezing make off just fine whether each candidate wins, loses, or burns the whole of their reputation to cut ads throwing whole constituencies under the bus based on nothing more than consultant vibes.

The party knows this, too. They know it, but they continue to sweep it under the rug.

It’s all the more head-spinning to learn how richly this failure pays. When the Democratic National Committee released its autopsy of the 2024 defeat, it omitted a chapter that warned “too many people … have become generationally wealthy off politics and drive too much of the decision-making within the ecosystem,” a system its author called “inflexible and self-enriching.” The FEC records put this in dollar terms. Over the past decade, Democratic candidates and committees have paid more than $5.9 billion for fundraising services, an industry that has more than quadrupled since 2016. The DNC itself spent 17 cents on fundraising for every dollar it raised from individuals in 2006 and is on track to spend over 50 cents this cycle. It raised about as much from individuals in 2022 as in 2010 but spent twice as much to do it. The committee’s well-publicized cash problems this cycle have coincided with massive and growing payments to its fundraising vendors.

Why is this being tolerated, in the Democratic Party's upper ranks? I expect it's for roughly the same reasons Donald Trump can't help defending pedophiles. People tend to reflexively defend those closest to them, and the lines between "Democratic Party strategist working for the Democratic Party on a party paycheck" and "Democratic Party strategist who does not work for the Democratic Party but does contract work for individual campaigns" barely exist.

The Democratic vendors bleeding the party base dry for their own monetary gain represent the Mar-a-Lago of the Democratic Party. They're the ones who have membership, who all know each other, and who have all convinced each other that they are the experts in whatever you hand them because look at all the money everybody's making.

It'd be one thing if the strategists blasting endless fundraising pleas at the expense of our phone batteries were, in fact, delivering real results. But it's another thing when study after study exposes the industry as fundamentally useless.

It's a worse method of raising money than any other, and one that preys disproportionately on the elderly.

It goes to finance a consultant class that has been repeatedly proven to have little to zero impact in actually getting their clients elected.

What are we doing here.

I expect that what we're seeing here is the same process of enshittification that has overwhelmed every other human endeavor of the last 50 years. We have an array of new technologies that have allowed industry, media, politics and take-your-pick to morph away from localization and towards centralization and gigantification. Book stores became Amazon; local stations became conglomerates, with coverage itself bending from local flavor to cookie-cutter sameness. Telemarketers became autodialers, and autodialers became SMS messages. And, most to the point, everything everywhere became a hedge fund—a pseudo-ethical, omnipresent demand to extract maximum value from everything, all the time.

You could easily convince me that local political strategists might have a big impact on races in their region of expertise. Campaigning for office in Chicago is not the same as campaigning in Los Angeles, and neither looks like campaigning in Las Vegas or Salt Lake City might. There is deep value in knowing what local populations think about local issues.

But that isn't how you make the big bucks. To make big cash you have to claim to have big knowledge, and to make even bigger cash you need to assert generic knowledge that applies to everyone everywhere so Pay Me. And, like every other industry, this has led to stagnation, elitism, consolidation, and more a little fart-sniffing.

Bonica and Grumbach reference this as well; the Democratic Party's attached consultant industry exists for the consultants, not for the Democrats and certainly not for the voters. And that means it is largely captured by, well, itself.

[Y]ou can anticipate what we’re going to say here: The incentives are not aligned. The consultants’ key constituency is not voters but the campaigns, donors, and party elites that provide them contracts. Their advice has to satisfy those relationships, not win elections. If it were really about popularity, the advice would mean sometimes shifting rightward and sometimes shifting leftward. Given these incentives, snake oil strategy advice abounds.

There are two additional tells as to whether a political consultant is selling snake oil. The first is how selective the consultants are with which policies to emphasize. Strategists demanded silence on abolishing ICE when it polled relatively poorly, but they still advise “Don’t Abolish It” even though doing so has become popular. The Abundance agenda—a set of mostly good policy ideas, but not especially popular ones—suddenly captures the attention of Democratic elites, while more popular policies that the Abundance faction opposes, like moratoriums on data centers, have to be forced onto the agenda.

If you want to raise money from big donors, you have to strip out anything that upsets big donors. If you want to raise money from as many individual small donors as possible, you have to strip out any reference to arguments that the most generic possible person doesn't want to have: No civil rights talk, no talk of rights or responsibilities, no promises of what you'll do or what you'll give up to get there. Eventually, every campaign strives to look like it's selling a new kind of cheeseburger that's patriotic and easy to eat.

And the kicker is: There's no evidence any of it even works, when it comes to actually electing candidates. All the evidence we do have says it doesn't!

But of course it doesn't. The goal of these vendors and "strategists" isn't to win elections. It's to collect the largest possible base of generic donors to generic causes. The purpose of every institution is What It Actually Does, and here we are.

To fix all of this, we either need political courage or a voter thirst for vengeance, and since we're not going to get the first that just leaves the second. So the first and most urgent need is this:

Never, ever, ever donate to a Democratic political campaign via a text message or email solicitation. Don't do it. It is a scam that will put two thirds of what you donate into the scammer's pockets.

To donate, go to the candidate's campaign site and make your donation directly. That eliminates at least that scam fee. The candidate may ask you to donate to ActBlue: that's a reasonable, not-crooked choice. The candidate may let you donate via a credit card directly, usually through an online card processor like Stripe: If that's available, do that. The processor takes a small fee, on the order of 3-5%, but paying by credit card insulates you from most possible scams.

Be prepared to then be inundated with spam because individual campaigns might very well sell your contact information to one of these larger scammy "vendors," since campaigns need money. And if you get those new fundraising asks, ignore those as well: If you want to donate to any campaign anywhere, do it by going to the campaign site and doing it how they suggest you do it.

Even better still: Be a campaign volunteer. Nobody takes a cut of you being a volunteer, it's 100% your labor going directly to them. But only if you can.

What needs to happen first is that these abusive spam tactics producing "generational wealth" for Some Asshole, Inc. needs to become so well-known as a scam that it's no longer profitable to run. So-called Democratic vendors are well on their way to making that happen already, but we all have to do our part. Don't feel bad about it. If a campaign or charity doesn't have a way to donate except through some third party, that's the sign of a scam 10 times out of 10. Leave and never go back.

After that, we can start talking about whether entire consultancies need to be blacklisted from Democratic campaigns forever. That will be more difficult, for the same reason it's difficult to prosecute pedophiles in Mar-a-Lago, but it will happen once the base is angry enough.

Until then, we will get nothing but this performative play-acting paid for by the very class that we ought to be purging.

Searchlight Institute has polled the question directly. Seventy-one percent said the typical politician is likely corrupt, and every anti-corruption reform Searchlight tested drew majority support. But Searchlight’s policy recommendations lead with weak tea: drug testing for elected officials, public reporting of members’ work hours, a mandatory annual town hall, and a procedure for removing members in mental decline. These reforms are fine on their own, but it’s unclear how any of them would address voters’ concerns about graft, bribery, or undue influence by wealthy donors. The recommendations don’t even mention super PACs, mega-donors, or campaign finance, and none of the nine reforms Searchlight tested addresses them.

Yeah, go figure.

But what really needs to happen is what Mamdani and other locally popular candidates can muster. Candidates do not need most of the consulting apparatus consuming the party. Rather than listening to some consultant tell you what issues will play well in the playground of their own mind, you could enter the race with some specific ideas about what your local community most needs and, unless you're a vapid amoral shell, you'll probably get it more right and for free.

Fix the City, the super PAC that carried Cuomo, was run day-to-day by Adams’s former chief of external affairs, and it raised $28 million, the most ever by a PAC in a single New York election, including money from Michael Bloomberg and Bill Ackman, to stop Zohran Mamdani. Mamdani had consultants, too. But he raised so much grassroots energy that once he reached the public-financing cap, instead of capitalizing on the moment by founding a Super PAC, he told donors to stop giving and volunteer—the one thing a candidate can do that pays a consultant nothing.

We're not going to get rid of corruption when the very premise of so much of politics is "we like corruption." But at the very least we need to clean out the vampire class that's sucking up Democratic wealth and giving back nothing but abuse.

Go, read Bonica and Grumbach's piece and come back with your thoughts. Although mostly it'll just enrage you.

And those fundraising texts? Nuke 'em. Nuke 'em and don't look back.