Exploiting the elderly for campaign cash | Hour 1

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all the links, become a patron, go to the Pete calendar show.com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. It took almost a year. before the author of this piece, a Stanford University political science professor, lifelong Democrat, Adam Bonica. He worked with the New York Times, and then when they spiked the story, he went over to the Bulwark, who was very excited to publish it, and then they spiked the story. So he self-published the story himself. And it's a story about exploiting science. the elderly through what he calls spam packs. And as soon as I start describing this tactic, you're going to know exactly what, um, what he's referring to because this stuff started going on in the Republican party before it hit the Democrat party. So, uh, this is from CDM press, which stands for creative destruction media. So this, They provide this. Overview, but then I'm going to go to Bonica's piece that he wrote. He has a substack because I think everyone is now legally required to. Data for Democracy is the name of his substack. So first off, from CDM Press, the New York Times killed this story. It was a massive data-driven expose. on how Democratic spam political action committees targeted and bilked elderly donors of their cash. The New York Times killed the story after the Elias Law Firm, representing the DCCC and the DSCC, the Elias Law Firm pushed back to the New York Times, and then they killed the story. I'm sure it was complete coincidence. Using Federal Election Commission data on contributions to Democratic political action committees, or PACs, along with voter registration lists with age information covering over 300 million contributions to candidates and PACs, 300 million contributions, Bonica found that the vast majority of donors to Democratic spam PACs are the elderly. In fact, a surprisingly concentrated group of elderly donors are responsible for the lion's share of money raised by these groups. 1% of Democratic donors, or about 138,000, average age 75, 1% is responsible for more than 49% of the $ 1. 4 billion raised by these spam packs since 2017. These are actual cases of senior citizens being taken advantage of by Democratic spam packs, all while consultants rake in millions. For example, an 85-year-old retired man from Oxford, Ohio, he sent out 7,800 donations to Democratic groups. Grand total, $ 648, 000. That's more than double the value of his own home. An elderly woman from an assisted living center in Indianapolis made 25,000 donations totaling a quarter of a million dollars. A 93-year-old man charged 4,208 times over the course of four months. That's 31 times a day on average. They got him for almost $ 33, 000. Between 70% and 85% of the largest spam packs, Facebook fundraising, and ad impressions were served to users over the age of 65, a demographic that comprises only about 14% of the total adult user base on the platform. The biggest spam pack of them all is one called the Progressive Turnout Project, or PTP, or as I call it. They raised $ 390 million. From donors over the last decade. And get this, it spends 36 cents of every dollar on something other than fundraising to itself. So in other words, 64 cents out of every dollar fundraised stays in the pack. Goes to more fundraising, goes to more ads, goes to salaries and stuff. So only 36 cents actually go to the candidates or the causes that are being used to get people to donate money. In 2025, CDM Press reports Democratic-aligned spam packs raised more from individual donors than all Democratic Senate candidates combined. This thing is a massive operation. And there are a bunch of them, and they all kind of cluster together, according to the research that Bonica published at data4democracy. substack. com. He calls it the hook and squeeze. The hook and squeeze. If you've ever donated to a Democratic campaign, you know the messages never stop. Things like, all hope is lost. We're begging. Quadruple match expires in 180 minutes. They arrive at all hours. They claim to be close to tears because you haven't sent $ 15. Right? Most of us dismiss these messages as what they are, annoying spam. But federal election records reveal a hidden population of seniors for whom these messages prove surprisingly effective. What reads as parity to one recipient may be psychologically triggering for another. To understand how the system works, I combined contribution data from the FEC with age data from voter registration lists covering more than 300 million donations. The donors who send money in response to Democratic fundraising spam are overwhelmingly elderly, and a surprisingly concentrated group of them accounts for the bulk of the money that's raised. And then he goes through and he. Documents some of these cases, like the guy from Ohio, the woman in the assisted living home. And then he cites a New York Times report from 2021, which said that the all-caps writing and the manufactured panic of political fundraising spam function as a filter. It repels savvy donors and takes advantage of the same cognitive vulnerabilities that make seniors targets. For online fraud. So they know this. But it works. Who's behind the flood? A thriving industry of digital fundraising consultants who specialize in offering spam as a service. And the political action committees and candidates who adopt their methods. Together they form a broader network of fundraising that deploys these methods at scale. And he dubs them spam packs. The Democrat Party's own congressional campaign committees and some of its most senior leaders have embraced the spam packs. He then points out that Republicans went all in on these tactics first. And the GOP offers a cautionary tale because we see what happened to the GOP when they did this. After flooding supporters' phones with fundraising spam tips, In recent election cycles, their grassroots donor base, the party supporters who actually give when something moves them, until the spam drives them off, their donor base has been hollowed out because of the spam. Republicans raised less from small and mid-sized donors in 2024 than they did in the 2022 midterms. 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Pete, of that 1% that's donating all of the money, 99.9% live in Asheville and regularly protest. I believe it. think that's true. It feels true. David says, is this the act blue fraud we were hearing about? Um, no, this is, this is different. This is on top of what, uh, act blue was doing. And this guy, Monica, uh, in this piece, he does talk about act blue a little bit, uh, and that they have actually attempted to make some changes based on research that he did calling them out prior, but this is separate. The spam packs are separate. Oh, Monica with the old classic seniors, please. And for folks who don't know what that is a reference to 25 years ago, maybe 20, 25 years ago, there was an ad that was a, it was a campaign ad. I forget for whom. And it had like this automated, uh, menu, like you're, you know, press one for scaring seniors, press. Two for, you know, whatever kind of policy, other policies, whatever. And so, and then you hear this little old lady, you know, on the other end of the phone, and she says, scaring seniors, please. And then I think it was Spires and Krantz, or maybe it was Keith Larson, former WBT hosts here, and they isolated that seniors, please. And they just kept using it over and over again. But that's what that's a reference to is that that the Democrats campaigns are always trying to scare people. Right. Like Donald Trump is going to take away all of your Social Security. He's going to take away your health care. It's taken away your rights. Right. It's all. And it's not just Donald Trump. It's every Republican. That's what they are always accusing Republicans of wanting to do. And Republicans have historically not been able to do any of these things, even when they've controlled. the White House and the Congress. It's pretty amazing. Like the worst authoritarians ever. John says two possibilities here. One, they are scamming all these elderly people or two, they're using these elderly people to launder donations from other sources like, oh, I don't know, maybe China or billionaires that have already exceeded their maximum contribution allowance. The Democrats do have a disproportionate amount of billionaires funding their campaigns. And that is what act blue is accused of doing because they have found, you know, undercover or people have uncovered, let's just say investigative journalists. I think James O'Keefe may have done this. Stephen Horn in Eastern North Carolina did this as well. He tracked down some donor who, you know, is alleged to have made, you know, 30,000 donations to act blue. And they're like, I don't have that kind of money. I think I've donated like twice. So they're just using their accounts basically to launder donor money that's otherwise not allowed to be donated. RJ says seniors making 80 $ 15 contributions in one day would have to go in the possible, but highly unlikely category, especially at that scale. Foreign contributors, however, like China or Russia, Russia, Russia, more plausible. Alan Grayson. Was that the, that was the campaign ad for Alan? God, remember that guy? Remember Alan Grayson? Yeah. That's a deep cut right there. Ooh, he was terrible. Absolutely terrible. What was he from Florida? I want to say he was awful. All right. So the Republicans were doing this and it, hurt them in their fundraising in 2024 versus 2022. They actually raised more money, but then they just exhausted a lot of their donors who now just, you know, send everything to the junk folder. Anything that comes, you know, is blocked or deleted immediately. This guy who did this research, again, political scientist, Stanford University, he studies money in politics and he's a lifelong Democrat. And so this is him pleading with the Democrat leadership to stop doing this. He names a couple of the companies that are doing it, Mothership Strategies. They've drawn particular scrutiny in recent years. This one was founded in 2014 by three veterans of the DCCC, and they commercialized the party's most aggressive fundraising tactics. Then they went on to co-found their own PAC, called End Citizens United, ECU, that, that created an arrangement in which for a time, they were both the client and the vendor. So they were working for themselves and just sucking up all of that money. And they spent roughly $ 20 million, uh, on themselves. Basically they enriched themselves. Um, Spam packs rarely operate in isolation, he says. And then he hits the big one, the Progressive Turnout Project. This one's crazy. I'll tell you a little bit about it in a minute. From the research compiled by Adam Bonica and not printed in the New York Times. They had this story for, I think he said, somewhere around six months. And it just kept getting reviewed and edited and we got to run it past legal and whatever. And then they eventually killed the story. So then he went and shopped it over at the bulwark, which is like, like a never Trumper outfit. And, um, you know, cause they're standing as a bulwark for conservatism or something. And apparently got spiked there too. Apparently we don't know what the actual rationale was for it, but he pointed out in this piece or actually in another piece that, uh, And that once the publisher got a look at it and started being a part of that edit, the editing process, her name is Sarah Longwell, I believe. And she has a pack. So like, and she's the publisher. And so like, I don't know, draw your own conclusions from that, but then Bulwar killed it too. So he, he self publishes this thing. And one of the companies that he names as a spam pack, is the Progressive Turnout Project, or the PTP. PDP. Spam packs rarely operate in isolation. My analysis of FEC data shows that they cluster into networks linked by a small number of treasurers who oversee multiple committees at once. The largest I found is a group of packs connected to the Progressive Turnout Project. Harry Pascal... key. Of the famous wager, I believe, a longtime accountant turned Democratic fundraiser, is a treasurer for the Progressive Turnout Project PAC, and seven additional PACs whose affiliated status allows them to operate as a single network. The Pascal Network is just one large piece of a much larger phenomenon. I identified the 145 Democrat-aligned spam packs. Based on my analysis, these packs share a common profile. Heavy reliance on high-volume digital fundraising vendors, fundraising costs that consume a disproportionate share of what they raise, and a donor pool that skews overwhelmingly elderly, even compared to other packs. He then points out less than 1% of all Democratic donors account for almost half of the $ 1. 4 billion that's been raised by these spam packs since 2017. 138,000 donors, averaging 75 years old, and they've donated more than 100 times each. He calls these people captive spam donors. He said these packs don't churn and burn through disposable donors. It's not like they're going out finding more donors, right? That's sort of the the standard model, right? These spam packs, they hook and squeeze. That's what he describes this tactic as. And the groups behind these operations insist that they do not target any of their appeals based on the recipient's age. So they're like, we are totally not targeting the elderly. It just so happens that the way we write every single one of these fundraising messages is For some reason, appeals to the elderly the most. Yeah. Donors to these spam packs run far older than political donors in general, with the captive donor pool averaging age 75. Who receives the spam matters less than who responds. The same appeal can land in a million inboxes and still draw its money from a narrow, vulnerable feud. No age filter is required at the sending end when the message does the sorting at the receiving end. Whether or not anybody set out to target the elderly doesn't matter if you intended to or not. The sorting happens either way. Whether or not the people who are operating this fundraising model recognize it or intend it, Fundraising spam runs on similar psychological levers to those that the federal law enforcement and consumer protection groups have identified as hallmarks of elder financial exploitation. Things like manufactured urgency, emotional appeals engineered to trigger guilt or fear, false exclusivity, fabricated accounts or profile statuses that look like official notices and the relentless pressure to give before there's any time to think. So why is he doing all this? This guy's a lifelong Democrat. A couple reasons, he says. Number one, these spam packs are poisoning the Democratic ecosystem, he says. It warps incentives for organizations and candidates. For the campaigns, the draw is that the fundraising campaigns is boring and it's grueling and people don't like doing it. And so you just hire this company. They send out all of their, their emails and stuff. They do all of the fundraising work for you. Only about 20% of democratic congressional candidates hire these types of firms, just 20%. But those candidates, they raised a combined $ 570 million from these captive spam donors and The 80% of Democratic congressional candidates that did not hire the spam PACs, they did not raise $ 570 million. They raised $ 37. So this is why people use the spam PACs is because it is very, very, very lucrative. But he says the most devastating result of this strategy does not show up on an FEC report. In exchange for a quick return today, fundraising consultants are liquidating the party's long-term future, turning potential lifelong donors into people who now delete Democrat messages on site. Every frantic appeal trains donors to see the party as desperate and unserious. Yeah, I can't tell you. It's been probably a year since I looked in my blocked messages folder. Because, like, and the whole thing is just littered with, like, Donald Trump Jr. wanting to talk to me. Like, of course it's not him, right? But, like, that's what you get subjected to. What respectable organization treats its supporters this way and expects to keep them? In the long run, these tactics are less a boon to the party's finances than a siphon. And then there's the ethics of it, right? He talks about how Democrats champion that they protect the vulnerable. So much for that, right? I mean, you're siphoning off millions and millions of dollars from the elderly using these kinds of tactics that have long been identified as unethical. As the leader of the House Democrats, Hakeem Jeffries is uniquely positioned to either dismantle the spam machine or own its consequences, he says. And he's calling on Jeffries to do something. The fundraising model, he calls it a parasite on the party, enriching outside consultants while steadily starving the host. Republicans succumb to it first, watching their own grassroots donor base hollow out in real time. If Democrats don't change course, they're headed into the exact same donor death spiral. So that's why he wants the Democrats to take action. That's why he's calling this out. But I think as a couple of texters have noted, I'm not so sure that these are actually elderly donors. I think that this may be that like if ActBlue was doing this kind of stuff with this, with the smurfing, I think is what they call it. You get somebody to make a donation of $ 5. Now you have their account info. And then you just say they made more donations, and that's where this money came from. And if you're a super PAC, you get to keep all that stuff hidden. So you don't know where that money actually is coming from. I think that's probably the case here. I think this is happening at scale. This from Ron.... Who says, when Red did it for me, or. I guess you could say to me, I contributed to several Republicans in the 2000 election cycle, and I have been bombarded with fundraising requests ever since. Now, I wouldn't give a dime to any candidate running for any statewide or national election. Yeah, I mean, this is the problem. You're hollowing out, the party's hollowing out their own donor base by just constantly spamming them for more money. So this fella, Adam Bonica, I mentioned that he touched on the act blue. The good news is that change is possible. He says, after I published a series of articles on sub stack last summer about deceptive fundraising practices, act blue leadership, reached out to me to discuss the platform's response. Soon after, ActBlue announced its most significant crackdown on deceptive fundraising to date, explicitly forbidding the impersonation of candidates and unverified matching donations. There has been other movement in the. Launched an effort to stop PACs from trading on the Democratic name without actually supporting Democratic candidates. But these reforms have not been enough. Get this. In the four months. After Act Blue's crackdown, donations to the spam PACs went up 33% over the same period in 2023. I think, like, I think he's so close. He's so close to getting it. Like, it's kind of like the blind man, you know, touching an elephant, doesn't really know what he's touching, right? It's like, dude, you're right there. Why would the spam pack donations go through the roof? Why would they increase by a third in four months after Act Blue cracked down? Because remember, Act Blue started to get attention from the government, right? And when the government started looking at, Hey, why are all these donations going through act blue under people's names? And they claim they didn't make the donations. They didn't, they didn't spend tens of thousands of dollars on some campaign on the other side of the country. So like, what's the deal there. And so when act blue starts getting, uh, investigated, uh, And all of a sudden, they're like, oh, we're going to do some stuff now. Oh, thank you. For your Substack series about our deceptive practices. We're totally going to crack down on all of that. And then lo and behold, the spam packs, all of a sudden, they start getting more revenue. Why is that? Could it be that the donors are using the spam packs now instead of ActBlue? Could that be an explanation? Could that be the elephant? Maybe. Just spitballing here. Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Besson and the IRS... could revoke the tax-free status of left-wing nonprofits such as George Soros' Open Society Foundations, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Council on American Islamic Relations. This according to three sources familiar with the matter who told the New York Post. It's part of a Trump-backed crackdown on bogus charities, and Treasury officials are drawing up a sweeping audit of outfits deemed to be using and abusing the tax code. Besson's inner circle is drafting a blueprint that could ultimately strip noncompliant organizations of their 501c3 status. The reviews could result in massive back payments and civil penalties. The initiative says, leans in part on a 2025 executive order signed by Trump targeting nonprofits operating with a quote substantial illegal purpose, paving the way for the IRS to issue fines or even strip the tax exempt status of charities with alleged ties to political violence, protests, or radical ideologies. Officials have also scrutinized a number of anti-corporate and labor aligned advocacy groups and including the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, the Anti-Amazon Athena Coalition, Media Justice, and the Strategic Organizing Center alongside its parent union, the SEIU. See, don't tell me that the parties are the same. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support. and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast. So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetecalinershow.com. Again, thank you so much for listening and don't break anything while I'm gone.