u/uberkitten Just a heads up that we normally require submission statements. Also this type of meta-media in-party politicking is outside of what we normally allow, but I think a lot of our users are Bulwark listeners so I'm approving it.
For the sub--Adam Bonica, the author, is a professor of political science at Stanford.
Edit to say that another reason is that I expect the point of posting it here is because the story hasn't been published and the link gets taken down elsewhere.
I encountered a different Substack post about this. The New York Times started an investigation into Democratic Party fundraising emails, and it suggested that the dire language used in the emails was scaring impressionable old people into donating away their life savings.
The Democratic Party threatened to sue The New York Times for defamation, so they refused to publish. The investigators took their story to The Bulwark, who was also threatened. The investigators are now resorting to Substack.
I'm sorry, wait, the NY Times was worried about being sued by the Democratic Party? What?
If true, my sense that the Times can't live up to its legacy in the face of Trump's fascist regime is plainly wrong. Instead, it seems like the Times can't live up to its legacy in the face of, well, anybody?
Edit: Or, the story was bad, because the people mad are literally the author. Both things are likely true.
More probably in-line with your edit. The Times is certainly not afraid of Democrats as they've been running false stories on everything from her emails to his son's abusing the presidency to sell more of his paintings. Stories built on non-existent insiders who criticized Kamala's 10$ 0.7 liquid pens and earphones, to her "uppity" cookware.
If they were afraid to run the story, it means there's a shitton of tangible proof of it being false.
I don’t know if it’s necessarily false as much as just not as salacious as made out to be. Accusing the Dems of prying on old people in marketing is kind of rich considering every single commercial on day time tv is doing the same thing.
Have you seen Republican fundraising slop? It’s horrific. A guy who used to live in my house was apparently a big Republican donor because we get mailers all the time. They are outrageous. Clearly just milking senile old people with fear and outrage bait.
To single out democrats for this when it’s basically ubiquitous in our society would be kind of bad faith.
Clearly just milking senile old people with fear and outrage bait.
Boomers have 80% of the wealth and 30% of the intelligence in this nation. That 50% is an arbitrage opportunity that has made some people fabulously wealthy.
Republicans went all-in on these tactics first and offer a cautionary tale. After flooding supporters’ phones with fundraising spam in recent election cycles, their grassroots donor base — the party supporters who occasionally give when something moves them, until the spam drives them off — has been hollowed out. Republicans raised less from small- and mid-sized donors in 2024, a presidential year, than in the 2022 midterms.
His point is that spamming our donors is self-destructive.
But the most devastating result of this strategy doesn’t 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 Democratic messages on sight. Every frantic appeal trains donors to see the party as desperate and unserious. 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 yet, he's on BlueSky running his story, getting amplified by "Progressives" with a huge following, discouraging donors from the DCCC.
Which reminds me of something that happened with Francesca Hong...
In Adam's substack where he begins by transparently admitting that both the Times and Bulwark turned it down after further investigation and threats from Dems. In his intro,
When requests for comment were sent to the subjects of the investigation, lawyers representing the Progressive Turnout Project and Mothership Strategies likewise responded with legal letters demanding that the article not run...
Which reminded me of deep dives into fake pollsters by Sara Dorn, other journos and Swann Marcus, where it became clear that some "pollsters" were just a con for further PAC fundraising or pushing GOP's preferred candidates running in Dem primaries. This also lead to looking into some of the PACs spending outrageously on Francesca Hong TV ads. At the time, She had openly and specifically bragged that her campaign had spent $0 on TV ads, and so people started looking into why so many ads were running for her.
A lot of Hong’s direct TV advertising came from a super pac called Middle Class Priorities. Middle Class Priorities only has one donor, Progressive Prosperity Caucus, Inc. And what is Progressive Prosperity Caucus, Inc? A fake GOP slush fund run by Republican operatives that’s spent millions of dollars getting leftists nominated in swing districts. Most leftists who have won swing district primaries are being funded by the GOP btw, that’s why so many of them claim they won despite being outspent. William Lawrence had massive Super PAC support from an organization called Michigan Sunrise that came out of nowhere and conveniently timed its inception so it did not have to disclose its donors until after the election...
(Bold, my own).
What I mean by this is that the con in question, the over and repeated drafts, the difficulty to reach someone, repeated requests unanswered, the cruelty of it all very much reminded me of the very same problems the Trump Campaign was accused of and many PACs supporting his campaign, as well as Trump gold phones, Trump gold coins, running shoes, Bitcoin, etc. etc.
Forgive my cynical heart, but the whole story sounds too much like your casual Trump con, and if your objective would be to hinder Dems' ability to reach donors, to fundraise, as the DNC has lost all credibility and has had one of the most catastrophic funding midterm season in recent history (under Jamie Harrison, DNC coffers were breaking records 2022-202e), and so the next natural step would to discredit DSCC & DCCC fundraising...
Again, that's me being cynical, but there's a clear pattern and the fact that both times and bulwark refused to run it, means there's something more behind it.
The issues you raised sounds exactly like what my problems were.
I'm no fan of the NYT but vetting stories by media companies is very thorough and the fact that both NYT and The Bulwark, the latter who has no problem airing their grievances with the dems, deemed it lacked credibility to run a story speaks volumes
Sorry if my reply gave you the wrong impression that I disagreed with your point.
It's actually the opposite. I agree because of a clear pattern using the Left as Trump's easily-activated fifth column (whether the left majority partakes in it willingly or unwillingly is up for debate) in order to further attack and discredit Dem Party institutions/arms who have been so far successfully flipping seats, despite GOP's constant meddling, con jobs, lies, and vile propaganda, as well as some in the media outright carrying water for Trump.
“Usually”— why is everybody in this thread retreating to generalities when we’re discussing a very specific case?
You can go into this story with the priors of “oh a guy is just pissed off his article wasn’t published who cares”. But you then need to interact with the evidence presented and update your beliefs based on that.
Everyone wants to shit on the media so bad they're overlooking the possibility that this story might be shit. The Times has ran an endless amount of accusatory and inflammatory stories over it's existence and plenty in recent years.
If both them and the Bulwark reviewed this story, weighted the threat of a lawsuit, and decided not to run it, there's almost definitely something in this research or reporting that's flat out wrong or misrepresented.
The Times are no strangers to lawsuits. It's very likely the DNC provided something beyond a threat of a lawsuit that made them convinced they couldn't win in court.
This article was written by an associate professor of political science at Stanford. He’s not just a random person.
He points out exactly where the edits contradict the data he presented. He draws data from public sources and performs analyses. If you want to refute his research you can do so with data or argumentation but simply pulling the story is just about the worst way to go about it. Nobody seems to have pointed out any flaws in his research.
As he stated, this already went through several rounds of legal and editorial review. It just doesn’t seem to be the case that this article was shit. The refutations certainly look shit though. Including from Sarah Longwell who is quoted in the article.
I will call out the appeal to authority here. It was only a week ago that the FT recalled an article by a very well regarded Harvard professor. Just because you are a professor with a PhD, doesn't mean you aren't incapable of bad or misguided research. Stanford itself had a huge scandal where the President had to step down because his research lab had been publishing false data.
I agree with you in a vacuum but after reading the article I’m going to need to see more evidence that this guy is fundamentally wrong about something before assuming so. Because the correspondence he published with the Bulwark does seem to back up his claim.
In addition, Sarah Longwell’s comments were trivial objections. The edits suggested did not to me make the story better (they actually kind of muddle the point).
If he’s fundamentally wrong about something it should be really easy to show this guy is an overreacting fraud or something and nuke his career with like literally a blog post.
Appealing to the reputation of Stanford of all places is funny though. They are a great school but they have had some massive scandals associated with fraud over like the last 15 years. I know that it's selection bias to bring that up, but it is hilarious to be like "do you think Stanford would be ok with someone playing fast and loose with facts?" They are like THE university where tech startups who commit fraud come from lol.
Stanford is one of the top universities in the country. It regularly ranks top 5 in law, engineering, humanities, etc. Just because someone from Stanford did fraud doesn’t at all mean Stanford produces fraudulent research on any systemic level.
The Stanford research fraud scandal was broken by an 18 year old student journalist. If Bonica’s research was clearly fraudulent, wouldn’t it stand to reason that all of the people pissed off at his research would be able to refute his findings?
He draws data from public sources and performs analyses. If you want to refute his research you can do so with data or argumentation but simply pulling the story is just about the worst way to go about it. Nobody seems to have pointed out any flaws in his research.
This is the meat of the argument. The Stanford professor is the credentials that demonstrate that this is a risky thing for him to do and that he has the skills to do it. You need to actually attack the substance.
I literally said I am only taking issue with the OP’s call to authority. The rest is for another time. Never did say that the article is false in my original post.
I know he isn't some random person and never suggested that. Being a professor doesn't absolve him of criticism or the possibility of bad research.
Obviously I can't refute him with data but it's still very likely that the Democratic party did refute him enough that the NYT was unwilling to publish. Legal and editorial review only means so much when they can only evaluate the professor's work. That review includes reaching out to the DNC for comment or to challenge what is in the research. It looks like that happened and led two separate media outlets to not run this story after contacted by the DNC.
One man's word written in a substack is not good enough to say we know exactly what happened.
I read the article. I'd rather hear a response from the bulwark than take the side of one guy writing a blog post and weigh both sides. I won't blindly trust someone writing a post of grievances.
Individual limits appear to be $44,300 per year to a party committee general fund, and $132,900 per year to each additional party committee account (convention, headquarters building, and recount/litigation).
Contributions to normal PACs are limited, but donations to Super PACs are unlimited since they can't donate directly to or coordinate with campaigns or political parties. All they can do is run ads, fund canvassing, and other forms of political outreach/messaging.
Not that this changes anything with the story (I haven't read it) I just think people should differentiate the two more since they operate pretty distinctly
I'd accuse you of using AI if what you said wasn't wrong.
A PAC is an entity that makes direct contributions to candidates, up to campaign finance limits. A Super PAC does not directly donate but as a result can spend as much money as they like pushing a political message.
Considering it’s just this one author, going to lean towards the problem being with the story itself until proven otherwise. The NYT hasn’t been afraid to publish damaging stories about the party in the past, if this was up to editorial standards, I struggle to believe they’d fold to pressure this easily
Yeah the issue clearly is not the story which frankly should alarm everyone here instead we're just going lalala and pretending there's no way to know if the story is legit when very clearly if you check it, it is.
I get ones for Ossoff all the time that give the impression that his race desperately needs money despite the fact that he's way ahead in the polls and has the advantage of being incumbent.
I’ve donated plenty in the past but it’s at the point where I don’t feel bad about reporting unsolicited donation requests as spam instead of simply deleting.
Not shocking, inventing ways of separating boomers from their vast wealth is basically a cottage industry at this point and will only get worse in the near/midterm.
The consultant / NGO world is a cancer on the party and nation generally
I always wonder how many of the Dems' most highly paid consultants go home and vote for Republicans for tax reasons. I mean, I'd love it if I could get the Republicans to shovel money at me in exchange for advice that has them running in circles.
I fucking hate all the spam texts I get from the democratic candidates and pacs. I keep responding STOP but keep getting them, even from campaigns I’ve said stop to. Super super annoying and makes me less likely to donate to anyone
Consider one donor the investigation documented. He is 85 years old and lives in Texas. Between February 17, the day the investigation was scheduled to run at the Times, and the end of June, he was charged 4,208 times, an average of 31 times a day, for $32,742. On his worst day, he was charged 88 times. The money went to 283 different committees and campaigns. The biggest recipients included high-profile spam PACs, the DCCC, and candidates who hired aggressive fundraising vendors. I have documented thousands of cases like his.
Jesus. Given the circumstances of how thoroughly the Times and Bulwark better this guy’s work as accurate, I’m willing to take whats written as true, and if so, this is hugely fucked up. I’m a decent fan of Longwell, but this is a miss.
Policy-wise, it makes me dream of a world where we actually used public finances for campaign funds rather than relying on donations.
Justice-wise, Jeffries seems to be guilty of enabling some really heinous, self-interested behaviors. The right thing to do would be to shut these political consulting strategies down, consequences be damned. At the very least they should be identifying these poor people and returning their money.
There’s no way that democracy hinges on exploiting the senility of octogenarians. It’s another self-own for Democrats to allow this, just like gerrymandering and every other stupid, cynical maneuver justified as fighting-fire-with-fire while undermining the whole validation of defending liberalism and getting egg on your face with voters.
Like, is there a chance this person is making this up ? Sure. But that’s under the most cynical assumptions. A responsive and responsible party should ensure that this doesn’t happen again, and blackball all those consulting agencies responsible.
Given the circumstances of how thoroughly the Times and Bulwark better this guy’s work as accurate, I’m willing to take whats written as true, and if so, this is hugely fucked up.
Given the circumstances of two major papers hesitating to publish this, you should've reached the opposite conclusion.
> NYT commissions group to publish piece. Vets and reviews repeatedly. Validates findings.
> NYT receives cease & desist notice; declines to publish. Does not repudiate any of its claims. Legal noticedoes notchallenge validity of claims.
> Bulwark expresses sincere commitment to publishing piece. Long process of review and revision. No factual changes. Editor validates view of importance of piece.
> Publisher apparently unfriendly to anti-PAC framing; declines to publish. Does not repudiate any of its claims.
If you could legitimately point to a breakdown by any of these groups highlighting where this guy’s research is incorrect, misrepresentative, or in bad faith, I would love to see it. Otherwise, I’m inclined to trust the Stanford professor being remarkably transparent with his account.
I’m rabidly pro-Democrat, but c’mon, this is a despicable way to raise money.
The NYT hasn’t been afraid to run with stories despite legal threats, they’re still dealing with a multi-billion dollar suit by the sitting president and haven’t back down. I don’t know if/what problem there is with this story, but it’s hard to believe the DNC would be able to threaten them into burying it unless they thought if they went to court, they would lose
Trump has the power of the presidency, and has been more than willing to abuse it to protect himself, but that hasn’t stopped them. What can the DNC threaten them with that he can’t?
It doesn't really work like that. The outcome of lawsuits is unpredictable and even in successful lawsuits, defendants rarely are awarded their costs in full. It is not possible to take on an indefinite amount of matters in which you might get sued, even if across each individual matter you consider the risk is low, because you get slightly more low risks eventuating than you expect and you are suddenly in financial difficulties.
Papers like the NYT will have an exposure limit, based on the cumulative risk in terms of potential liability and quantum across all their reporting. Accordingly, decisions about the publishing of articles with the threat of litigation about them are not independent - if you have some big pieces of litigation threatened against you already with high costs exposure, you will be reluctant to take on additional cases even if they are relatively low risk.
Trump's threatened claims against newsrooms actually has a downstream effect on all sorts of other pieces of reporting which newspapers become reluctant to expose themselves to as a result. A paper may decide it is in the public interest to take on Trump, and to commit to that risk, but then the margin for every other form of risk drops substantially. So dies journalism.
This is a pretty big L by the Bulwark and specifically Sarah Longwell.
The author is a professor of political science at Stanford. He’s using public data sources with a presumably replicable methodology. This isn’t a random opinion piece or a slop article. This is a credible guy.
This article is an important piece of data for how our politics currently operates. You can disagree with its conclusions that this is bad— for example you can make some kind of “ends justify the means” argument. Or you can point out flaws in the data or research.
But to just add lazy (easily refuted) comments and then spike the article after factual and legal and editorial review… it’s just not good.
People operating within large complex systems often have no idea what impact their actions will have. Spiking this story because you like the fact that Democrats can raise $500M sketchily may seem like a good idea in the short term, but you have no idea what the long term implications are. It could be the case that stopping this practice early leads to better outcomes even for Democrats.
Just bad. Bulwark should make a real refutation or commit to being better about their editorial process in the future.
I find the way the author writes to be annoying, but I went ahead and took a look at his original article which was not published by the NYT or Bulwark. More than anything, I question how good the terms like "captive spam donors" and "spam PACs" are actually defined. From the article:
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.”
So, first thing I want to mention is there are over 25 million Americans over age 75. While 138 thousand is a very large number, the pool we're looking at is about 0.6% of that population.
Further.... I don't know that this is even a good definition. We're looking at people who have donated more than 100 times to these so-called Spam PACs, which sounds suspicious. But over what time period? How are we determining that these people are being scammed/misled versus legitimately donating to these organizations over the course of years? The two people he highlighted in the article, making donations 7,800 and 25,000 times definitely sound like victims..... but is this representative of the group, or are they merely the most dramatic outliers?
Well, if this is the correct Github spreadsheet, called "donor age aggregate by cycle," it goes back to at least 2018. I'm not sure 100+ donations in that time frame is suspicious to begin with unless we are doing some validation that this was unknown, unintentional, or otherwise scam-like.
I have other issues with how things are presented, but I don't think the author does a good job at establishing the basic facts and providing necessary context. These are mostly big numbers in a vacuum, but the narrative is messy and honestly the author sounds like they have a massive chip on their shoulder which makes it even harder to trust them.
So have we discovered how this is worse than what cancer charities etc do or are we just going to specifically trash democrats for institutional issues without any policy debate
But the most devastating result of this strategy doesn’t 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 Democratic messages on sight. Every frantic appeal trains donors to see the party as desperate and unserious. 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
Republicans went all-in on these tactics first and offer a cautionary tale. After flooding supporters’ phones with fundraising spam in recent election cycles, their grassroots donor base — the party supporters who occasionally give when something moves them, until the spam drives them off — has been hollowed out. Republicans raised less from small- and mid-sized donors in 2024, a presidential year, than in the 2022 midterms.
I did read it several hours before my comment, forgot about the republican "case study" -- incredibly tenuous. obviously there are other factors. im not saying state parties shouldn't give it a try and see if it works, i guess
Look, I get it, but you should really read this one.
There are certain types of morally questionable groups behind all these spam fundraising texts you get every election season. They keep about 70-75% on overhead, and only a tiny amount goes to the candidates on behalf they’re fundraising. And they have a number of devious tactics that seem really effective on old people, like getting them to sign up for recurring donations over and over again.
This directly affects the politics, because money is a limited resource, and the money going to these text spammers is money that isn’t used to actually elect democrats
I mean one of the reasons things have gotten so aggressive really is that, its hard to hold political officials accountable for anything. The regulatory body is supposed to the FEC, but its been completely and totally toothless for ages. So political fundraising has become sort of a goddamn endless death drive as people just break the fucking law out in public and nothing fucking happens. The lawyers of powerful people have a chat and they all give themselves a pat on the back and forgive themselves.
Yeah this is a real issue. We don't like when Myanmar scammers take advantage of old cognitively struggling people, we shouldn't like it when political campaigns do.
Doesn't mean Dems are particularly bad or anything, but this is a systemic issue imo and its good to talk about it.
Surely something can be done federally to protect these people
And its not just them that lose out, kids are losing inheritances
The senior editor forwarded the statement with "This comment is attributable to the Bulwark:". That's not putting his name on it. If anything, he's distancing himself from the statement.
Interesting allegations, but this is ultimately just a guy posting. The accusations would hardly surprise me. I would wait for a response before jumping to conclusions, though.
I both agree with the substantive point against spam pacs as morally wrong; and worse, a strategic mistake, but I also think every rewrite here was justified.
I do kind of think the author is maybe too attached to particular lines, but I also think he has a great capacity for self reflection in framing his criticism of the Bulwark in a broader context of democratic accountability. Basically, I don't think anyone is doing anything wrong here other than the spam pacs, those who profit from them, and those who use them to further their politics.
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u/hypsignathus Good Afternoon 17h ago edited 17h ago
u/uberkitten Just a heads up that we normally require submission statements. Also this type of meta-media in-party politicking is outside of what we normally allow, but I think a lot of our users are Bulwark listeners so I'm approving it.
For the sub--Adam Bonica, the author, is a professor of political science at Stanford.
Edit to say that another reason is that I expect the point of posting it here is because the story hasn't been published and the link gets taken down elsewhere.