Democratic spam PACs don’t have enough to show for how annoying and bad for the party brand they are
If you read this blog you get a lot of text messages from strangers who want your money. I’ve never texted you but on various social platforms I am often one of those strangers making asks of people who follow me. I maintain an active list or two of Democratic candidates and organizations I think are worth supporting. ActBlue’s platform makes it easy to plug in a candidate or organization’s information and contribute to them directly, and this easy user experience has helped support a boon of fundraising for Democrats.
But plenty of people refuse to get involved in this way because it makes them the target of spam. 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, sometimes from Democrats you want to support but mostly from ones you don’t. You get the creeping sense your five bucks were wasted on recruiting 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 who don’t.
Some of this irritation is just the cost of doing business. Its 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, its 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 this feels completely unnecessary because 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 accusing me of “ending my Dem Membership,” an act I could only prevent by giving them money. Specifically, via text, they told me:
Harris has her BIGGEST lead & you’re ending your Dem Membership? Renew: vpproject.us/927?t=tOabl0 - Voter Protection Project PAID FOR BY VPP Stop2End
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 (and VPP’s website only appears to list two full-time employees, along with a “President of the Board” and a founder who has since resigned) 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 due to the sheer volume of this type of message from organizations that Democrats don’t actually seem to want in their ecosphere. This surely wouldn’t be the case if Democratic leaders thought these groups were actually helping.
Indeed, 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 United from 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. Over a couple evenings of Halloween-appropriate old movies 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?!”
(How giving money to a PAC that sends less than 5 percent of every dollar raised directly to Democrats went unexplained) Texts from candidates are annoying too, for sure, but to me it feels much more annoying to get these messages from organizations that for all their whinging are not ultimately spending much to actually help Democrats win.
The link above includes the full text of all of this type of spam I’ve received in the past year or so. Fully 39 percent of these texts included a promise of a MATCH, ranging from doubling to nonupling and everything in between. About 21 percent explicitly referenced Kamala Harris despite linking to a contribution page for an organization with no formal relation to the Harris/Walz campaign. About 23 percent of the texts 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 - absolutely worthy of your support - 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. I’ve never run a PAC before, but I was mystified to see some of them exist pretty much only to pay themselves.
This mystery partially resolves itself when one realizes many of these organizations don’t spend much on anything. The “100% admin” organizations I found both spent less than $10,000 this cycle on any activity whatsoever. (If I had to guess, I’d conjecture that STOP MAGA PAC’s $8,003 expenditure with NGP VAN - 90 percent of its classifiable total - was for the use of some software tools to use for an initial attempt at fundraising, at which point they got better jobs elsewhere, and New. Digital. Now. PAC’s sole expediture of $6,738 with Sandler, Reiff et al was to hear a lawyer tell them their PAC wasn’t a very good idea and they should find something else to do)
At the same time, this data ended up rather irksomely complicating my opprobrium because plenty of these organizations are clearly doing actual things that could plausibly help Democrats win. Big spenders like the Progressive Turnout Project, House Majority PAC (HMP), CHC’s PAC, etc. are both raising lots of money and either giving it directly to Democrats, or doing work on their behalf like research and comms. While the National Democratic Training Committee claims its contributions are MATCHED in ways for which there is zero evidence, it seems pretty clear to me NDTC’s core work is beneficial to Democrats if they’re good at doing what they say they’re doing. STOP TRUMP, whose text messages I find particularly annoying (October 10: “If we raise $1m to win Pennsylvania today, Trump’s DONE!” – no he fucking isn’t), is on the upper end of these groups in terms of the share of money it gives directly to Democrats.
Whether giving money directly to campaigns or spending on their behalf, virtually all of these organizations are at least doing something on paper that could help Democrats win and not just pay themselves. And even when they are spending a lot of money on overhead, in cases like NDTC one could argue the overhead is the point, such as by building courses that make it easy to learn how to run a campaign or fostering networks and connections that improve the party’s core infrastructure. That stuff I’m not really qualified to evalute.
…I have questions about how these groups choose which candidates to support, however.
Some of it seems pretty reasonable, if the ads they’re spending on are well-made, the research is taken seriously, etc. If you match these organizations to their FEC records, to the committees and candidates they’re either contributing to directly or supporting via ads and research, a ton of this fundraising is going straight into anti-Trump ads. If you simply take the FEC IDs of each of these organizations and sum up their contributions to other candidates or committees, or expenditures on their behalf, these forty organizations collectively have spent about $55m on activity I’d say qualifies as more or less directly helping elect Democrats. Of the roughly $55m these organizations have spent in total this cycle, just over $34m has gone to anti-Trump ads and barely another $400k has gone to what is explicitly marked as pro-Harris activities (at least, according to boxes 24A, 24E, and 24K as classified in the TRANSACTION_TP field of the pas224 file of the FEC’s 2023-2024 records. Obviously, right?). About another $2m has gone to Senate races, and about another $16m or so has gone to House races. (FEC records have different boxes to check if your spending is “for” a candidate or “against” a candidate - I have no idea how one decides which is appropriate in the case of, say, contrast ads, but according to the salary expenditures in this data that type of decision is well above my pay grade)
| Spending | Dollars |
|---|---|
| President | |
| Opposing | $34,134,045 |
| Supporting | $419,996 |
| Not formally for or against | $1,100 |
| Senate | |
| Opposing | $1,005,250 |
| Supporting | $453,368 |
| Not formally for or against | $348,860 |
| House | |
| Opposing | $6,884,365 |
| Supporting | $6,484,795 |
| Not formally for or against | $2,601,803 |
When it comes to Senate races, really only one organization among the forty that have spammed me this cycle is doing any heavy lifting: End Citizens United alone is the only one making significant Senate investments, spending at least some in most of the competitive races, with about half of its Senate spending being to help Jon Tester (or attack Tim Sheehy) in Montana. Fully about $1m of the roughly $2m spent by these groups in Senate races came from End Citizens United expenditures in Montana. End Citizens United’s spending on Jon Tester’s behalf is about half of their total spending (besides the er, $5.6m they spend on salaries ). If you squint at the data, you too may arrive at some questions concerning why, say, California and New Jersey got more attention than Michigan, Nevada, or Wisconsin from these groups this cycle, but if you don’t squint the volume of contributions is so low to begin with it doesn’t even strike me as that crazy these groups might as well try and get an in with a candidate whose primary is their big election. This is all such a pittance in the grand scheme of things (we are apparently coming up on a $16 billion election cycle) it feels almost embarrassing this is the level of magnanimity these groups can show for their efforts. An entire cycle of relentless spamming has produced a pretty measly showing by these groups as of two weeks before the election.
Their House spending is similarly lopsided. While these groups made at least some investment in fully 153 districts, only 36 candidates in these races received more than $30,000 from these groups, and just nine House races received more than $100,000 from them - in races that typically cost about $3m apiece in total, often going several times higher than that in more contentious districts. Indeed, of the roughly $16m in spending in House races by these groups, Just four districts account for about 75 percent of all of these spam groups’ direct spending in Congressional races. About 46 percent went to NY-3 (about $7.4m), 14 percent went to OR-3 ($2.2m), 8 percent went to CA-22 ($1.3m), and 5 percent went to AZ-3 ($780k). Ballotpedia estimates that NY-3 incumbent Tom Suozzi has raised over $9m in total against a Republican opponent who has raised less than $1m in total.
That said, NY-3 is a fairly competitive district, rated at about D+2 by Cook. But this would make it one of just a handful of “competitive” (say, D+5 to R+5 PVI) races getting this kind of treatment. Excluding the top five, the average House candidate to get contributions from these groups got just $25,370 from these groups. Excluding the top twenty, the average House candidate who received contributions from spam PACs received just about $14,800 – or less than one percent of the average total cost of a House campaign. And with only 153 districts getting investments, these spam groups are outright ignoring two-thirds of the Congressional map.
But while that is defensible in a certain sense because most Congressional races aren’t competitive, competitiveness seems to have little to do with where these groups chose to make contributions. In addition to mostly only spending pittances in House races directly, it doesn’t seem like these groups are spending their money very strategically. About a third of their House spending went to districts with a PVI over D+10, suggesting their interests are probably more about buddying up to Democrats in safe enough districts that they are likely to accrue positions of power within the party moreso than it is about actually trying to win and expand Democratic political power. This chart shows the full distribution of contributions and transfers by these groups to House districts, plotted by the competitiveness of those districts. Here, the seats within the black dotted lines (those whose PVI is above R+5 and lower than D+5) would be ranked as “competitive.” The red blocks are seats with Republican incumbents, and the blue blocks are seats with Democratic incumbents. Bright blue blocks are the big fish.
And here’s the same chart minus the top four recipients. Minus those, the big recipients include OR-5 (D+2, with an R incumbent, and about $515k in contributions from these groups), NJ-8 (D+22, D incumbent, $501k), RI-1 (D+12, $440k), NY-1 (R+3 with an R incumbent, at about $200k), and NJ-3 (D+5 with a D incumbent, at $180k from these groups over the course of the cycle). In other words, these groups are targeting a couple of genuine pickup opportunities, but also extremely safe D seats where it is likely the incumbents will enjoy long careers during which to climb the party’s ranks. While these groups send cash to plenty of races in that R+5-D+5 competitive zone, the total volume of contributions within the competitive band is low, with a couple candidates running in D+30 or D+40 seats receiving about the same level of contributions as most of those running in R+1 or D+1 seats.
There is no denying that almost all of these groups are doing at least something to help Democrats win, including the comparatively efficient activity of helping campaigns in key swing districts. Even the relatively paltry spending these groups do in the Senate looks right ordinally speaking, with Montana getting the most attention followed by a basically tied second tier consisting of Arizona, Ohio, and Texas. Over 150 House candidates can say they owe at least some of their cash to at least one of these groups.
…But these groups didn’t exactly epitomize the fucking brand, did they?
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 pannicky, 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 projeny 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 psychological dead 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.