Tragedy of the Common Texts
What the proliferation of bad actors has wrought to our inboxes
CNN ran a deeply disturbing piece on how (mostly Republican) fundraising scams are preying on the elderly, particularly on dementia patients. Here’s a sampling of the devastation:
One 82-year-old woman, who wore pajamas with holes in them because she didn’t want to spend money on new ones, didn’t realize she had given Republicans more than $350,000 while living in a 1,000 square-foot Baltimore condo since 2020.
Richard Benjamin, who now lives in a memory care unit at an assisted living facility, would look forward to the emails and texts, and especially to the ones thanking him for being a true American and patriot when he donated his money. This eventually led him to give about $80,000, leaving him tens of thousands of dollars in debt and his children angry at the campaigns who they say tricked their dad and took advantage of his compromised state of mind. “He really, in his heart, believed that Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. and other politicians were personally reaching out to him,” Jason Benjamin said.
You can read the whole thing here. This is just one aspect of a problem we have sought to address, and what CNN and The Washington Post talked to about last cycle. Democratic donors are getting bamboozled in the predictably bonkers political marketplace.
After last election, we talked to some people doing it the right way - like John Ray. By day, he is the Senior Director of Polling for YouGov. But in his spare time, he promotes a slate of high-value Democratic candidates for which he has raised more than $100,000 without any of the overhead expenses of spam texts.
Below is a portion of a recent post that John wrote breaking down more of this tragedy of the Democratic commons. You can read the full thing here and follow him here.
Addressing this problem is why we launched the Win The Middle slate, and are building a community with you to address the damaging inefficiencies in our democracy.
Democratic spam PACs don’t have enough to show for how annoying and bad for the party brand they are
By John Ray
Aside from a brief bout of the warm fuzzies, the most palpable reward one seems to get for helping Democrats is being invited to do so again, several times per day. You get the creeping sense your five bucks were wasted on whoever is doing the spamming, that the candidates you support aren’t using your money to talk to voters who need to hear from them but rather to irritate well-meaning faraway activists.
Some of this irritation is just the cost of doing business. It’s not a field I’ve ever worked in directly - I’ve never made a dime off any of my fundraising activities - but surely if your job is to tell a candidate how to raise money, it’s hard to ignore the wealth of data available out there on people who have already supported your candidate in the past, and on people who seem willing to support Democrats broadly. Although I hate that feeling when my phone lights up and I think I’m about to have a genuine social interaction only to open my texts and see that it’s just 30330 coming around again rattling the coffee tin, on some level I’ve got to acknowledge that’s just what happens when I’ve bought a few bucks’ worth of warm fuzzies from a candidate in the past: inevitably, I’ve elevated my base probability of doing so again. Fine.
But a lot of the spam we get is transparently bullshit and comes from people we’ve never heard of. For example, earlier this month the Voter Protection Project sent me a text “Harris has her BIGGEST lead & you’re ending your Dem Membership?”
Following this link takes you to a page where the details are different from what is stated in the text. One, my “Dem Membership” is actually apparently my “2024 VOTER PROTECTION PROJECT DEMOCRATIC SUPPORTER MEMBERSHIP”:
And two, the basis of this “emergency text” changes from being based on the need to maintain Kamala Harris’s momentum to supporting “VPP” directly.
Indeed, the Voter Protection Project’s only apparent relationship to Kamala Harris is being able to paste her likeness into a landing page. Unclear how this helps protect voters. Then again, I obviously am not as smart as the folks at VPP because according to OpenSecrets data they have found a way to pay themselves about $440,000 this cycle for fundraising while I’ve yet to make a dime on this sort of thing. Perhaps this is because I only tell people that I think their money might help candidates win, not that it will help ensure they remain above board with important organizations like the Voter Protection Project, which does vital work like raising money for themselves (about 26 percent of their expenses this cycle, according to OpenSecrets ), paying themselves (about 21 percent) and, time permitting, making direct contributions to candidates or other organizations (a whopping 7 percent of what they spend).
Other organizations with similarly bleak track records often assure me contributing to them is marginally less of a waste of resources than I think because of a magic money multiplier that ensures my contributions go further. Some organizations promise the vaunted MATCH, wherein every dollar I give will be multiplied by some very large number with help from some unknown source. These are extremely common. A 400% MATCH from “Democrats Who Win” sent in mid-September. A 500% MATCH from “Gen-Democracy” on October 3rd. Not to be outdone, on October 4th, Stop MAGA PAC (which has so far spent 99 percent of their expenditures on “Administrative” this cycle so far) sent me a text proclaiming an 800% MATCH. If these wealthy benefactors are sincere, the linear projection indicates campaign contributions could fully eliminate income inequality within the decade.
They’re not sincere. There is zero evidence any of these matches ever occur. Indeed, a few days ago the Harris campaign explicitly warned against these tactics.
Democrats who care about winning seem to believe these organizations are so detrimental that the folks at ActBlue are willing to forego the revenue they’d get from allowing some of them on their platform. ActBlue recently booted the groups Democratic Power Inc., Democratic Victory Inc., and Democrats Unitedfrom their platform for failing to use the platform “appropriately,” per above.
I went back through my phone and found that I had been sent spam from all these of these organizations - but also many more that have a similar approach and a similar track record in terms of what the data says about their expenditures. I put together a small dataset of all the spam texts I had received over the past year or so. It averages just over one spam text per day, up to just over two spam texts per day after August, coming up on three per day in October – not counting texts directly from candidates’ campaigns which, again, I kind of consider just the cost of doing business. They are in my opinion not worthy of opprobrium in the same way that, say, spam PACs like “UNITEDemocrats PAC” are such as when they told me on October 13 that “VP Harris is SOARING - but you still haven’t endorsed her?!”
39 percent of these texts included a promise of a
MATCH21 percent explicitly referenced Kamala Harris despite linking to a contribution page for an organization with no formal relation to the Harris/Walz campaign
23 percent excluded the name of the organization to which the recipient would be contributing, and in a handful of cases the spam text was “signed” by a different organization than the one listed on the linked ActBlue page – this was often the case with the aforementioned “Democratic Victory PAC,” which often signed its texts as “Dem Congress” or something like that.
Organizations like OpenSecrets.org have made enormous efforts to figure out how these organizations spend their money. They have put in the work to help classify these organizations’ expenditures into key buckets including “Administrative,” “Fundraising,” “Salaries,” “Contributions,” “Transfers,” “Campaign Expenses,” “Media,” and “Strategy and Research,” as well as tracking their independent expenditures and whether those expenditures were for or against Democrats or Republicans.
Let me caveat - a Democrat who is doing any of this stuff may be doing perfectly above-board things to help Democrats win. Frankly, there is a fairly robust experimental literature within progressive research circles on the utility of high-volume texting as both a turnout and donation mechanism. In the limited number of cases where you can back out peoples’ salaries from this sort of data, it is clear the market will bear these spammy activities. A PAC’s operations director who runs the scheduling, the HR staff that keep an organization running, the accountant who makes sure all these records are in order in the first place are doing jobs that support organizations whose tactics could very well be tied to Democrats winning races. An organization that conducts its own polling and focus groups and market research rather than making campaigns do it themselves could very well be helping.
But Lord, some of these spending patterns are bleak.
Over a dozen of the 40 organizations that sent me spam this year spent 50 percent or more of their money on overhead - on paying themselves, keeping the lights on, or covering the cost of the very activity that landed them in this dataset in the first place. Seven of them spent over 80 percent of their money on overhead. While Democratic Power and Democratic Victory - which have apparently already been booted from the platform - are up there, there are plenty of other organizations in the game with similar spending habits.
The dark blue bar here is Admin, salaries, and fundraising expenses:
The tactics they use to raise money are gross. Multiple times per day I look at my phone and its
AOC is filing for impeachment of Trump’s corrupt Supreme Court Justices, but you didn’t sign on?!?
from “Democratic Strategy Institute” on September 5, or its
Goodbye, Colin Allred
from “Let America Vote PAC” on September 13, or its
NO ONE’s donating to defeat Ted Cruz. We’re 547 gifts short. We’re out of time!
from “STOP TRUMP” (kind of a non sequitur) on October 8, or its
Not mad, just disappointed! Why are you ignoring our 500% MATCH to boost our Kamala Harris ads?!
from “Gen-Democracy” on October 10, and so on and so on. Multiple times per day, the Democratic brand is presented to me as a panicky, incompetent loser whose ineptitude is actually my fault, because I haven’t filled out this paperwork and paid this renewal fee that they falsely insinuate is required of any good Democrat. The same people who are screaming about Elon Musk spreading fake news and Trump’s plan to swindle the American people are lying about my “party registration status” and are lying about the “5X MATCH” out the other side of their mouths. For all their urgency, these spammers don’t take politics seriously at all. I’m literally a professional Democrat and my most common interaction with the Democratic brand is some asshole with a Southeast DC PO box for an address on their FEC paperwork telling me a half-assed lie to try and get my money for a race they act like we’re going to lose anyway.
And most of them have little to show for it. Virtually every House and Senate candidate in a serious race this cycle, or their friendly neighborhood non-coordinating entity, has received larger contributions from single individuals than these groups have put together. There are several crucial swing races that, in total, can attribute mere hundreds of dollars to these organizations. Meanwhile, if you back-of-the-envelope the salaries that go into these things, there are long-careered political professionals making well into the six figures at the top of that funnel. This year, I received spam texts from forty different organizations that apparently have barely a million bucks apiece to show for it - and more than half of them would’ve on net sent more money to Democrats if they had simply not existed at all had their would-be salaries and overhead transferred directly to candidates instead.
Others have written about the Möbius strip of consultants paying consultants ringed around all of this, and those points are worth reiterating: Whether ultimately helpful to individual Democratic candidates or not, these groups overwhelmingly rely on tactics that are injurious to the brand, insulting to activists, and obviously lacking in the final product . I barely have a combined few thousand connections across social media and yet my personal ActBlue pages - promoted only on those venues - have raised over $100,000 directly to Democratic candidates and party organizations. How are contribution lists like this so far ahead of the professionals who barely give any amount to anyone, and so much better targeted than the professionals who have apparently decided a D+40 race needs five figures of their cash this cycle?
Unfortunately, it is clear the market in its present form will bear these spam PACs. Candidates who receive money from them would be short-term irrational to criticize them, even if the net cashflow to the Democratic ecosystem is negative (i.e., if more money could be available for winnable races on net if these orgs didn’t exist, which in at least a few cases seems basically indisputable to me). The people who run these organizations are obviously able to make a living at it, with some of them apparently the founding members of multiple of these organizations (according to FEC data, these 40 unique organizations are the progeny of only 28 unique “committee treasurers,” for example). With contribution records being smashed every cycle, Democrats on the whole remain far from sufficiently cash-starved to feel the urgency to do something about the parasitic underbelly.
But that makes now a good time for us to act. Frankly, there isn’t currently that much on the table in terms of cash shortfalls. Zero of these organizations have shown themselves to be pivotal in any sense - if anything, they should be on the hook for explaining to the activists they harass, bully, and lie to why they exist at all due to the sheer meagerness of their results. According to some fairly straightforward arithmetic many of these organizations are financial dead weight. According to the complaints and confusion of many people normally excited to suppport Democrats until a year of this shit rolls along, these organizations are also psychologicaldead weight. While they may collectively end up narrowly creating some value for Democratic candidates, they do so in the costliest way possible for the party’s reputation and reliability.
Their messages mute the actual things going on in politics in favor of fantastical catastrophizing under the assumption that’s what the rubes they target want to hear. Their expenditures have precious little to show for the effort. Those of us who use ActBlue should applaud and encourage the efforts to get this garbage off the platform.
The people who run these organizations should face more pressure from the professionals qualified to evaluate their work on what the hell they’re doing. As a pollster, the accuracy and utility of my work is under constant scrutiny and with good reason. The people who want to take your money and claim they can do so to stave off the apocalypse should face more pressure to show how their efforts have paid off.
Even after sifting through all this data I still don’t have the sense these organizations are outright scams - rather, virtually all of them are clearly helpful in at least some way to at least some candidates. But “technically not an overt scam” is less a bar to clear and more a fresh pile of dog shit on the sidewalk we should all have the common sense to avoid as a matter of course. Small-dollar activist contributions are too important to be treated this way. After a couple years now of doing it on the side I am too acutely aware that fundraising doesn’t have to be a rip-off nor does it have to make you feel bad all day, every day. I think we’d all benefit if the major fundraising platforms knew we don’t need this shit to win, they don’t need this shit to survive, and those doing this shit know they can and should go find a better use of time and resources if they want Democrats to win.
You can read the full piece with additional charts here.