Bad News and Good News on the Fundraising Front

A new investigation shows how one Democratic firm has built a self-dealing nexus of shady PACs, while ActBlue, the fundraising powerhouse, finally takes some critical steps to police the ecosystem.

Sunday, political scientist Adam Bonica published an important investigation into Mothership Strategies, the Democratic fundraising firm that he described in his headline as “the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine.” Few people would disagree that Mothership and the various PACs it has helped spawn have exemplified the problem of all the unwanted and shrill emails and texts that bombard the inboxes and phones of anyone who has ever made a donation to a blue candidate or cause. I’m not the only journalist who has written multiple times about how much damage this approach is doing to the Democratic ecosystem; Pod Save America’s Dan Pfeiffer did an excellent post on this topic just last week.

[Perhaps this post is best read with some background music]

But Bonica went further, digging through Federal Election Commission filings going back a decade to map “a nexus of interconnected political action committees….that function[] primarily to funnel funds to Mothership.” The names of these PACs, he noted, are undoubtedly familiar to you, like End Citizens United, Progressive Turnout Project and Stop Republicans. They are voraciously good at extracting dollars from donors, but for many years that has been one of the main reasons their manipulative tactics have been tolerated if not embraced. But what Bonica documented is far more disturbing: by his count:

Since 2018, this core network of Mothership-linked PACs has raised approximately $678 million from individual donors. (This number excludes money raised by the firm's other clients, like candidate campaigns, focusing specifically on the interconnected PACs at the heart of this system.) Of that total fundraising haul, $159 million was paid directly to Mothership Strategies for consulting fees, accounting for the majority of the $282 million Mothership has been paid by all its clients combined.

But the firm's direct cut is only part of the story. The "churn and burn" fundraising model is immensely expensive to operate. Sending millions of texts and emails requires massive spending on digital infrastructure. For instance, FEC filings show this network paid $22.5 million to a single vendor, Message Digital LLC, a firm that specializes in text message delivery.

The remaining hundreds of millions disappeared into a maze of self-reported categories: $150 million to consulting/fundraising, $70 million to salaries and payroll. There are some disbursements to what seem to be legitimate advocacy and organizing–for instance Progressive Turnout Project reports paying Shawmut Services $19 million for canvassing. However, most of the unclassifiable expenditures appear to be administrative costs or media buys that feed back into the fundraising machine itself.

This led Bonica to a damning conclusion: that “at most, $11 million of the $678 million raised from individuals has made its way to candidates, campaigns, or the national party committees,” for a fundraising efficiency rate of just 1.6%.

Some people have pointed out that Bonica hasn’t included money that this nexus of PACs may have spent on independent expenditures on ads aimed to help candidates (or hurt their opponents). End Citizens United, for example, has put $23.7 million into such spending since its founding in 2016 (while donating $9.1 million to candidates or party committees), according to OpenSecrets.org. [UPDATE: End Citizens United is disputing these figures, saying they are much higher and go much further to help Democrats, so while I wait for detailed sourcing from them I’m striking this reference.] Progressive Turnout Project has spent $13.3 million; while donating $4.6 million to candidates or party committees, since its founding in 2015. Yes, these sums pale in comparison to $54 million those two groups alone have paid Mothership, according to Bonica’s reckoning, for a variety of consulting services—but they do improve the “fundraising efficiency” number from a truly damning 1.6% to perhaps something inching closer to 8 or 9 percent. (I’m not sure but I think the variation between what OpenSecrets counts as money given to candidates and what Bonica counted is due to him excluding money that didn’t come from individual donors.)

Still, Bonica’s finding is damning. In fact, it’s so ugly it prompted Mothership, which generally avoids talking to the media, to give the following statement to Pod Save America, which it included in its daily podcast on August 5:

“This Substack is completely inaccurate and contains numerous false and misleading claims about Mothership and our clients. The truth is that Mothership supports Democratic campaigns, PACS, issue advocacy organizations and more in raising critical funds. We have directly raised over $400 million for dozens of campaigns and member connected PAC clients. Further, a majority of the funds that are reported by the FEC is going to Mothership are pass through funds. The company actually pays to our clients’ other vendors, including advertising partners to support their programmatic work.”

The Pod Save America co-hosts were having none of it. As Tommy Vietor noted, while party leaders say “this works,” he commented, “they’re incredibly inefficient—an enormous amount of money goes in, but very little goes out to the causes.” And Jon Lovett added, “The cost is that this big group of hyper-engaged Democrats who have been funding the resistance for almost a decade now are exhausted and angry and mistrustful of this entire process.”

So why do so few people in Democratic politics talk about Mothership Strategies?

A veteran Democratic strategist once said to me that there are only two kinds of people that politicians really listen to: “The people who they get their money from, and the people they pay.” And here’s what you need to know about why Mothership has weathered all the complaints about its practices, at least until now. Too many Democrats pay it a lot of money. Eyeballing the FEC records for the more than 5,750 individual disbursements made to Mothership, here are some its biggest clients and what they paid the company:

• Jaime Harrison, the DNC chair until recently, paid it $16.5 million for his ill-fated 2020 Senate campaign.

• Jon Ossoff paid it $11.9 million.

• Congressional Hispanic Caucus: $16.9 million.

• Congressional Black Caucus: $6.1 million.

• House Majority PAC: $5.5 million.

• Congressional Progressive Caucus: $3.3 million.

But this is just half the picture. The other side is how much money Mothership and its nexus of PACs have funneled across the commanding heights of the Democratic ecosystem. [UPDATE: End Citizens United says that has had no relationship with Mothership since early 2023, which is confirmed by FEC records showing their last payment to them was in April of that year.] Even if, as Bonica points out, their “fundraising efficiency” is super-low, that matters little to every individual Democrat who got the maximum PAC donation of $10,000 from End Citizens United or every state Democratic party that got somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 sometime in the last two cycles. Chuck Schumer appreciates the $375,000 ECU gave the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee between 2019 and 2024. Nancy Pelosi and Hakeem Jeffries surely feel the same about the $347,000 it gave to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during those years. Who bites the hand that feeds them?

No one talks about all of this, other than a few journalistic scolds and a handful of ethical Democratic fundraising consultants worried about the rot and waste, because nearly everyone is getting something out of the status quo.

Brian Derrick, the founder of Oath.vote, had this to say about Bonica’s investigation:

Adam's analysis has been making waves in donor circles not because it is shocking but because it is completely believable. There has never been less transparency in who donors are being asked to support or how that funding is being used. The endless text and email demands from generically named entities signed by leaders with little to no relation to the group have eroded trust at the precise time that trust means the most. Our country is facing a crisis brought by anti-democratic forces but our party faces a crisis of our own making.

We created Oath because donors were tired of being treated like ATMs. We thoroughly vet every candidate and organization on the platform to screen for potential scam PACs and we have specifically looked for Mothership Strategies as part of that screening process. I am glad to see more people shedding light on the dubious practices of their clients but there are more in the space that aren't connected to Mothership. We will continue to advocate for donors who want to support causes and candidates of their choice and provide a safe space for them to do so without being barraged by more asks or having their data sold. If Democrats want to win back the trust of their most loyal supporters, they must do the same.

Now for some good news on this front

Yesterday, after years of ignoring or making excuses for the twin problems of scam- and spam-fundraising, ActBlue, the giant Democratic payment-processing platform, updated its account use policy in some critical ways. In an email to the thousands of entities that use ActBlue, CEO and President Regina Wallace-Jones said that starting August 20, it would take the following steps:

-It will bar “outside groups from using the name or likeness of any candidate, elected official, or organization in a way that falsely implies endorsement, affiliation, or authorization without documented written permission. Entities must not misleadingly suggest that donations will directly benefit specific individuals or entities without proper authorization, or misrepresent the destination or intended use of donor funds.”

-It will also prohibit “false claims in solicitations, including references to fake voting records, non-existent memberships, or unverified matching programs.”

She also said that ActBlue will, when warranted, “request statements showing how contributions have been used to advance [a group’s] stated mission” and it may demand documentation proving that a claimed matching program exists.

The reasons she gave for taking these steps shows that, finally, at long last, the complaints of more ethical fundraisers have gotten through. She wrote:

“We've all seen how excessive solicitations and aggressive fundraising tactics can drive donors away from our movement. When supporters feel bombarded or misled, they don't just unsubscribe from one organization—they often stop giving altogether. That's why we're establishing clearer standards for respectful donor engagement. If an entity becomes the subject of repeated donor complaints about excessive or aggressive solicitations, we'll investigate and work with them on corrective action. This isn't about policing every email, it's about addressing patterns of behavior that damage donor relationships across our ecosystem.”

Even better, ActBlue has set up a way to submit complaints if you think that someone is violating these policies. You can write to https://secure.actblue.com/contact and provide screenshots and relevant documentation, and a heretofore invisible “Evaluation Committee” will review and take action if deemed necessary.

These are good first steps. As Josh Nelson, who has led a scrappy effort to pressure ActBlue and other Democratic vendors at the nexus of the fundraising ecosystem, commented on LinkedIn, this is big news. But he noted that these changes fall short of what he and 140 other Democratic operatives asked ActBlue to do months ago, and that it remains unclear how strictly the platform will enforce its new rules. In particular, it’s unclear how ActBlue will handle complaints about “excessive or aggressive solicitations.”

The hard truth is that unless a lot of ordinary donors start complaining a lot to ActBlue, the incentives that have allowed the current abusive, extractive, manipulative and fundamentally corrosive system to become normalized will keep making change unlikely. Adam Bonica’s investigation of Mothership may be circulating widely now, but this isn’t the first time scam PACs and spammers have gotten media attention. When Lara Putnam and I wrote an oped for the New York Times about this three years ago, the piece got nearly a thousand supportive comments from people furious about the system. But the politicians, party committees and consultants that all profit from churning-and-burning the rest of us haven’t said a word about Bonica’s report, no doubt thinking, “this too shall pass.”

As Nick Nyhart, a veteran organizer who has toiled in these fields for a long time commented to me today, “I think Mothership pioneered the style of hard-edged and often misleading solicitations that raise funds and benefit consultant shops, but deliver long term negative consequences to voters, donors, and candidates. However, their take has been a small share of overall campaign money and the issues are much more systemic. There's a problem of the commons here, with misaligned incentives, a nearly free good (emails/texts), and a rising arms race in political spending fueled by limitless donations that are chump change for the richest people in the world.”

All true. But now, for the thousands and thousands of us who are sick of this problem, there’s something you can at least try to do about it: Write to ActBlue, document your complaint. And report back what they say!

In Other News

—Here’s the one thing to understand about the current fight over Texas’ attempt to re-district its Congressional map in the middle of the decade. Yes, both parties gerrymander to gain a partisan advantage after the U.S. Census gets updated every ten years. This is different, because Trump, our wannabe authoritarian, asked Texas to make the change in order to keep the GOP from losing control of the US House next year. It’s an explicit power-grab meant to prevent a popular majority of voters, who clearly disapprove of Trump, from converting that sentiment into power. Alex Shephard makes this case well in The New Republic.

—Yesterday was the 80^th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Garrett Graff’s oral history reconstruction of what the crew of the Enola Gay remembered makes for chilling, necessary reading. So do these oral histories of hibakusha, survivors of the bombing.

—Nearly 20 top Israeli security chiefs have released a group video (with English subtitles) insisting that it’s time to “end the war.” Meanwhile, over the opposition of the current IDF chief of staff, Netanyahu’s cabinet is voting today to fully occupy Gaza. When you think things can’t get worse in Israel/Palestine, they do.

My Latest Podcast

I used to be on the other side of most issues from Bill Kristol, who worked in both the Reagan and Bush (I) administrations. But now we’re on the same side when it comes to battling rising authoritarianism. So, believe it or not, it was fun talking with him for the latest episode of This Old Democracy, which you can listen to on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast fix.

End Times

Like a middle finger, indeed!