Bluesky

The signs of the Democratic Party’s receding viability are legion, from its dismal approval numbers in opinion polls to its serial capitulations to the GOP on Capitol Hill. Yet one arm of the Democrats’ political operation is humming along: its nonstop fundraising appeals in e-mail inboxes and text-messaging accounts. These frenetic pitches are no doubt familiar to many Nation readers: They invoke some pending MAGA outrage, suggest the imminent collapse of the republic is nigh, and hit you up for a small donation. Many of them are couched in the voice of a prominent Democratic leader or candidate, introducing themselves by their first names and addressing the recipient in the same fashion, as though from a neighboring barstool. 

These ubiquitous pleas—known as “churn and burn” come-ons—are more than just a reflection of a panicking opposition party trying to stoke voter enthusiasm; they are, increasingly, the reigning business model of a Democratic establishment otherwise unable to effectively oppose the MAGA movement. And as a revealing investigation by political-spending sleuth Adam Bonica shows, these appeals are scams.

Bonica has combed through FEC filings to document the money flows generated by the Democrats’ largest private vendor for churn-and-burn appeals, Mothership Strategies, and found that most of the small donations kicked up in this fashion stay firmly in the orbit of the Democrats’ privately contracted fundraising complex. Of the $676 million that Mothership has raised since 2018, Bonica writes, $159 million went to Mothership’s own coffers as consulting fees. Other money streams are likewise far afield from campaign work: $70 million for Mothership’s payroll and $150 million for more consulting outlays. Most of these expanses, Bonica writes, “appear to be administrative costs or media buys that feed back into the fundraising machine itself.” Meanwhile, Mothership has its own hefty outlays for vendor support—one firm specializing in these pseudo-personalized text come-ons, Message Digital LLC, pulled in $22.5 million over the same period.

With all this dosh swirling around the Mothership’s orbit, the percentage of cash going into actual campaigns and Democratic electioneering organizations is vanishingly small. “My analysis of the network’s FEC disbursements reveals that, at most, $11 million of the $678 million raised from individuals has made its way to candidates, campaigns, or the national party committees,” Bonica writes. “This represents a fundraising efficiency rate of just 1.6 percent.”

That’s a stunning number—but as Bonica also notes, it arises from a classic set of self-dealing Beltway arrangements. Mothership was founded in 2014 by two veterans of the digital arm of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Greg Berlin and Charles Starnes, who simply took the churn-and-burn strategies they’d honed at the DCCC and converted them into proprietary assets as private contractors. And to keep the cash flowing in their direction, they also founded a host of plausibly goo-goo sounding satellite groups to authorize and circulate fresh torrents of fundraising asks. The partners thus “became the operational heart of a sprawling nexus of interconnected political action committees, many of which they helped create and which now serve as their primary clients,” Bonica notes:

These are not a diverse collection of grassroots groups; they are a tightly integrated network that functions primarily to funnel funds to Mothership. . . . The relationship between the firm and this network is cemented by blatant self-dealing.

A spokesperson for the firm disputes Bonica’s analysis, saying “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 as going to Mothership are pass through funds the company actually pays to our clients’ other vendors, including advertising partners, to support their programmatic work.”

Disputes over forensic accounting aside, this far-reaching grift is not something Democrats can afford, either financially or politically. The party’s fundraising efforts are already lagging behind the incumbent GOP heading into a midterm cycle. There’s a grim perversity in setting up money fronts with names like Stop Republicans when their actual effect is to leach desperately needed cash out of Democratic campaign operations; the financial logic here serves to achieve the opposite of those worthy goals.

And this is where the damage wrought by the Mothership empire goes beyond the financial hemorrhaging, as appalling as the scale of those losses are. To keep working, the churn-and-burn come-ons depend on Democrats’ having some trust in the party—and a fundraising complex that diverts donor cash away from the campaigns it professes to serve will only compound the party’s credibility crisis. After running in the last election cycle on the true and urgent case that Trump and the MAGA movement represent an existential threat to American democracy—and that Project 2025 aims to permanently enshrine the authoritarian agenda of the MAGA right in the most basic operations of government—Democrats have largely failed to counter these threats as they’ve come to gruesome life in Trump’s second term.

That’s been a devastating blow to the party’s image as it needs to persuade voters it can foreclose on another MAGA putsch next November. A new AP poll found that a third of Democrats queried about the state of the party responded negatively: “About 15 percent described it using words like ‘weak,’ or ‘apathetic,’” the survey found, “while an additional 10 percent believe it is broadly ‘ineffective’ or ‘disorganized.’” Meanwhile, “Republicans were about twice as likely to describe their own party positively.”

This enthusiasm gap broadly tracks the fundraising gap between the two parties—and the cynical donor shakedowns perpetrated by Mothership and its satellite groups feed the perception that Democrats fundraise off crises rather than respond to them. As Bonica writes, the political impact of the Mothership grift is that “for every dollar a grandmother in Iowa donates believing she’s saving democracy, 98 cents goes to consultants and operational costs.” And the party’s recent congressional record—from Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s disastrous capitulation to the GOP in last winter’s budget showdown to the Democrats’ dismal support for the brutal immigration crackdowns in the Laken Riley Act and the crypto-bribery provisions of the GENIUS Act—reflects an approach to the party’s base that’s at least as cynical as a churn-and-burn fundraising pitch.

If the Democratic Party wants to be taken seriously as the answer to an unhinged and increasingly unpopular MAGA governing agenda, it needs to nuke the Mothership and start acting like an actual opposition party.

This post has been updated with a comment from Mothership spokesperson.