How the Democratic Party Runs on Elder Fraud

Don’t respond to the text, don’t even read it, and make sure your parents don’t either.

Welcome to the podcast Organized Money. You can listen to today’s episode on Apple on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Have you noticed the seemingly endless, catastrophic-sounding text messages from political candidates? Messages like: “Barack Needs Your Help!”; “Social Security Is Ending!”; or “Help, We’re Losing The Election!”, all ending with a plea to throw in a donation.

It turns out these spam messages are part of a sophisticated and profitable arm of political fundraising that has grown substantially over the last decade plus. It’s gone from grassroots fundraising to what can arguably be called elder fraud—where small numbers of frightened, sometimes mentally unwell Americans give hundreds or thousands in response to these text messages.

Today on the show, Matt and David sit down with Adam Bonica, a political scientist and author of “Hook and Squeeze: How Democratic consultants, committees, and party leaders built a fundraising spam pipeline that funnels money from a captive pool of elderly donors into their own operations.”, to find out how and why the Democratic Party embraced this style of political marketing, why it feels so entrenched in party politics, and what we can do about it. We’ll also get into the strange story of Adam’s research, which was edited and fact-checked by The New York Times for months, before spiking the story out of fear from political consultants. Read more about the story, and check out Adam’s writing at Data4Democracy.

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Thank you so much for listening. If there’s a monopoly you’d like us to explore this year, or if you have anything else to tell us, please let us know by leaving a comment or by responding directly to this email.