Last week the New York Times ran a story about the murky world of email fundraising, highlighting the strangely large number of solicitations that appeared to come from Texas gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke—they were marked “official Beto” or “team Beto”—but were in fact from unaffiliated groups that may not do anything to elected O’Rourke.
The problem here isn’t that O’Rourke lacks cash. He raised $2 million in his campaign’s first 24 hours; if he loses it’s not going to be because he didn’t have enough money. There’s more cash than ever sloshing around the Democratic Party, much of it from small donors, and it’s this phenomenon that makes less-than-totally-honest fundraising appeals profitable. In the hours after O’Rourke was getting attention for the announcement of his campaign, he was in the news, and since small donors have an unfortunate tendency to give to whatever shiny object is in the news cycle, it made sense for left-leaning PACs to hitch themselves to his star. The problem is that, as the Times points out, it can be hard to separate the valid fundraising appeals from the shady.
Here’s a quick primer on how you can weed out dishonest solicitations.
Read the ActBlue page carefully
Let’s look at one of the PACs that the Times identified as trying to associate itself with O’Rourke: the Blue South PAC, which according to the Times sent five emails with the phrase “Team Beto” in the first three days of his campaign. If you got one of these emails and clicked through to the ActBlue page, you would have seen this (which is archived here as the original page is no longer active):
The “Team Beto” language and the big photo of O’Rourke might lead you to believe that you’re donating to help him win in Texas. But you’re not, you’re donating to the Blue South, which is—well, we’ll get to that. The text to pay attention to is highlighted in the above screenshot. ActBlue pages always include a “your donation will benefit ____” above the part where you click the amount you want to donate. If the money is going directly to a candidate, it will just say “your donation will benefit CANDIDATE NAME.” If it’s going somewhere else, or if it’s split between several candidates and groups, it will say so.
Don’t give to groups you don’t recognize
There are some outright scam artists trying to fool people into donating to phony political groups. But more commonly what you’ll see are PACs with vague missions that may be trying to elect Democrats but incidentally, enrich the people who founded them.
Blue South, the Times reports, is affiliated with a digital strategist named Zach Schreiber, who told the newspaper that Blue South and an affiliated PAC called Defeat Republicans, which sent fundraising appeals marked “Official Beto,” were doing things “in line with the industry best practices.” But if you go through the FEC records of these two PACs you’ll find that Defeat Republicans, which has spent just over $550,000 this year, paid Schrieber over $75,000 in that period and also paid something called Opt-In Strategies, where Schrieber is a consultant, over $86,000. Blue South has raised $56,000 this year and spent $37,000, over $13,000 of which went to UpWave Digital Solutions, which does not list employees on its website but which Schreiber founded, according to his LinkedIn profile. (Blue Tent has reached out to Schreiber for comment but did not immediately hear back.)
That’s a lot of affiliations to untangle, and that’s pretty standard for the world of PACs and political consulting. It’s important to note that none of the above is proof Blue South is a straight-up scam. Nothing suggests it is breaking the law or even doing anything all that uncommon. But it’s sort of unclear what the PAC actually does, and its website is very short on details. It’s probably not worth your time picking through the FEC website and figuring out whether a PAC is giving a disproportionate amount of money to the consultant who runs it; a simpler course of action is just to not give to any group you don’t recognize. There are lots of very well-established candidates and organizations doing great work, you don’t need to give to Generic Name With Vague Mission PAC.
Read more Blue Tent
Of course, there are also a lot of groups that aren’t well known but are also doing great work. It’s important to fund these organizations, and arguably more important than giving money to the Democratic National Committee or a similarly deep-pocketed institution.
How do you find these? That’s tricky. Some organizations you may know collaborate with others you might not, and that can be a useful way to broaden your giving. Sister District is one group Blue Tent has written about which recommends some smaller orgs; Movement Voter Project has a longer directory of groups.
Or you can also just read Blue Tent! A major part of our mission is identifying PACs and nonprofits that are worth your money, and describing as precisely as we can what they are spending money on. Our briefs are going to be much more detailed than a solicitation email, and we won’t pretend to be part of the Beto O’Rourke campaign either.