Pod Save America - Why are Fundraising Texts SO Annoying?

Episode Date: May 18, 2025

Are you tired of incessant, unhinged Democratic fundraising texts and emails? Well, so are we. Tommy sits down with three experts in the party's digital fundraising space to talk about how this model became the norm, why it may be hurting Democrats more than it helps, and how that campaign — you know the one — got your cell phone number. Blue State Digital founder Joe Rospars joins to diagnose the problem, our own Dan Pfeiffer weighs in on its impact, and ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones explains why Democrats rely on the tactic and lays out what we stand to lose if Trump's attacks against her organization succeed. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

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Again, that's promo code crooked for an additional 50% off your first order plus free shipping at smalls.com. I want to read you the opening lines of a couple of fundraising texts I got. These are mostly real, but some may be made up and I want to see if you can spot the fake one. Sure. Family. It's Cory Booker.

It's one. Two, we're about to shock Susan Collins. Three, Tommy, I'm gay and I need your help. Four, and this one I believe is supposed to be sung. Lately, I've been losing sleep about the future of our country, Tommy. Fine. Number five, friend, I don't mean to sound dramatic, but our democracy is about to burn to the fucking ground. My ass is literally on fire, RN. This is Chuck Schumer, by the way.

Which of those do you think is real? ["Pod Save America"] Welcome to Pod Save America, I'm Tommy Vitor, and this episode is about something everyone hates. Fundraising emails and fundraising texts. Even if you've made only one political donation in your life, your contact information can get thrown into some database that leads to endless streams of unhinged fundraising solicitations. But this problem is bigger than it just being kind of weird when Hakeem Jeffries won't stop sending you selfies. It could actually undermine one of the few advantages

that Democrats have over Republicans, which is grassroots fundraising success. In 2024, Kamala Harris raised about 40% of her money from small dollar donors, while Trump raised less than 29% of his. And according to an analysis by the Center for Campaign Innovation, in the first three months of 2025, House Democrats have raised about twice as much on average from donors giving under $200. The Democratic Party's advantage with small dollar donors is even bigger over in the Senate. But if we drive those donors away by annoying them, or worse, by exploiting them, that fundraising

advantage will evaporate. So in today's episode, I'm going to explore the world of online fundraising, how it got so bad, why texting stop never seems to make the messages stop, the political risk for the Democratic Party, and the critical role that ActBlue plays in our fundraising success and how Republicans are trying to destroy it. You're gonna hear from three experts in this digital media world.

Crooked Media Zone Dan Pfeiffer, Regina Wallace-Jones, the CEO of ActBlue, and Joe Rosepars, the CEO of BlueState Digital and a longtime digital strategist. We're gonna start with my conversation with Joe about how online fundraising has evolved the explosion of awful fundraising texts and what a better approach to small dollar fundraising could look like. So Joe, you've worked for a bunch of different candidates, Howard Dean, Barack Obama, Elizabeth

Warren. How has your job evolved over time, the job of a digital strategist? Well, increasingly the job of the digital strategist is more and more parts of the campaign. So when we first worked together back in 2007 for Barack Obama, we really had to have three brains, right? You would have morning with the comms team, you'd have afternoon with the field organizers

and political folks, and then in the evening, you'd have afternoon with the field organizers and political folks. And then in the evening, you'd be chasing the finance folks to be handling the grassroots part of it. And so I think the job now is actually the whole campaign, right? So I think I was the first one to be chief strategist for a campaign like coming from a digital background for Warren in 2020. And what we've seen is that the model for the organization of the campaign has changed as every part of the campaign has become digital. It's funny to think that I think your job title

was like head of new media right now, just media. That's the whole ball game. Do you have a sense generally of how much money democratic campaigns are raising from big donors versus grassroots online fundraising these days? It depends on the campaign, like safe incumbents will have, you know, there are sort of rounds of checks that come in. There are different candidates and campaigns that are almost exclusively grassroots based. That's something that candidates can change as they move up the ladder, run for different levels of office.

So for presidential campaigns in 2020, Elizabeth Warren decided not to spend time selling access to the candidate, right? So not calling rich people on the phone or having private big donor events to fund the primary campaign. And that was something that was a risk at the time, but she was able to become the first-time

presidential candidate ever to get to a million donors by focusing on the grassroots. And so even when it's tough, you're in a competitive primary, you can make these choices, but also donors reward the choices that you make about how you raise your money. Yeah, for sure. I mean, that's true for Obama. In 2008, we didn't take any PAC money, any lobbyist money. People thought that might be stupid or risky. But I think the messaging that comes with that kind of,

let's be honest, like bare minimum campaign finance step you can take personally is pretty important. So the big question behind this episode is why the hell am I getting so many text messages from candidates, and why can't I get them to stop? So I was hoping to start with some basics. So when I donate to a candidate, what happens with my data? Unfortunately, the answer depends, right?

Because your data is, you've signed up, right, for the campaign's email list. If you gave your phone number, you're probably going to get SMS from them. But a campaign, especially one that loses or for a candidate who's not gonna be running for office anytime soon again, that turns in, your data turns into a way

to retire campaign debt and for consultants to sell it on to the next person. So basically, the campaigns can log your data, put it into a file and then sell that to other political candidates, or I guess PACs or organizations? Yep. So I think that's the part that frustrates people,

because you end up getting these fundraising texts from candidates you've never heard of, from PACs you've never heard of or never given to. Is it also getting scraped from FEC data or information that we sort of put into the system writ large when we just vote or register to vote? In theory, you're not supposed to scrape the FEC data in order to do fundraising, where the FEC data gets scraped by a voter file company

gets, you know, gets passed on and reformatted into some, you know, the data finds its way to places and for purposes that's not really the intention. But it's also just campaigns straight up making their data available to a brokerage of likely donor, likely democratic supporter, et cetera, data. And so it's the model where, unfortunately, where we are right now is that the digital experience of email and SMS has the market around your data has come to look like the direct mail market, where there are just these lists being passed around by different shops and people just blast away at it. So the consulting firm or the mail house or data data firm makes money. And you get bombarded with lots of texts and emails.

And they don't even really need it to have a high response rate. Right? As long as you get a couple, it's cheap to do and then you're off to the races and doing this thing. The problem with it, though, is that obviously, it's a terrible experience for the end user of the donors. And it doesn't actually build a good file for your campaign because you might have somebody respond to an initial message, but if they're not in your district, they're not following your race, they're not actually part of a community that you're building around your campaign, they're not likely to give again.

And what happens is that even donations that you get in, in that first sort of wave of a mass of prospecting, you wind up with a lot of unsubscribes with a lot of people who don't ever give again. Right, and I guess that's probably why it feels like to a lot of people, you can reply stop every day for the rest of your life, and you're still gonna remain on some list,

probably because your data is just getting sold over and over and over again. Yeah, you're replying stop to that campaign, and usually they'll follow your request to stop, but the consultant that put your data in that campaign's file is obviously not going to stop. Can you explain what a scam pack is and how it works? There are operatives who run shops that produce mail

or digital services or technology or data, and they set up packs that look like they're gonna do something, right, to help Democrats win or this kind of Democrat or fight on this issue, and really what happens is it becomes a self-licking ice cream cone for the consultant. So it's raising money, but spending basically all of its money on raising the money for the consultants

and operatives who set it up. You're right. It's really awful. And also, I mean, I think there have been instances, I believe, of candidates who basically seemed like their entire campaign was predicated on running against Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, or some Republican in like an R plus 30 district. And then this person runs and they raise a ton of money online. And you come to realize that, oh, actually, that money is going into, let's say, a marketing firm that they actually own and operate. Yeah, there are cases where that's the candidate.

There are cases, though, also where the candidate is making choices to run a very high overhead fundraising program that they don't, I don't, not every candidate needs to or should be an expert in fundraising practices, but a lot of times you can have campaigns that get taken for a ride and wind up paying a considerable portion of their overhead to the to the consultants. Can you explain what peer to peer texting is and whether you think that has contributed to this increase in text message fundraising requests?

Peer to peer texting is when you have a group of volunteers, right, who are willing to do something for you. You provide them a software tool where they can log in and send pre-filled out texts to a pre-selected list of voters or prospective donors or whatever that is. And it is something that, like if a campaign doesn't wanna necessarily get tagged, or an organization doesn't necessarily want to get tagged with you knowing where the message is coming from, per se, or if they are engaged in practices around the lists that they've uploaded, that wouldn't pass muster for the text that they send from their shortcode, you know, like their five digit number that is the official campaign thing, You might find that in peer to peer text. Peer to peer text is came up as an organizing tool to help voters reach out to people in their community or people that they knew and is definitely a key part of running a big grassroots campaign. But in the hands of grifty

operatives, it can also be a key part of why you're getting bombarded so badly. And I think that's what's so frustrating about this, right? It's because I think peer to rifty operatives can also be a key part of why you're getting bombarded so badly. And I think that's what's so frustrating about this, right? It's because I think peer-to-peer texting or text-based communications started as a really great way to remind people to vote or to get registered to vote. And now it's being taken over by this fundraising piece of the political pie, and it feels like it's ruining it. Yeah. And maybe I'm just old school, but our clients and campaigns and organizations we work with at BlueState don't send unsolicited SMS

or email. It's just not the way to build a strong, healthy program over the long period. And the biggest, most successful programs over long periods of time don't engage in these practices. Yeah. I wanna read you the opening lines of a couple of fundraising texts I got.

These are mostly real, but some may be made up and I want to see if you can spot the fake one. Sure. Family, it's Cory Booker. It's one. Two, we're about to shock Susan Collins. Three, Tommy, I'm gay and I need your help. Four, and this one I believe is supposed to be sung.

Lately I've been losing sleep, losing sleep about the future of our country, Tommy. Number five, friend, I don't mean to sound dramatic, but our democracy is about to burn to the fucking ground. My ass is literally on fire, RN. This is Chuck Schumer, by the way. Which of those do you think is real? You know, I think a lot of people would love to have

that level of energy from our Senate Democratic leader, but I think the last one is probably the biggest one. Yeah, you nailed it. Why do they include these creepy photos? Why is the tone so completely unhinged? Is that effective? I mean, if you think about the version on the Republican side, on the Republican side, the grassroots fundraising is distilled to its most grifty concentrate, because they just don't need that money, right? Like the Republican financing operation is so brazenly corrupt, that all of the grassroots fundraising is really just about tricking older folks into entering their credit card information that is being auto charged every month month and they don't know or check. And that's the end state of where it's going

for these kinds of messages that you're seeing. And so it's both a annoyance and it makes the fundraising harder for people that are trying to do fundraising for important races and meaningful causes, but it's also just a content problem, right? Like people's perception of what the political conversation is, what democratic messaging is,

what is important and needs to be emphasized and lifted up is all distorted by whatever the 0.001 response rate taking up to, you know, adding a thousandth of a percent to that. Right, right, what's a little bit more effective. Do you think the candidates themselves have become aware of how much people hate these messages and how much they annoy them? I think people say things to candidates about the email and SMS that they get.

But the reality is that unless it's a presidential campaign, you as a candidate likely won't encounter most of the people getting these messages. Because like you, I get all these messages and none of them are for anybody running in my district or usually even in my state. And so you're not gonna bump into these people unless you're on a plane or something, right?

You're not gonna bump into any of the people who your campaign is aggravating. Yeah. So the annoyance we all feel with fundraising texts used to be the annoyance we all felt with fundraising text used to be the annoyance we all felt with fundraising emails. Is that the email issue abated because of spam filters becoming so effective?

I just feel like people don't, it's like I don't even notice them anymore. Yeah, the email inbox is a more regulated place, right? By Gmail or by whatever other service you use. And so things get sorted out. There's also still an ongoing war of round deliverability. And so the more of these bad practices that you engage in in email,

the worse your email will perform in terms of getting to the people who actually signed up and want it. And so there is a kind of balance to the economy of how email works, even though people are still doing a bunch of these practices, especially in the scam pack and like organizational area. So I mean, when you when I press people, you know, friends who have worked on campaigns

or people the DNC on this issue, they're like, we know, we know these messages suck, they're annoying. But one of the only advantages we have as Democrats is a better grassroots fundraising program and base. And if the money from these text-based messages went away, we would have less resources, we'd lose campaigns. So they feel like they're kind of stuck. Is that bullshit? Yeah, it's pretty much bullshit The the cost of doing business in the bad way is higher than doing business the right way and building your campaign in your organization from the bottom up ethically with consent and people opting in. And the idea that we have to do things that

people hate in order to run campaigns is not limited to fundraising, right? And it's really toxic and something that needs to go. Like we don't have to make shitty TV ads that people hate. We don't have to have organizational cultures run by really aggro awful people managers with a bunch of HR problems in campaign organizations. There are lots of things about campaigns that people excuse in the name of

winning or fundraising or whatever. And I think there are enough examples now going back to us piloting certain things with Obama, Warren, Bernie, AOC, others that you really can make different choices and have a campaign be something good that people enjoy their experience with. And by the way, that's better for the brand, right? That's better for the party. That's better for the organization you're building. That's better for the campaign organization that will be left over when the campaign is over. Because too often a campaign, especially presidential campaigns, you wind up, whether you win or lose, it's still just an empty parking lot full of garbage, right, that the carnival left town. And if you're trying to actually build a relationship with people who want to do something, want to help you govern,

who want to help you get other people elected like them, that's a much more powerful thing politically to do. And also, it helps that you are most able to do that by doing it the right way. I like that the metaphor of a parking lot full of garbage after a carnival is an excellent one for a losing campaign. People listening are probably like, okay, I'm angry. Who should I be mad at? Who are these consultants? Is it a bunch of them? Is it a few bad actors? Like how do we think about that? There are a few actors that are the worst, but unfortunately, it's quite prevalent. Like there, there's very few of us, like Blue State who are not engaged in these practices and trying to help campaigns build for the long term

build the right way campaigns and organizations and party committees and things like that. And so, you know, I would give people that give the campaigns that you care about the feedback when they are treating you in a way that you don't like. But also, I think there's room here for some institution or media outlet or organization to assign itself the task of basically consumer protection here, right? If some party committee or media outlet decided that they wanted to solicit all of the complaints for unsolicited text messages and emails and stuff that grassroots donors on the Democratic side are receiving, you could report out like the worst actors

on a campaign basis. You could go do the investigation to find out what vendors they're paying that result in these massive spikes in complaints. So I think there is a way to get at this that doesn't require like government intervention or the DNC shutting people off of the voter file or whatever. I think surfacing it and making it a little bit more transparent, you know, would help campaigns and organizations make better decisions. That is a really good idea. And I think you speak to the need for someone

who really knows what they're doing to kind of vet these things because you get all these requests and you can, you try to like, sometimes I'll like get a forward from my father-in-law who's like a great human being, a great Democrat, he'll be like, should I donate to this thing? And I'll try to like run it down for him. And it takes me forever.

You go to a website, I go to the FEC page, I try to Google the people associated with it. It's almost impossible to actually vet a lot of these packs and organizations that are just bombarding people. Yeah, and I think it would be a great service to grassroots donors everywhere to just aggregate where people are seeing these spikes in complaints and these activities to the point where

if you actually had it wired up and enough people bought into that, you would actually see things happen in real time and maybe be able to stop them and call it out. Today's episode is sponsored by Acorns. What's the best piece of money advice you ever got? Put it in the mattress. Put it right.

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Head to acorns.com slash crooked or download the Acorns app to get started. Paid non-client endorsement, What's sort of the gist of a better way to run a railroad that raises money and like resources candidates appropriately, but doesn't feel annoying or at worst predatory? Yeah, you don't have to just sit around and wait for people to come to your website and sign up for your email or SMS, right? Like there is paid media, right? And that's something where if you invest in, and by the way, good for the brand, good for everybody, invest in progressive and democratic media outlets and invest in the

sponsorship of content that aligns with your worldview, that's where your potential donors are, right? So there are ways to go out into the media environment in so many ways and so many platforms investing in organizations of all sizes from the guardian US where, you know, my wife works, but like down to individual creators who are just trying to sponsor, you know, their ability to do that work part time on top of whatever else they do. There are lots of places to go to find the people you want to give to your campaign and frankly better ways to make a connection with them than an unsolicited message that's annoying them at the dinner table.

Yeah. Trump has directed the Department of Justice to investigate ActBlue, which is the biggest fundraising platform for Democrats. How important do you think ActBlue is for the Democratic Party and what do you think it would mean if the DOJ made it go away somehow? I think we have to say at the top of this that obviously any politically charged investigation

is illegal and shouldn't happen and is awful and not something that we should accept as normal and discuss as like, oh, what are the politics outcomes for this? I feel really a know, really a lot of sympathy for the folks who are putting in the hard work at ActBlue. It's essentially a public utility for democratic campaigns, especially the campaigns that are the smallest and need to get their infrastructure up and going. It's a turnkey option for people who are just starting out their campaign

to try to do anything in the electoral process. And yeah, it shouldn't be taken lightly that they're a target. After the 2024 election, a bunch of democratic operatives and fundraisers sent a letter to the leader of ActBlue demanding that they make some changes to the way their service works. Like the biggest asks were getting rid of messages that trick donors into believing they were giving to an official party

entity when they were not, or that their donation would be matched somehow by someone. Do you think that letter went far enough? And what responsibility do you think ActBlue has in this kind of conversation we're having about fundraising sucking for the end user? Well, I think if you're going to be in the position where you are a public utility and for all intents and purposes, kind of a monopoly on the thing, you have a different kind of level of responsiveness that you need to bring to the conversation when you're in a sense, the only game in town. And so I think there's more stuff that they could be doing. I really hope that the investigation and illegal targeting of them is not so much of a distraction that all the other work isn't prioritized to help improve the

ecosystem around democratic campaigns and fundraising. But it's really up to all of us as donors to make sure that the organizations we give to are behaving ethically and rewarding those who do behave ethically. And then hopefully some actors around get together and help change the gravitational pull of this system a little bit. As we go into the next cycles. This might be a dumb question. But do you think it's possible for a campaign to raise too much money? Yes, it is especially problematic when campaigns that are having a great moment and make decisions about their budget around the money that they're raising right now encounter a moment where

that slows, you wind up chasing, right? And I think this is something that we've seen in different primaries and general elections over the last few cycles. And it's something where if you have internally given your fundraising team or your fundraising team has accepted a goal of X and they see that they're not, they're only going to get to 80% of X. A lot of campaigns don't have enough of a checks and balances on their strategy for fundraising and how it connects to their actual budget and money spent, that you wouldn't

actually have people go out and try to spend $1.20 to raise $1 to hit a goal number. And a lot, and not that people would even necessarily do that intentionally, but just because of how you've instrumented your system of where you spend money to raise it, you are over predicting what the dollar you spend to bring in a dollar of donation is going to be. And so you wind up holding the bag at the end. And so in a sense, you have spent too much money to raise too much money. You should have just settled for raising slightly less money. That's a really good point.

I think I bet a lot of people don't realize how much money gets spent in pursuit of fundraising. I guess a lot of listeners to this show, I bet like 90% of listeners to Pod Save America have given to a candidate at some point, and they just wanna feel like that money is going to a good cause or being well spent or just like not getting abused in some way.

Do you have advice for people about kind of like a couple best practices around donations to politics generally? I think if you're talking about campaigns specifically investing in the candidates who are giving their time to you is a good filter for me. So candidates who are spending time speaking with you and producing content for you that isn't asking you for money is an important part of the equation, right?

And so if you see a candidate who's spending time engaging grassroots folks in ways that are about more than money and fundraising, that it's about organizing, that it's about policy, that it's about narrating what's going on in the campaignating what's going on in the campaign or what's going on in politics. Generally, those are the campaigns that usually are going to be good and in good places to go. I think also folks who are, you know, building

organization on the ground, like, it is not easy to be a field organizer, as you know, from all these years ago, it is not a lucrative thing to go work on a campaign as, as you know, from all these years ago, it is not a lucrative thing to go work on a campaign as you're as an early job or even as a job later in life, if you're taking a break from whatever else you're doing. The difference between being able to hire one more person, to just scratch out like a good busy work week for a campaign is such a big deal, and just not that much money in the scheme of things. And so folks who are hiring and doing real organizing on the ground, those are the campaigns that I, you know, would give the extra dollar to.

Yeah, that's a really good point. I mean, and that's a reason to donate early, right? Because that money could be invested in hiring a field staff and not dumping money on TV ads that may or may not work. Campaigns and candidates are living and dying by what they can predict they're gonna be able to spend. And so when you have these moments, even though it's not, well, it's an election year here in New Jersey, but even though it's not an election year,

for Congress or for Senate yet, the sooner you give and the more times you give to a candidate that's doing something that you believe in, it's so much signal, right, to that campaign to invest more in what they're doing that got to you that made you inspired. But also that to give them the confidence to build and hire that next organizer, or build out the open one more campaign office in order to build out, you know, earlier and better for the election that's going to be next year. So like this is sometimes it feels like you're sort of on the receiving end of like a kind of the bank teller, you know, machine opens up and it's like, okay, here's this fundraising email, and then everybody goes away inside. But like, they're

really watching and making decisions based on whether you gave today how much you gave how many times you get like all that stuff is getting extrapolated by good campaigns to make their bets about how they can best win. So I would encourage everybody to, you know, when you're feeling it, give to the give to the folks you love. Anything else you want to share? The grift on the Republican side is like, you know, I find that Democrats were not often not talking enough about these things that are like fixable. And when we're engaged in our self critique, it's a lot of your, you know, things that aren't necessarily fixable, and are just the way they are. So I think this is one where we can do things we can see on the other side what it looks like when it's like really bad and there is no

grassroots component to how campaigns are run or responsiveness to ordinary people. And so we should do some things and try to make this problem less of a problem. Yeah, agreed. And it does feel fixable. And just to just to nail a point you were making about the grift on the Republican side, I have this kind of faint memory of, I think Donald Trump sending out an email ostensibly for like Herschel Walker, but 90% of the funds actually went to his PAC. And then sometimes you're automatically opted in for a recurring donation.

And sometimes those recurring donations continue after election day. So it is just a shocking extraction of money, usually from their most elderly voters and supporters. So it is really as gross as it is, you can feel on our side, it is worse over there. Yes. And there's data to back that up. I think there were consumer complaints to the FEC and others. There's just so many more on the Republican side. And that's bad too, right? I guess. I don't want them to be more effective grassroots fundraisers, but we have a ways

to go before it's quite as bad as them, but we should fix what we can. Yeah, I don't want them to be more effective at raising money, but I also like, I don't want broad swaths of the most committed political activists on both sides to feel like the entire system is a grift that is rigged against them and is designed to harm them. I feel like that's just bad for our body politic and helps enable people like Donald Trump. Joe, thank you so much for doing this. This is fascinating.

I'm really grateful. Yeah, thanks. Great to be here. We'll be right back with my conversation with Dan. But as you guys know, we are trying to build an independent progressive media company. And the best way you can support our work is by subscribing to the Friends of the Pod.

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That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash crooked to get free shipping and 365 day returns, quince.com slash crooked. Here's my conversation with Dan about his concern that these fundraising tactics are worse than just annoying, that they could actually hurt the Democratic Party. All right, Dan, so everybody hates fundraising emails, we hate fundraising texts, but you have said before that you think this is a bigger issue than it just being annoying and that the fundraising tactics could actually hurt our candidates or the party itself. Why is that?

Well, I think it's important to sort of take a step back and recognize how the process actually works on campaigns. But like every campaign exists only till election day. They care about nothing that happens after that. So they burn their list to the ground to reach there. They don't care. Cause if you lose, your list is worth nothing. Right.

And so if you win and you have to sort of rebuild trust with your list, that's a high-class problem. And so they send more, all their goal is to reach their fundraising goal. And they get more desperate, more alarmist and the hard part for, and more frequent, right? And they only think about the single, their donors they're going to get.

They never think about, it's not their job to think about, the fact that the people who are on their list, either because they signed up or more likely because some firm they use bought their number from some other list or bought their email from some other list, are on 50 other lists or a hundred other lists. And they're getting every email and every text. And you don't know if you're just an average person, you don't have no

idea which are from the DNC or Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, or your member of Congress and which are from some sketchy scam pack that's just trying to take your money. And so all you get the sense, the democratic party writ large is just bombarding you with insane communications for money. And it, it dries out the list. It turns people off. They're often they are, you know, they're trying to just like solve a specific problem.

Like I'll give you an example. The DNC has had to raise money since the 2024 election. I, because I was a monthly donor for a very long time to first the Biden and the Harris campaign, I have gotten in the months after the election, it's been a while since then, but the months after the election, I was repeatedly getting fundraising texts from Kamala Harris asked me to raise money for the DNC. Just think about how frustrating that is right after the party, because they have a budget goal and they're trying to reach it. What makes it even worse and even more complicated is you have fundraising consultants who get paid

based on the amount of money they raise. In some cases, it usually doesn't happen with like a presidential campaign or anything like that, but with some of these smaller campaigns or some of these PACs. And so they're so aggressive and it just, it leaves a bad taste in everyone's mouth. I'm sure all the people in your life

are constantly complaining to you. Is there anything you can do? When I was in the White House, people asked me all the time how they get off the list. And they would show me emails and texts that weren't from Barack Obama or the DNC. They were from other groups. But because it's just a Democrat asking another Democrat for money,

it wears bad on the whole party. Yeah, and another piece of this is that, you know, text-based communications is a great way to communicate with people because people actually open their texts and they read their texts. But we're only doing it with fundraising now. that text-based communications is a great way to communicate with people because people actually open their texts and they read their texts. But we're only doing it with fundraising now.

What's a better way for campaigns to leverage that high open rate for a political advantage, do you think? Well, I think the hard part is that we have really ruined the use of, text was great for a brief period of time, and now it's been so abused that it's very hard to distinguish in your political texts now, what would be a real, an ask for to be a volunteer. Right.

Or to show up to vote, because you're getting so many fundraising texts and you were trying to get off those lists. Like, and this is the collective action problem that exists in the fundraising space, which is you can use your list correctly. Bernie Sanders is great at his list. He asked him for money, informs them of things to do, ask them to do non-fundraising things a lot, like to race,

go to this rally or volunteer all of those things. So he does a great job, but then there are always other people doing a terrible job and there are a lot. And because there's a list overlap, it makes it hard. So if you're an individual candidate and you have a lot of people's phone numbers, that is a good way to tell them information. Like you could actually just tell them about things happening in Congress

would be like a really great way. Like people, John and I were just talking on the Friday pod about how people have no idea that Congress is about to vote to got Medicaid to pay for tax cut for rich people. Like that, text-based would be a way to do it. But when you're getting a zillion fundraising tax, it lowers the efficacy of that other way

of using text-based communications. Yeah, it makes you just assume that everything is just a solicitation. Last question for you. So I was talking to Joe Ross-Pars earlier about whether he thought it was possible for a campaign to raise too much money. And he said, yes, especially if you're a campaign that is spending a lot of money to bring in

money. It can become like a self-licking ice cream cone. And it got me thinking about the Harris campaign and how they spent their roughly $1.5 billion they raised in 2024. The New York Times reported that Harris spent about $600 million producing and airing TV ads. There was the $900,000 they spent on the exterior of the Sphere in Las Vegas

as sort of marketing effort at the end of the campaign. And a lot of these things were perceived as being pretty ineffective, especially given the price tag. Do you think campaigns are putting too much time, money, and effort into fundraising at this point with diminishing returns for even the spend on those dollars? I think not in local races and probably most house races.

I think they have a certain amount of budget. It's hard to raise that money. They don't have huge grassroots lists that are just like pouring money in. They don't have huge bundlers who can do it. The big Senate races and the presidential campaigns probably are in some cases, in some cases, spending too much time raising money.

And I think you remember in 2020 when after Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, there was that massive flood of money into every Senate race in the last few weeks of the race. And the things that campaigns were spending money on, especially when that money comes late You just there's only so many things you can do with it I see that most of the TV ads are bought you're buying TV ads were like

1-10th of the reach gets into your state is right over the border stuff like that and I think and there it does create a When you have that much money you sometimes make strange strategic decisions because you're not forced by the necessity of meeting a budget. Yeah, some of them can argue that we had too much money at the end of the Obama campaign. We were buying ads in video games in 2008.

30 minute spots and stuff, yeah. Yes, yeah, we bought 30 minute spots like we were selling like a blender on QVC. But there is this, like I think what you're bringing up with the Harris campaign is there is, you can spend money, especially if you're a national man, you can spend money to raise money and you're spending a whole bunch of money

and you're barely breaking even in some cases. And that's part of what's happening as these lists get burned to the ground is it's harder and harder to get people to give money. So you're spending more to go to more people. There have been some efforts from some people who have tried to put pressure on ActBlue and other groups, but this is something, maybe the DNC getting involved, but we really do need party leaders to come together and work to try to set some set of rules around the

frequency of fundraising, texts and emails. There could be maybe an equivalent of charity navigator for these packs. I got a text minutes after Ross Baraka was arrested from a group called Free Ross Baraka. was arrested from a group called Free Ras Braca. I don't know what group, is that his campaign? Is that another group who just adopted? But there was no way to know until you entered the flow to actually donate the money to know who you were giving to.

And there has to be, all of the people who are doing right, which I think are a lot of the democratic politicians are suffering because there are a lot of bad actors out there. So there should be some collective effort to try to police what's happening. And I think the whole party would raise more money and improve our standing with our base

if we were to do that. That's a really good idea. I mean, there's a couple of kind of actionable suggestions that have come out of this episode. One, I think you're right. The party leaders should come together and try to lay out some standards that everyone should be asked to follow.

Two, some sort of charity navigator-like platform will be really helpful because it's incredibly difficult to run down the providence of these PACs and see what's legit and what's not. And then three, Joe recommended that we keep a list and just name and shame all the worst actors. The campaigns or PACs or party entities that harass people the most. Yep.

And the fundraising consultants. I think that's a great idea. Great idea. Dan, thank you so much. Thank you, Tommy. After the break, you'll hear my conversation with Regina. But our friends over at Vote Save America would kill me if I didn't make clear

that Vote Save America does not sell donor contact information ever. Pod Save America is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. You all know what speed dating is, right? Well, if you're the owner of a growing business, what if there was a feature like speed dating only for hiring? In other words, you could meet several interested qualified candidates at once, all at a designated time. Well, good news there is. It's Zip Intro from Zip Recruiter. You can post your job today and start talking to qualified candidates tomorrow. And right now you can try

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Again, that's ziprecruiter.com slash crooked. ZipIntro post jobs today. Talk to qualified candidates tomorrow. or go to the website at www.aclu.org. We'll talk to qualified candidates tomorrow. Throughout this episode we've been talking about Act Blue. We wanted to end it by talking with Regina Wallace-Jones, the CEO of Act Blue, about what they do and why Trump's attempts

to destroy Act Blue could be so devastating for the Democratic Party. My name is Regina Wallace-Jones. I'm the CEO and president of ActBlue. And what is ActBlue? ActBlue is a digital fundraising platform. We have existed since 2004. We give homage always to Howard Dean, who was one of the first to really demonstrate that a viable presidential campaign could be run

with the strength of small dollar donors. And our vision at the time was that we could make that widely available to all candidates up and down the ticket we have been executing on that mission for the last 21 years and are excited where we've landed now is a central juggernaut for the Democratic and progressive left And that's where we love being and that's where we want to stay. What was the fundraising landscape or? is a central juggernaut for the Democratic and progressive left. And that's where we love being and that's where we want to stay. What was the fundraising landscape or process like for Democrats before ActBlue came along? So there would be basically two different kinds of candidates that were funded prior

to an ActBlue. The first would be just a wealthy person, period, who may have financed largely all of their campaigns themselves and or among themselves and their friends. The other is a candidate who is largely making a bid for larger donors to fund their campaign, which effectively means that substantially few people are making a decision about who

has the fundraising momentum to really run a campaign. And that would be at the municipal level, it would also be at the federal level, but the dollars get sort of more and more magnified the higher you move in the ticket. So at Blue's perspective was that we really wanted to unlock the power of the grassroots, that the say of the many was way, way more powerful than one or a few. And so we set out at that point to really work from the bottom up. We did not start at the presidential. It actually wasn't until 2020 that all of the Democratic candidates

for the President of the United States ran a small dollar campaign on ActBlue. Yeah, I worked for John Edwards for President in 2004. And when you would walk around the fundraising department, there would be giant books filled with contact information for trial lawyers. So I remember the kind of OG fundraising and the types of people that it involved in the political process. And you're right, I mean, Howard Dean comes along and he starts this revolution in online fundraising.

But at some point along the way, ActBlue just exploded in popularity and kind of became the only game in town. I'm just wondering, why do you think that was? You know, I think there's a couple of reasons for this. The first is and kind of became the only game in town. I'm just wondering, why do you think that was? You know, I think there's a couple of reasons for this. The first is, ActBlue is really the only large entity, and certainly at the time, the only entity that was actually organized as a nonprofit. The second thing is, we did, as I said,

start from the ground up. So it was sort of a winning the trust of the ecosystem campaign by campaign and demonstrating that consistently we were going to be there for the moment. If we think back to 2020, the moment when George Floyd was killed was a moment that exploded into movement around the world. And Act Blue was a central actor in that helping to channel the dollars, the fundraising, and

the frustrations in some way, but really with an intention to drive action, right? The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, sort of that moment when many realized that reproductive rights were at risk and that we had not really put the right structural framework in place to make sure that that wasn't something that we would lose. So, as you said, I mean, you're not a political party, you're not a political entity, You're not a political entity.

You're not fundraising. You're a technology platform and conduit through which funds are raised and then distributed out. Is there a version of ActBlue on the Republican side that just happens to be used by Republicans? And how does it differ? I am so glad that you asked that question. Actually, there is a product that was created in 2019.

That product is called WinRed. And the structural model for WinRed is, in many ways, an exact replica of ActBlue. There are some key differences. One is that it was mandated from the top down. So whereas we started one campaign at a time from the ground up and did not get to the presidency until 2020, when red was started as a mandate from the top down, where President Trump was the candidate that really drove the use of the platform.

And obviously the challenge with that is that there's only a presidential every four years, which means that if you have not done the work to win the hearts and minds of down ballot candidates, you go from feast to famine as a platform. And it's very hard to maintain a platform without having continuous evergreen fundraising that is happening at all times. So that's one key difference. The second key difference is that WinRed is a for-profit, which means that they're substantially less transparent in their practices. And that drives very different behaviors inside of the ecosystem that they're

operating within versus inside of ActBlue. In this moment, we are three times more effective than WinRed. That is both in dollars raised, but it's also in conversion rates, and it's also in genuine trust that we have across the ecosystem. So all good news there, always things to work on, and I know that we're going to talk about them. So let me get at some of these annoyances, because a big part of why I'm doing this episode

is because democratic fundraising efforts can be really annoying. I think it goes just beyond the inconvenience. I think sometimes the volume of requests, the feeling that you can't get them to stop, the tone, the tenor, it can feel like almost disrespectful or worse. You know, there are these scam packs that raise money

and that money then primarily gets funneled to the people working for these scam packs and not for good campaigns or good causes. What role can ActBlue play in reforming the process or weeding out bad actors? So let me begin at the top because I'm certain that for some listeners, they're looking at this and they're getting raging mad because they, you know, first and foremost believe that messages are coming from ActBlue. So I always have to clear the record at the top and say,

ActBlue does not solicit directly, nor does ActBlue sell the data that exists on our platform. What is happening for ActBlue is we become the link inside of the transactional ass that's typically happening on an email or an SMS platform. And because we are such a clear brand inside of that email or that SMS or that text message, we get the attribution for the actual message. That's not what's happening, but I certainly recognize that that is how

most donors experience it and only because I'm the CEO of ActBlue, do I actually know the truth of how all of this is working. So what you're saying is for people who get a million texts and they feel like they have texted back stop to every campaign or PAC in the history of campaign and PACs and they want to blame ActBlue because sometimes embedded in those texts is an ActBlue link, you're saying you guys have nothing to do with that. You're not sending those messages. Well, yes and because these two, there's two

things that just got conflated together here. One is that messages are coming out from 40,000 entities. This other thing is I, Regina, or you, Tommy, are getting messages from 40,000 entities, right? The big question there is gee whiz, if I only gave to one candidate, how is it that all 40,000 of them have my contact information? And there I say, Act Blue is not giving your information to all of the other entities, but the commitment that we have for every entity that is raising on Act Blue is that the donors that are giving to them is donor data that belongs to that campaign or that entity that is raising on the platform. And there are many that hold that data with a ton of sacred responsibility, and there

are also some who sell or give that data away. Now, if I wanna be the protagonist in this and in defense of some of those who are making these decisions, the mental mindset is one of many things. One is I am sharing my list with a colleague in another state that I really think is the right person for the role and they do not have enough donors that they can reach to get the scale of fundraising

that they need. And so as a good actor, I am sharing my very, very valuable list with them so that some of those people consider that candidate. It is not something that everyone agrees with, but in their defense, that might be a reason why that happens. Another reason why that happens might be I have not raised quite as much money as I needed

to raise in my campaign cycle and the list that I have is the most valuable asset that I have as a candidate. So I will make a decision to sell my list to a broker or sell my list to another campaign or sell my list to another whatever the case may be in service to paying my staff or in service to paying down debt for my campaign, right? So the intention often is a good and reasonable intention that an entity is trying to act upon. The effect of that on many donors, not all, right? I mean, I wanna be clear that there are many, many donors that are like, bring that on, because I want to go.

I don't think so. I don't think there's any donors that are saying you can't go. I promise. I promise I hear it all. Listen, you're being, I'm just, as a friend, you're being excessively generous to these campaigns, okay? No, no.

I'm, like, we get the concept, but no one is like, sell my data ad infinitum. That is a nightmare for everybody. No, and no, but let me tell you, let me tell you why I know this is true, because at least 5% of the time, people are saying yes, right? So if everyone hated it, right,

it would be a, we would stop doing this. I think most people don't know what's happening. I think people are gonna donate to a list that- That is true, but that is also different from when it happens, whether I know how it happened or not, do I say yes to the ask that's being made of me? Different times, different people say yes. In their defense, all I'm saying is that there are often good reasons for why it's happening. And in 2025, in a world where targeting and messaging can all be much more precisely done than list sharing between candidates

or causes, a moment like this creates an opportunity for an Act Blue to innovate and to move us to our next level of efficacy as an ecosystem. For example, those who are listening today may be seeing targeted advertisements on your social media platforms. There you get the benefit of hearing not just flat text message or flat email, but you get the benefit of hearing a video coming from the principal or the candidate who is really making a very clarified bid for what they're asking for. And it's not like two seconds of time, it's a rich bit of encounter that you can really take in and be influenced by what's being said and from there make a choice to make a donation. This is way less

intrusive for many and what we're finding is that the more candidates that are using these channels that we and other platforms are enabling, the more we're finding that donors are enjoying that a little bit better because it's integrated in with their feeds, right? And sometimes they're into it and sometimes they're not. But if they're not into it, it doesn't interrupt their day. They can just scroll past it, right? Yeah, they're not opening their phone

to a giant picture of Nancy Pelosi being like, "'Tommy, we're all gonna die if you don't give me five bucks right now.'" Right, it's lovely issues, by the way. Absolutely lovely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She is absolutely lovely, but the texts are awful. So in December of last year, a group of fundraising practitioners

and consultants and academics, they wrote this letter to ActBlue with some recommendations about protecting donors from the scam packs, the unscrupulous actors that we were talking about earlier. How can you do that? How can you guys help protect against scam packs? Did you guys find the recommendations in that letter helpful or were they targeted at the wrong people? How do you think about it?

Well, I think about it in two ways as the CEO of ActBlue. One is any problem that we're having in our ecosystem, I want to hear about it. I'm not one that would bury my head in the sand and pretend that something doesn't exist. Having said that, I have a preference for hearing about it and not posting about it. I find one way to be a little bit more destructive and another way to be much more inviting of collaboration and problem solving. So that is certainly an open letter that I took to heart. Now let me, again, for those who are new to this conversation and or may

not understand all the ins and outs of it, I want to offer that the very naming of Scampak is difficult naming, right? If I were to try to look up what is the formal definition of Scampak, right, it would be hard for me to find an actual definition for what that is. But we do coalesce around a series of practices that make for a good pack with good practices and a series of practices that lead to a pack that needs improvement. Let me just call that. So the things that I would name would be, does the PAC have a clear identity with a clear social presence that donors can look at and review and understand what is it that they are here to do?

That would be one. One would be, are they transparent in how they are spending the dollars that are actually being raised, right? And if it is a PAC that is raising for candidates, what you would want to see is a substantial amount of their spend going to actual candidates. If it is a PAC that is raising for issue or cause or something that is not candidate specific, you would want to see dollars being directed to that very specific thing that they are raising for and not towards nefarious, unnamed, right?

Like, let's call it consultant expenses, right? Where you can't really understand what that is or what it does. So that would be sort of a differential for me between good and bad. There are good and needs improvement rather, not good and bad. And then there are actual messages. So I've heard a lot of people accuse PACs who are using messages like Act Now and get a $5,000 matching rate, right? There are PACs that use that kind of messaging that are very good PACs, right?

They are taking the dollars that they are raising. They are demonstrably putting those dollars into key races across the country. And no one would ever argue about how the dollars are being spent, but they might argue about the aggressive messaging that they're using to get people to act, right? It would be like, again, the rough equivalent of the pastor who is a hellfire and brimstone pastor

versus someone who's giving you a little gentle nudge that you should improve the practices in your life, right? Both of them lead to the same outcome if followed, and if you have that belief system, but different people have different preferences for how they hear their information, right? That I would not name as scam, even though some folks might receive it,

and many folks might receive it, and feel like it is scammy or spammy feeling. Yeah, that's a really important point, right? You can have a sort of annoying, scammy, obnoxious tone, but that doesn't mean the money's going to a bad place. And look, I have empathy for how challenging the task is of identifying or defining a scam pack, because let's say we were talking about a charity.

If there was a charity that said they were buying malaria nets for kids, but you look at their expenditures and 85% of it is going to a marketing firm or legal services or overhead, and 50% is going to malaria nets, you're like, ah-ha, nope, bad actors, right? But we're talking about political entities

seeking political outcomes. And the expenditures could be on marketing or ads or whatever and Look up on the up-and-up, but they could be routed through an entity That's affiliated with the person that launched the pack that's doing the fundraising So they're getting paid that way and I guess the challenge is like how do you guys? root out situations like that where you have someone who starts a pack and then pays their own firm a Bunch of money and profits on the back end,

but it seems like that would be tough for you to know. So research is an important part of how we think about PACs being onboarded, right? And to be clear, PACs are an IRS designation, right? So there are some PACs that have existed for a long time. There are some PACs that are brand new. And the thing about PACs that have been around for a long time is there's plenty of records to review in the spirit of conducting research to decide whether they should be onboarded.

There are newer PACs that do not have the benefit of, you know, years and years and annals and annals of research. So provided that they have the IRS identity, which that must be there, there are some that we would grant the benefit of time to get up and running. And you can imagine that for a new organization, just like for a startup company, dollars get spent differently on day one than they're spent on day 20,000. So we do try to offer some grace and try

to get some points on the field to figure out how exactly that PAC will behave. And if we're finding that the PAC's behaviors are inconsistent with ActBlue's mission, which that the PAC's behaviors are inconsistent with ACT Blue's mission, right? Which is to build technology that shapes democracy and fuels democratic wins, right? If we're finding that there's something

that is completely orthogonal to that for the mathematicians on the phone, then that might be the cause for a conversation, right? No mathematicians here, let me No math petitions, Sierra. Let me tell you. No math petitions, come on! I got a few friends out there! Philosophy major.

Marinate on that. Imagine that was your life. Things went for you. Imagine. Philosophy was like my third favorite subject. I just want to switch gears a little bit, which is President Trump has ordered his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to go after Act Blue.

Republicans in Congress have been going after Act Blue or investigating Act Blue since 2023. It's clear their concern is what we've been talking about, which is that Act Blue has become a great way for Democrats to raise a lot of small dollar money and has been very beneficial to the Democratic Party. But what do you think they're looking for and what has the impact been on you guys from these investigations or these threats? Ultimately, what I think that they're looking for is why are they more effective than we are.

And I would probably be looking for that myself if I was on the other side of the coin. But practically speaking, as I said, we've been at our craft for 21 years. They've been at their copycraft for six years. And when ActBlue was six years old, although we were not mandated from the top down, we were raising around about the same amount, right? So it is not the case that you turn on the spigots and everything just goes, right? There is tremendous discipline in scale and resiliency and all of the things that we have spent all of our time focusing on on the back end. And

there's also tremendous time that we spend tuning the art of conversions and making sure that we are getting better and better and better with every election cycle. So I think that is the heart of the matter. But not being able to accept that reality, of course, we have to get lost in conspiracy theories, right? We have to get lost in the, well, it must be the case that they're better because of this, that, or the other thing, the most recent thing being foreign,

foreign nationals who are interfering in the process. The data does not bear that out. Let's say Donald Trump snapped his fingers and made ActBlue go away tomorrow. What would the impact be on the Democratic Party? Well, I think it would be catastrophic, but I also think it's an impossibility. Why is it impossible? If this is a man who can direct his attorney general to tell the world that him accepting a $400 million plane from Qatar is okay, why couldn't he tell her to take

you guys out? Nothing can stop the president from telling his cabinet to do what he wants to tell him to do. I think there's clarity here that there was not an executive order to shut down ACLU. There was a memorandum, which is effectively a letter written to the AG to look into the fundraising practices of ACLU and other fundraising platforms, right? In theory, if there were a real fire, right, that would have been an order, and that order would have been to shut ActLU down, right? The real thing that they're trying to attack is our efficacy.

We stand by our efficacy. We know that it's three times stronger and that's not a brag, it's just a when you're at it for 21 years and when you take your job seriously, that's what results look like and results matter to ActBlue. Well, listen, Regina, thank you so much for doing the show. I appreciate this. I know you guys are dealing with a lot of stuff in DC, so thank you for making the time. Absolutely. Appreciate you. If you want to listen to Pod Save America ad free or get access to our subscriber discord and exclusive podcasts, consider joining our friends of the pod community at crooked.com

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