On the menu today: This is the last Jim-written Morning Jolt until next Tuesday — Dominic Pino is up tomorrow, and I’ll bet he writes something about economic policy. There will be a lot to chew over in the amazing results, up and down the ballot, but for now, let’s say “good riddance” to those annoying political spam texts, and recognize that the Democrats now have a serious grifter problem, just as much as the Republicans do.
A Little Ditty about Doris and Diane
The past few months, my Three Martini Lunch podcast co-host Greg Corombos and I have traded stories about the increasingly frantic tone from the political organizations that send spam fundraising texts to our phones. For some reason, some groups think Greg is “Doris,” and a liberal group that should be tried at the Hague thinks that I am “Diane,” and the right apoplectic tone will get us to donate just $5 now.
“DIANE, WE’RE ALL STANDING OUT ON THE LEDGE WE SWEAR WE MEAN IT DON’T TEST US DONATE JUST $5 NOW OR OUR PLUMMET TO OUR DOOM IS ON YOUR CONSCIENCE”
“DIANE, WE KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE AND WHERE YOUR CHILDREN LIVE DON’T TEST A DESPERATE MAN JUST SEND $5 NOW AND NOBODY GETS HURT”
“DIANE, WE’RE AT THE CRITICAL FUNDRAISING DEADLINE AND THE VOICES ARE GETTING LOUDER AND ARE TELLING US THEY WANT BLOOD, BUT THEY’RE WILLING TO BE SATIATED IF YOU JUST SEND $5”
I exaggerate . . . slightly. My guess is you’ve gotten similar messages. I suspect the folks running these organizations saw the legendary National Lampoon cover and thought, “What a great idea!”
You probably noticed that if the polls are up for a candidate, it’s a sign they desperately need money now. If polls are down for a candidate, it’s also a sign they desperately need money now.
Way back in 2019, I wrote about the right’s grifter problem, which manifested itself most notably in official-sounding political-action committees that collected millions, spent large percentages on overhead, and then did very little to actually help the Republican candidates they claimed to be supporting.
A long, intermittently hilarious report from John Ray lays out how grifting organizations have now taken root in the Left’s political ecosystem, parasitically sucking away resources that could be put to better use elsewhere:
But plenty of people refuse to get involved in this way [donating money] because it makes them the target of spam. Aside from a brief bout of the warm fuzzies, the most palpable reward one seems to get for helping Democrats is being invited to do so again, several times per day, sometimes from Democrats you want to support but mostly from ones you don’t. You get the creeping sense your five bucks were wasted on recruiting whoever is doing the spamming, that the candidates you support aren’t using your money to talk to voters who need to hear from them but rather to irritate well-meaning faraway activists who don’t. . . .
A lot of the spam we get is transparently bullsh**and comes from people we’ve never heard of. For example, earlier this month the Voter Protection Project sent me a text accusing me of “ending my Dem Membership,” an act I could only prevent by giving them money. Specifically, via text, they told me:
Harris has her BIGGEST lead & you’re ending your Dem Membership? Renew: vpproject.us/927?t=tOabl0 – Voter Protection Project PAID FOR BY VPP Stop2End
Following this link takes you to a page where the details are different from what is stated in the text. One, my “Dem Membership” is actually apparently my “2024 VOTER PROTECTION PROJECT DEMOCRATIC SUPPORTER MEMBERSHIP. . . .”
And two, the basis of this “emergency text” changes from being based on the need to maintain Kamala Harris’s momentum to supporting “VPP” directly.
Indeed, the Voter Protection Project’s only apparent relationship to Kamala Harris is being able to paste her likeness into a landing page. Unclear how this helps protect voters. Then again, I obviously am not as smart as the folks at VPP because according to OpenSecrets data they have found a way to pay themselves about $440,000 this cycle (and VPP’s website only appears to list two full-time employees, along with a “President of the Board” and a founder who has since resigned) for fundraising while I’ve yet to make a dime on this sort of thing.
Have you gotten those insanely implausible, “[DIANE], a donor has promised to match all contributions this week $900 to one, so donate now to maximize the impact of your contribution” texts? Who are these cruel donors who say to these organizations, “Sure, I have millions that I’m willing donate to your group, but I’m only willing to spend them if random other people who have never given to your organization can be persuaded to donate by sending them annoying texts”? Are these the shadowy rich guys who are running the Squid Game?
Ray says these sorts of messages are flourishing on the Democratic side as well:
Other organizations with similarly bleak track records often assure me contributing to them is marginally less of a waste of resources than I think because of a magic money multiplier that ensures my contributions go further. Some organizations promise the vaunted MATCH, wherein every dollar I give will be multiplied by some very large number with help from some unknown source. These are extremely common. A 400% MATCH from “Democrats Who Win” sent in mid-September. A 500% MATCH from “Gen-Democracy” on October 3rd. Not to be outdone, on October 4th, Stop MAGA PAC (which has so far spent 99 percent of their expenditures on “Administrative” this cycle so far) sent me a text proclaiming an 800% MATCH. If these wealthy benefactors are sincere, the linear projection indicates campaign contributions could fully eliminate income inequality within the decade.
They’re not sincere. There is zero evidence any of these matches ever occur. Indeed, a few days ago the Harris campaign explicitly warned against these tactics due to the sheer volume of this type of message from organizations that Democrats don’t actually seem to want in their ecosphere. This surely wouldn’t be the case if Democratic leaders thought these groups were actually helping.
Indeed, Democrats who care about winning seem to believe these organizations are so detrimental that the folks at ActBlue are willing to forego the revenue they’d get from allowing some of them on their platform. ActBlue recently booted the groups Democratic Power Inc., Democratic Victory Inc., and Democrats United from their platform for failing to use the platform “appropriately,” per above.
And if you feel like the spam texts invaded your phone with increasing frequency as Election Day approached, you’re probably right. Ray wrote, “I put together a small dataset of all the spam texts I had received over the past year or so. It averages just over one spam text per day, up to just over two spam texts per day after August, coming up on three per day in October – not counting texts directly from candidates’ campaigns which, again, I kind of consider just the cost of doing business.”
Where’s all that donated money going? Eh, not much into actions that are likely to help the candidate. “Over a dozen of the 40 organizations that sent me spam this year spent 50 percent or more of their money on overhead – on paying themselves, keeping the lights on, or covering the cost of the very activity that landed them in this dataset in the first place. Seven of them spent over 80 percent of their money on overhead.” And Ray identified a couple of organizations that didn’t have any records of spending money on anything.
Even for the organizations that did spend discernable money on actual Democratic candidates, Ray wonders whether that money was actually spent in a way that did the most good, or that could be reasonably said to match donors’ expectations: “About a third of their House spending went to districts with a PVI over D+10, suggesting their interests are probably more about buddying up to Democrats in safe enough districts that they are likely to accrue positions of power within the party moreso than it is about actually trying to win and expand Democratic political power.”
Now, grassroots Democrats’ wasting their money by giving sums to political organizations that don’t do much, or spend it in uncompetitive races, is not likely the biggest reason Kamala Harris lost. It may not even make the top 20 or 50 reasons.
But it does illustrate the lack of a discernable connection between money spent, or ads run, and the number of votes won. When people complain about how much money is spent in political races, what they’re often really saying is, “I get annoyed by all the ads on the rare times I’m watching live television.” (And they all look and sound like this.)
This past year, you probably heard a lot of complaints about how Elon Musk was allegedly trying to buy the election for Donald Trump. (Much less about the Soros family.) I wanted to believe that the “rich guys and money buy election wins” worldview would wither after the earliest months of 2020, when Mike Bloomberg ads were so absurdly ubiquitous that you probably started hearing “Mike can get it done” in your dreams, and then, after spending $500 million of his own money, Bloomberg only won the primary in American Samoa. If “it” means spending roughly $100 per vote won, then yes, Mike, and probably only Mike, can get it done.
Harris’s campaign and allied groups spent $1.9 billion, while the Trump campaign and allied groups spent $1.6 billion. Between when Harris entered the campaign and November 1, Democrats outspent Republicans on presidential ads by $460 million.
Did she get her money’s worth? This morning, Democratic donors are asking a long-overdue, hard question: What did we spend all that money for?
As a former Biden adviser lamented to Axios reporter Alex Thompson, “How do you spend 1 billion dollars and not win? What the f***?”
Hey, maybe because of “Bidenflation,” a billion dollars doesn’t go as far as it used to go.
And for that matter . . . did it make a lot of sense for Democrats to contribute $78 million to Colin Allred’s longest of longshot bids to take down Senator Ted Cruz in Texas? Did it make sense to donate $31 million to Debbie Mucarsel-Powell’s bid to take on Senator Rick Scott in Florida?
ADDENDUM: If you see that “there are 20 million missing voters” meme or argument going around, keep in mind that a bunch of the western states take an unforgivably long time to count the vote, and if they weren’t safe Democratic states, this would be a much bigger issue. As of this writing, Thursday morning, California has just 60 percent of the vote counted. There will probably be around 6 or 7 million more votes to be counted, and I’d expect a roughly 60–40 split in favor of Harris. Oregon has only 78 percent of the vote counted, and Washington State has just 71 percent of the vote counted. Arizona has just 70 percent of the vote counted, Colorado has 81 percent, Mississippi has 81 percent, New Jersey has 91 percent, Maryland has 82 percent, and Maine has 93 percent. So the total votes will increase, and either come closer to the 2020 vote total or perhaps even surpass it.
As of this writing, Trump has 72.6 million votes nationwide and Harris has 67.9 million votes, a 50.8 percent to 47.5 percent advantage.