Adam Bonica is a Political Science professor at Stanford, and he had a hell of a time getting his essay about Democratic Spam PACS published. The New York Times, a well-known conservative media outlet, refused to publish it even though it was fact-checked, because the Elias Law Group, representing the DSCC and DCCC, sent a cease-and-desist. Similarly, the Republicans at the Bulwark refused to publish it unless it underwent a substantial re-write which removed much of the findings of the piece. So, Bonica published it himself, and it’s damning.
Bonica begins by using a couple of terrible examples of old people making an incredible amount of donations — in one case, a 91 year-old woman in senior living donated 25,000 times for a total of $250,000 in donations:
The most visible players in this ecosystem are what I call “spam PACs” — organizations that use high-volume digital fundraising firms to raise small-dollar contributions, only to sink a disproportionate share of those funds right back into fundraising.2 They are built on a common financial model: outsized spending on aggressive digital messaging that repeatedly extracts donations from a disproportionately elderly group of donors. But these tactics have spread throughout the party. Even the party’s own congressional campaign committees and some of its most senior leaders have embraced the spam.
Republicans went all-in on these tactics first and offer a cautionary tale. After flooding supporters’ phones with fundraising spam in recent election cycles, their grassroots donor base — the party supporters who occasionally give when something moves them, until the spam drives them off — has been hollowed out. Republicans raised less from small- and mid-sized donors in 2024, a presidential year, than in the 2022 midterms.
One of the key players is a group called Mothership Strategies. They’ve been “shunned” according to Politico, but they’ve re-formed as “End Citizens United.” Here are the bros in charge:
Bonica zeroes in on a another group of PACs connected to longtime Democratic fundraiser Harry Pascal. Here’s what he found:
The graph is kind of weird, but the net of it is that $70 million of $390 million raised went to doing anything other than fundraising, and it’s questionable what, exactly, the “organizing and turnout efforts” accomplished.
The spam PACs raise far more money from donors 65 and over than overall Democratic fundraising.
Bonica’s piece enumerates the many different (shitty) ways that these PACs use scare tactics to prey on older people. And they are definitely a tool of the Democratic institutionalists, as the example of Hakeem Jeffries shows:
In the 2018 election cycle, Jeffries had one of the youngest donor bases of any House Democrat, with an average donor age of 54 and only 21 percent of his donors 65 or older. When he became caucus chair in 2019, those numbers began to shift. By the 2026 election cycle, his average donor was 73, and 86 percent were 65 or older. Jeffries didn’t change his political positions in ways that would account for this shift; it was his role in the party that changed — and his fundraising strategy.
The whole thing is worth a read, and Jeffries has the power to blacklist these fundraisers. He just needs to use it, because they’re predatory and they’re killing the Democrats’ brand.
