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Democrats Really, Really, Really Don’t Want People Investigating Their Scammy Fundraising

Several of the party’s top committees threatened to raise legal hell over a new study into the way they pry money out of seniors.

The Democratic Party’s 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. 

That’s the glum conclusion political scientist Adam Bonica reached at the end of an aborted eight-month collaboration with the New York Times 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’s advertising library, showing that the main respondents to the obtrusive and incessant text-based fundraising appeals launched by Democratic-affiliated groups—which Bonica aptly characterizes as “Spam PACs”—are “overwhelmingly elderly, and [that] a surprisingly concentrated group of them accounts for the bulk of the money raised”:

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’s adult users in the United States, according to data published by Meta. 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 “captive spam donors.”

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’s adult users in the United States, according to data published by Meta.

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 “captive spam donors.”

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: 

Whether or not........

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