{"id":865,"date":"2026-08-17T18:12:48","date_gmt":"2026-08-17T18:12:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=865"},"modified":"2026-08-17T18:12:48","modified_gmt":"2026-08-17T18:12:48","slug":"democrats-really-really-really-dont-want-people-investigating-their-scammy-fundraising","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=865","title":{"rendered":"Democrats Really, Really, Really Don’t Want People Investigating Their Scammy Fundraising"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The Democratic Party\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Read more Trump\u2019s Loose Grip on Reality Could Sink the Navy\u2019s Ships<\/a><\/p>\n

That\u2019s the glum conclusion political scientist Adam Bonica reached at the end of an aborted eight-month collaboration with the New York Times<\/em> 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\u2019s advertising library, showing that the main respondents to the obtrusive and incessant text-based fundraising appeals launched by Democratic-affiliated groups\u2014which Bonica aptly characterizes as \u201cSpam PACs\u201d\u2014are \u201coverwhelmingly elderly, and [that] a surprisingly concentrated group of them accounts for the bulk of the money raised\u201d:<\/p>\n

\n

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\u2019s adult users in the United States, according to data published by Meta.<\/p>\n

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 \u201ccaptive spam donors.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

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:\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n

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\u2019s time to think. Why stamp \u201cFINAL ATTEMPT\u201d on a message and warn that \u201cthe deadline is just hours away\u201d if not to manufacture urgency? Why claim that Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and Hakeem Jeffries have emailed you, then demand an answer to their \u201cdesperate pleas\u201d if not to trigger guilt? Why warn that Social Security checks will be \u201cSLASHED by $500\/month?!\u201d \u2014 up from the $460 in the email sent two days earlier \u2014 if not to stoke fear? Why tell someone they are \u201cthe only Democrat in your city who hasn\u2019t responded\u201d if not to single them out? Why announce a recipient\u2019s 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 \u201c400% MATCH\u201d that applies only if you give right now, if not to force a decision before reflection can intervene?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Bonica\u2019s findings are an extension of his earlier research into the Democrats\u2019 sprawling Spam PAC complex, which found it to largely be a self-dealing boondoggle for the party\u2019s 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 \u201ca fundraising efficiency rate of just 1.6 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more From Urban Housing to Rural Nursing Homes, the Working-Class Fight to Protect Public Goods From Private Buyers<\/a><\/p>\n

His latest work detects an additional layer of cynical exploitation to this already skeevy shakedown operation that Bonica calls \u201cheartbreaking.\u201d 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\u2014more than double the appraised value of his home. One 91-year-old Indiana woman in an assisted living facility made 25,000 $10 donations.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But it turns out that Bonica\u2019s bracing research is just part of the story here. The other dismaying saga concerns how a major investigation commissioned by The New York Times<\/em> ended up as a Substack post. Bonica has devoted a separate post to that, and it makes for similarly bleak reading.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Times<\/em> 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\u2019s editors and researchers. But when Bonica and the Times<\/em> 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\u2014it vigorously disputed the claim that both groups and their fundraising hirelings \u201ctargeted\u201d elder donors, even though Bonica never made any such claims. A separate letter from the lawyers at Mothership Strategies\u2014which is, as its name suggests, the largest player in the Democratic Spam PAC world, founded by a pair of former DCCC staffers\u2014comically sought to refute Bonica\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s findings. After Bonica got confirmation from his editor that the piece was about to be scheduled, he was abruptly informed that the Times<\/em> wouldn\u2019t be publishing it after all. <\/p>\n

The Paper of Record\u2019s nonsensical rationale was that the piece was \u201ctoo investigative\u201d and \u201ctoo authoritative\u201d for the Opinion section\u2014raising the question of why it devoted eight months of its own staff time to ensuring the piece\u2019s 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\u2019s at least marginally less ludicrous, and probably much closer to the mark: After columnist Nick Kristof published a reported piece on the IDF\u2019s sexual abuse of Palestinians in the war in Gaza, the Times <\/em>opinion shop wasn\u2019t going to court another \u201cpredictable headache.\u201d (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\u2014-one of which cited the Times<\/em>\u2019 decision and advised, Mafia-style that \u201cyour publication should do the same\u201d\u2014and obtrusive edits that, in the author\u2019s view, disfigured the point of the piece.)\u00a0<\/p>\n

And so a major investigation into the predatory fundraising apparatus of a major political party has landed on Substack\u2014while 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<\/em> is now adopting the same anemic, ass-covering campaign targeting Bonica\u2019s credibility that the Democratic campaign committees did, on the same apparent calculus: that other institutional onlookers won\u2019t evince much interest in the actual record. That, regrettably, is why \u201call the news that\u2019s fit to print\u201d ranks somewhere close to \u201cFINAL ATTEMPT\u201d and \u201c400 % MATCH\u201d in the annals of public credibility.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Read more The Dignifying Solution to America\u2019s Care Crisis<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Nation Magazine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":864,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"\nDemocrats Really, Really, Really Don't Want People Investigating Their Scammy Fundraising - Atlas Living Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=865\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Democrats Really, Really, Really Don't Want People Investigating Their Scammy Fundraising - Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Nation Magazine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=865\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Atlas Living Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-08-17T18:12:48+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=865#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=865\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/f6233854b1f92a6d21147fe5d5e58abc\"},\"headline\":\"Democrats Really, Really, Really Don’t Want People Investigating Their Scammy Fundraising\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-08-17T18:12:48+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=865\"},\"wordCount\":1363,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=865#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/08\\\/9a2b18e700586c9276e4fd5ae42bf663.jpg\",\"articleSection\":[\"Politics\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=865#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=865\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/atlaslivingmedia.com\\\/?p=865\",\"name\":\"Democrats Really, Really, Really Don't Want People Investigating Their Scammy Fundraising - 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