Inside the Democrats’ Campaign Spam Machine

“Democracy is doomed unless you give $15 RIGHT NOW.” Sound familiar? Those alarmist texts flooding your phone are part of a Democratic fundraising machine Stanford political science professor Adam Bonica says is more scam than strategy — sending millions to consultants while actual campaigns see a small fraction. We’ll talk about how the system works, who profits and why changes could be on the horizon.

This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Mina Kim: Welcome to Forum. I’m Mina Kim. Does it feel like political fundraising texts and emails are constant and also increasingly unhinged? If you’ve gotten messages claiming Nancy Pelosi is sobbing because you haven’t donated yet, or that your donation will be matched by some astronomical percentage, you’ve probably met the Democratic fundraising machine that Adam Bonica says is treating its supporters like marks and ultimately destroying the party’s brand.

Listeners, if you get these kinds of messages, how do they make you feel? Bonica is associate professor of political science at Stanford, and his Substack is called On Democracy and Data. Adam Bonica, welcome to Forum.

Adam Bonica: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Mina Kim: Glad to have you. So you’ve put this avalanche of political fundraising texts we tend to see into categories. Could you describe those categories, starting with what you call the “all caps for cash”?

Adam Bonica: Yeah. So this is the garden-variety, sort of unhinged type of message we’ve become pretty used to receiving, like the one you referred to in the beginning — that we’re doomed, or Nancy Pelosi is sobbing because we haven’t donated. These are strange. They’re deeply weird. And once you dig into what’s going on and put all these categories into place, you start to see that it’s part of a larger pattern. These aren’t meant to appeal to most of us; they’re actually targeted at a very specific group.

Mina Kim: Yeah. I was struck by a line in your Substack where you were saying these all-caps messages are meant to startle as opposed to inform.

Adam Bonica: Yeah. There is no actual information content or messaging content. Often, you’ll get these messages, and it will say, “I need you to see this. I need you to see this letter I wrote,” or something along those lines. You click on the link, and it just brings you to a page where it’s harvesting your personal information. Often, these are linked to actual legitimate campaigns, and sometimes they’re linked to other organizations that are probably less above board in the arena.

Mina Kim: And what about the ones that are not necessarily being totally honest with you? You’ve also talked about the ones that promise a donation match. You’ve called it a “phantom match.” Why?

Adam Bonica: So this is a pretty widely used tactic now in the online fundraising arena. For instance, I got a text last year that said Taylor Swift was going to eight-times match my donation.

Mina Kim: Mhmm.

Adam Bonica: That seems highly unlikely, for a variety of reasons. Were she to do that for thousands and thousands of donors, she would almost certainly violate campaign finance limits. So often these phantom matches, if you want to be generous in how they’re put together, the organization offering them may be shifting some funds around in their internal operations and calling it a match. But it’s rare, if ever, that you actually have a wealthy donor waiting on the other side to match the donations you’ve made.

Mina Kim: There are also ones that you see as essentially emotional extortion. Do you mean the ones where they’re like, “We’re close to tears,” those types of ones?

Adam Bonica: Yeah. The “we’re close to tears,” “you’re abandoning me,” “I’m crying over here, and all you need to do is donate and everything will get better.” These over-the-top type messages are a kind of emotional extortion. They fit that pattern extremely well. And when you see that happening, you might shrug it off as just sort of weird, but you have to think more deeply about: okay, if they’re sending this out, it’s probably working on someone. And who is that? That’s when things get to be a lot more, I guess, angering and sad.

Mina Kim: Who do you find they manipulate the most, or who tends to be most vulnerable to these types of emotional pleas?

Adam Bonica: Primarily, it’s going to be people with lower cognitive defenses. The vast majority of these funds are targeting seniors. Pretty much all of the money coming from this type of fundraising — 95 percent plus — is coming from people 65 years and older, skewing even older on the age spectrum. A lot of these PACs are raising a good half of their money from donors who are 80 or older.

This is unsurprising. This whole investigation led me into a bit of a rabbit hole reading about different grifting and online scam tactics. And these fit a very well-established mold of the types of elder fraud campaigns that we see happen in other arenas.

Mina Kim: Are there plenty of examples of this on the Republican side too?

Adam Bonica: Yeah. Don’t get me started on that. It’s so much worse on the Republican side. It’s so much worse. But it’s so bad on the Democratic side that it’s almost indistinguishable from a citizen’s perspective.

The Republican side had started this tactic a little earlier than Democrats, and they were much more aggressive in doing things like not telling the donor that they were going to have recurring donations. Or, there was a New York Times story a few years back about how the Republican National Committee was fundraising by sending out texts that would just say, “Do you support Donald Trump? Click yes if you do. Or type yes if you do.” And if you typed it, it would start to automatically charge you without you having any idea.

Mina Kim: Oh my gosh.

Adam Bonica: These types of tactics are pretty extreme when you think about them — especially coming from major party operations. It’s an unacceptable way to treat one’s supporters to begin with. But it’s also deeply odd to see political parties doing this. Parties find a lot of different ways around the world to fund themselves, but I cannot find another example outside of Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. who have resorted to targeting vulnerable seniors.

Mina Kim: Well, let me invite listeners into this conversation. If you’re inundated with urgent texts asking for campaign contributions, how do they make you feel? Do they make you feel like giving? Do they freak you out and make you push “yes”? Or do they actually make you reluctant to give to the campaign?

You can tell us by emailing forum@kqed.org, finding us on Discord, Blue Sky, Facebook, Instagram, or Threads @KQEDforum. Or you can call us at 866-733-6786. That’s 866-733-6786. And if you have found some success in curbing the barrage of fundraising messages you’re receiving, we’d love to hear how you’ve managed to do that too.

So Adam, just to be clear, I imagine you accept that some level of political fundraising needs to go on. Right? The political fundraising in and of itself is not your issue exactly?

Adam Bonica: Yeah. In the U.S. electoral system, it is unfortunately a fact of life that parties rely on this type of fundraising for resources. There are other ways that you can fund parties, but in the U.S. we’ve unfortunately been using this model for some time.

There are different ways to fundraise, though. One way we see being used now is this extractive approach where you’re trying to shame a donor into giving or confuse them into giving. An alternative approach, which is used by a lot of candidates and grassroots advocacy organizations, would be fundraising through inspiration — showing people that you’re doing something important and that you want their help. You want these supporters to be both financial and voluntary supporters of a movement, and see them as allies.

Right now, we’re stuck in this mode of fundraising where that’s not happening. Supporters on both the Democratic and Republican side — though we’re focusing here on Democrats — are being treated like marks. The party has a lot of reasons not to alienate its supporters. But in adopting this approach, it’s irritated a lot of party members and made it much harder to build a larger political movement around the really serious issues we’re facing today in the country.

Mina Kim: Interesting. So Caroline, I think, is reflecting this. The listener writes, “I get these messages all the time, and I hate them. I feel like I’m always being asked for more money from the Democratic Party. I’m never thanked. I’m never told how it’s being used, and so I’ve stopped giving.”

You’ve touched on this, but what is so damaging about these tactics in your view and the long-term effects of them?

Adam Bonica: Yeah. Great question. The most valuable thing a party has is its brand. You can raise all the money in the world, but if you have a terrible brand and people do not trust the party — if they do not see the party as a good-faith actor — that party can do nothing with those resources.

Think of companies that have brands to protect. I don’t want to say Coca-Cola, but a better example might be public radio or NPR. If they engaged in these fundraising tactics and started spamming anyone who’d ever given to them ten times a day with desperate appeals, that would delegitimize the whole organization. People would be getting this messaging continuously.

This is what people see the Democratic Party as more and more often, and I think that’s having a huge effect on the overall party brand. That may very well be feeding into the very low favorability and approval rates that the Democratic Party is seeing right now.

Mina Kim: Yeah. And we’re coming up on a break, but how do the defenders defend them? Do they say, “Well, they’re effective though, in the short term at least, even if it maybe erodes our long-term relationship with the person. And right now, we need a lot of resources because the times really are pretty urgent under this administration”?

Adam Bonica: There are two huge problems with that. The first problem is that when they say it’s effective, what they’re really saying is they’re effectively extracting money from people who otherwise wouldn’t be giving but are essentially being targeted by these schemes. This is not a good-faith way to fundraise.

And the second, equally important point is once this money is being raised, you can track, for the most part, where it’s going. It is not going to the parties or the campaigns. It’s largely going somewhere else.

Mina Kim: Well, that’s exactly what I want to dig into after the break, Adam, and let’s do that.

Listeners, you’ll hear more with Adam Bonica, associate professor of political science at Stanford, whose Substack is On Democracy and Data. Stay with us. You’re listening to Forum. I’m Mina Kim.