Bluesky

The Democratic Party’s overlords are facing a multifront challenge to their authority, as their voting base has rallied behind outsider candidates and its Beltway leaders succumb to rote left-punching sloganeering. But one clear mandate still animates the party from on high: its fundraising operations shall not come under close critical scrutiny. 

That’s the glum conclusion political scientist Adam Bonica reached at the end of an aborted eight-month collaboration with the New York Times opinion section. As Bonica recounts in a pair of Substack entries, he launched a study based on individual contribution data from the Federal Elections Commission and Meta’s advertising library, showing that the main respondents to the obtrusive and incessant text-based fundraising appeals launched by Democratic-affiliated groups—which Bonica aptly characterizes as “Spam PACs”—are “overwhelmingly elderly, and [that] a surprisingly concentrated group of them accounts for the bulk of the money raised”:

Among the fundraising ads run by the largest spam PACs, between 70 and 85 percent of impressionsare delivered to users 65 and older, though people in that age band account for just 14 percent of Meta’s adult users in the United States, according to data published by Meta.

The FEC donation records, cross-referenced with the L2 national voter file, reveal a similar but even more pronounced skew. Less than 1 percent of all Democratic donors account for almost half of the $1.4 billion raised by spam PACs since 2017. Put more precisely, roughly 138,000 donors averaging 75 years of age have each donated to these PACs one hundred times or more. I call them “captive spam donors.”

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This data point is key because the basic come-ons floated by these fundraising outfits are alarmist, misleading, and deceptive. The idea behind them is clearly to cut through the onslaught of online donor pitches with an acute air of personalized urgency and/or peril. And like all fundraising appeals, these solicitations lean heavily on a sense of guilt. Bonica outlines how the sky-is-falling, quasi-bullying rhetoric that suffuses the industry verges on elder abuse: 

Whether or not those who operate this fundraising model recognize or intend it, fundraising spam runs on similar psychological levers to those that federal law enforcement and consumer-protection groups identify as hallmarks of elder financial exploitation: manufactured urgency, emotional appeals engineered to trigger guilt or fear, false exclusivity, fabricated account or profile statuses that look like official notices, and relentless pressure to give before there’s time to think. Why stamp “FINAL ATTEMPT” on a message and warn that “the deadline is just hours away” if not to manufacture urgency? Why claim that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Hakeem Jeffries have emailed you, then demand an answer to their “desperate pleas” if not to trigger guilt? Why warn that Social Security checks will be “SLASHED by $500/month?!” — up from the $460 in the email sent two days earlier — if not to stoke fear? Why tell someone they are “the only Democrat in your city who hasn’t responded” if not to single them out? Why announce a recipient’s “appointment to the Social Security Advisory Board” above a picture of a Social Security card if not to dress a solicitation as official business? Why the midnight deadlines, the countdown timers, the “400% MATCH” that applies only if you give right now, if not to force a decision before reflection can intervene?

Bonica’s findings are an extension of his earlier research into the Democrats’ sprawling Spam PAC complex, which found it to largely be a self-dealing boondoggle for the party’s consultant class. In breaking down the expenditures for the leading clearinghouses of spam fundraising appeals, Bonica found that out of some $670 million in donations, just $11 million wound up in the coffers of campaigns, national party committees, and individual candidates. The other $659 million stayed with the fundraising groups themselves. That works out, Bonica wrote, to “a fundraising efficiency rate of just 1.6 percent.”

His latest work detects an additional layer of cynical exploitation to this already skeevy shakedown operation that Bonica calls “heartbreaking.” In one instance, he writes, an 85-year-old Ohio retiree made 7,800 donations to Democratic-aligned fundraising shops, totalling more than $648,000—more than double the appraised value of his home. One 91-year-old Indiana woman in an assisted living facility made 25,000 $10 donations. 

But it turns out that Bonica’s bracing research is just part of the story here. The other dismaying saga concerns how a major investigation commissioned by The New York Times ended up as a Substack post. Bonica has devoted a separate post to that, and it makes for similarly bleak reading. 

The Times opinion section actually reached out to collaborate with Bonica on a data-heavy project after he published his first report on the Democratic Scam PAC network last year, and he pulled the elder-predation report together in close coordination with the section’s editors and researchers. But when Bonica and the Times reached out to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) and its sister Beltway operation, the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee (DSCC), they replied with a cease-and-desist letter threatening the paper with legal action if it proceeded to publish the story. Like many such documents, the letter was largely an exercise in smoke-blowing—it vigorously disputed the claim that both groups and their fundraising hirelings “targeted” elder donors, even though Bonica never made any such claims. A separate letter from the lawyers at Mothership Strategies—which is, as its name suggests, the largest player in the Democratic Spam PAC world, founded by a pair of former DCCC staffers—comically sought to refute Bonica’s finding that the prime tributary of donors skew above the age of 75 by citing research Bonica himself had earlier published with political scientist Jake Grumbach, which pegged the median age of donors in the 2020 cycle at a much lower 59. 

Yet the legal intimidation worked, even though the piece had been fact-checked four times, and a data journalist on staff had independently verified Bonica’s findings. After Bonica got confirmation from his editor that the piece was about to be scheduled, he was abruptly informed that the Times wouldn’t be publishing it after all.

The Paper of Record’s nonsensical rationale was that the piece was “too investigative” and “too authoritative” for the Opinion section—raising the question of why it devoted eight months of its own staff time to ensuring the piece’s investigative veracity, and suggesting that regular readers of the apercus of Bret Stephens and Tom Friedman would somehow be disoriented by confirmed reporting presented in convincing fashion. Bonica quotes an informal comment from another staffer at the paper that’s at least marginally less ludicrous, and probably much closer to the mark: After columnist Nick Kristof published a reported piece on the IDF’s sexual abuse of Palestinians in the war in Gaza, the Times opinion shop wasn’t going to court another “predictable headache.” (Bonica subsequently sought to get the piece published at The Bulwark, but that plan also fizzled out, thanks both to a fresh round of cease-and-desist letters from Spam PACs—-one of which cited the Times’ decision and advised, Mafia-style that “your publication should do the same”—and obtrusive edits that, in the author’s view, disfigured the point of the piece.) 

And so a major investigation into the predatory fundraising apparatus of a major political party has landed on Substack—while the newspaper that had originally commissioned it has since released a statement claiming that the piece had never been fully fact-checked, even though the author has a copious paper trail showing otherwise. In other words, the New York Times is now adopting the same anemic, ass-covering campaign targeting Bonica’s credibility that the Democratic campaign committees did, on the same apparent calculus: that other institutional onlookers won’t evince much interest in the actual record. That, regrettably, is why “all the news that’s fit to print” ranks somewhere close to “FINAL ATTEMPT” and “400 % MATCH” in the annals of public credibility.