As Democratic donors know too well, each day brings a deluge of misleading, manipulative or outright false email appeals from Democratic candidates and institutions.
There are so many shady email fundraising programs run by campaigns or by companies on behalf of campaigns it’s difficult to provide a comprehensive list. But they are ubiquitous. And they are “bipartisan.” As we previously reported, researchers at Princeton University found that the vast majority of both Democratic and Republican email fundraising pleas sent during the 2020 cycle used misleading statements, emotional manipulation, or both.
“It’s an open secret at this point that a number of Democratic Party institutions have been engaging as questionable actors in this space,” said Murshed Zaheed. Zaheed is a progressive strategist who has worked on former Vermont Democratic Gov. Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, as a senior staffer for former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV), and as vice president for politics at CREDO. Currently, he’s the founder of the strategic communications firm Pacifica Strategies. Zaheed advocates for ethical practices in political fundraising, and says that today, the Democratic Party treats donors “as inanimate lists (of names) as opposed to communities that belong with them.”
In this piece, we’re focused on the biggest and highest-paid offenders using disclosures filed with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC) by Democratic candidates, consultants and entities.
There are some limits to what can be gleaned from filings. One, the information isn’t completely up to date, so we worked from available data on spending in 2020 and 2021. Absent comment from the campaigns and organizations we contacted, there is no way of knowing whether or not specific campaigns and organizations are currently doing business with shady email vendors with which they contracted in prior cycles. Two, the FEC doesn’t provide specific information on services rendered. We’ve therefore limited our analysis to payment descriptions that are most likely to be related to email fundraising.
The largest email fundraising vendors also do other work, such as purchasing digital ads and other advertising, but this piece focuses only on work related to email fundraising.
Mothership Strategies: “Willing to do anything to scam donors out of a buck”
Mothership Strategies, one of the worst vendors, was founded by former Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) staffers. The firm actually pioneered shady tactics, including deceptive subject lines like those implying the supposed sender is offering the recipient a job interview.
Just how bad is Mothership? Bad enough that a 2019 Washington Post report called out the company, specifically citing allegations that its 2018 emails for the Progressive Turnout Project constituted a “barrage of misleading and even threatening messages. One email, for example, suggested that the recipients’ friends and neighbors would be notified if they failed to cast a ballot, according to a copy posted online and confirmed by the group.”
If you think Mothership learned something from these critiques, think again. In 2021, the New York Times cited the company for deceiving senior citizens.
“They come up with a lot of that stuff and sort of push the envelope on just how deceptive and how disrespectful to potential donors campaigns and PACs can be,” said Josh Nelson, CEO of Civic Shout and co-founder of The Juggernaut Project, two companies that help Democratic campaigns and progressive groups grow their opt-in email lists. “Mothership is willing to do anything to scam donors out of a buck.”
So just who has used Mothership Strategies’ services? Here’s a partial list of their biggest customers in 2020 and 2021:
Jaime Harrison, chair of the Democratic National Committee and failed 2020 U.S. Senate candidate. Harrison’s campaign paid Mothership Strategies more than $11 million, including more than $4.7 million in the closing months of Harrison’s 2020 campaign, for work described in FEC filings as “digital advertising & services” and “digital services & advertising.” Blue Tent reached out to the DNC’s press office, asking whether Harrison has any regrets about hiring Mothership Strategies and whether the DNC recommends the company, but didn’t receive a reply as of this writing.
Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA), whose campaign paid Mothership more than $2 million between 2020 and 2021 for “online fundraising consulting,” also didn’t reply to Blue Tent’s request for comment.
While Harrison and Ossoff's campaigns were Mothership’s top two 2020 candidate clients, they were far from alone. The Stop Republicans PAC paid the company more than $13 million for “digital advocacy” and “digital advertising.” Progressive Turnout Project, the National Democratic Training Committee PAC, and the Democratic Strategy Institute were also big spenders ($500,000 and above) that funneled money to Mothership for services that probably included some kind of email fundraising in 2020 and 2021.
Sapphire Strategies: Nancy Pelosi’s ‘Most Important’ scam email shop
Do you get “the Most Important Email we’ve ever sent you!” from U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) every few days or weeks? If so, those emails are almost certainly sent to you courtesy of Sapphire Strategies. The speaker’s congressional campaign committee and her PAC to the Future are, in fact, Sapphire’s largest customers by far — between them, they paid the company more than $11 million total in 2020 and 2021 for services including “list acquisition” and “fundraising consulting services.”
As we previously reported, at a time when the sky is falling for American democracy and trust in Democratic leadership is critical, the emails being sent in Pelosi’s name are over the top, manipulative, and often outright false and misleading. Blue Tent emailed the speaker’s press office about her use of Sapphire, and the emails it sends in her name, but hasn’t received a response.
Mothership Strategies and Sapphire Strategies aren’t just the largest of the companies engaged in potentially shady email fundraising practices: They’re the largest several times over. The biggest payment received during 2020–2021 by Bluefoot Political, another company that Nelson identified to Blue Tent as engaging in potentially shady practices, was just over $80,000. Bluefoot Political’s largest customers are two PACs: Democratic Victory PAC, Inc. and Integrity First PAC.
They scam because it “works”
The people behind large-scale shady email fundraising campaigns — including entities like the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, companies like Mothership or Sapphire, or electoral campaigns — engage in emotional manipulation and/or outright falsehoods for one reason: Those tactics work — at least, they work for large organizations that can afford to turn off tens of thousands of donors (or more) without suffering real consequences.
“I’m not talking about Mothership, (because) they’re a whole ’nother hell,” said Beth Becker, founder of Becker Digital Strategies. But whenever someone in the field concerned about, for example, the DCCC’s email strategies would bring those concerns to the organization’s former digital manager, that person would reply, “I understand what you’re saying, but it works for us.” As Blue Tent has previously reported, the Trump campaign borrowed the idea of fictitious matching gift campaigns from the DCCC.
But, Becker said, the reason these tactics work for larger organizations is precisely because those organizations have donor lists consisting of hundreds of thousands or even millions of contacts, so they can afford both a very small response rate, and they have the money to rent or buy other lists to make up for a large “unsubscribe” rate. When a company or campaign has those kinds of resources, Becker said, “it’s just like P.T. Barnum said: There’s always another sucker right around the corner. And they can afford to piss people off and have people unsubscribe, and have people report them as spam, because there’s literally another sucker right around the corner for them.”
Given that distrust in government and elected officials is rising due, in part, to misinformation, it seems that the Democratic Party might want to rethink the ways in which it is raising money and who it is paying to do so.