Six and a half years ago, the Washington Post published a story about a sketchy Democratic consulting firm called Mothership Strategies. Mothership's brand of panic-inducing solicitations by text and email had been a big success during the 2018 midterms.
The solicitations piled into voters’ email accounts — sometimes multiple times a day. And they carried alarming messages, often in blaring capital letters.
“We’re on the verge of BANKRUPTCY.”
“Our bank account is ALMOST EMPTY!”
“Trump is INCHES away from firing Robert Mueller.”
The catastrophic language yielded a fundraising bonanza for clients of Mothership Strategies, a little-known and relatively new digital consulting firm that raked in tens of millions of dollars from a tide of small donations that flowed to Democrats during the 2018 midterm elections.
The company was founded in 2014 by three people with experience in digital fundraising for Democrats. Already by 2018 it was a big success.
The firm has grown rapidly, from fewer than 40 staffers in January 2017 to 100 by the end of 2018. The company said it helped raise nearly $150 million for its clients in the 2018 cycle. That surge of cash helped make Mothership one of the top paid firms in what was the most expensive midterm election in U.S. history, collecting $35 million for its services from political committees during the past two years, according to Federal Election Commission records.
Lipsett, Starnes and Berlin said the company retained less than half of the money it was paid, with the rest passed on to their vendors for expenses.
But criticism of Mothership's tactics led it to step back from involvement in most campaigns. By 2023, Politico was reporting it had reinvented itself and was making even more money than before.
Once considered a juggernaut in the Democratic digital space, the firm is no longer in mainstream politics following fierce criticism over its aggressive fundraising tactics and allegations that its huge money hauls were being funneled back to the company itself.
But rather than disappear from the political scene, Mothership has found a lower-profile roster of clients, primarily political action committees not affiliated with politicians. And campaign finance records, interviews, and communications from the firm show that it’s continuing to collect significant fees while deploying the very same aggressive business practices — such as sending fundraising emails with catastrophic, eyebrow-raising language — that gave it pariah status in the first place.
The group’s second act is raising new alarms among Democrats who fear that those methods draw money away from campaigns and other liberal causes. They also worry its actions hurt the progressive community’s reputation more broadly and threaten to send the entire industry into a race to the bottom.
Mothership was paid over $50 million during the 2022 midterms, according to money-in-politics watchdog group OpenSecrets. That total is a substantial portion of what it helped clients raise.
By last July the Kamala Harris campaign was warning donors not to get suckered by similar fundraising scams. The Bulwark ran a story about a group called Democratic Power that was cashing in on the announcement of Harris as the new nominee.
“Everyone in politics knows this whole operation is a scam designed to trick people who think they are donating to help a candidate they care about,” said one prominent Democratic digital operative. “They point to the fact they give a small percentage of the money they raise directly to campaigns, but that is just the cost of doing business for moments of scrutiny while siphoning the lion’s share into organizations they control.”...
One recent text included a picture of Barbra Streisand, the famed singer, actress, and longtime Democrat, saying how “excited” she is “to support KAMALA HARRIS!” and offering a “700% MATCH ACTIVE” for donations to help “crush” Donald Trump.
But the text wasn’t from Streisand or the Harris campaign. It was from “Democratic Power,” a group started in October 2022 at an address that appears to be a UPS store in Southeast Washington, D.C.
And that brings me to a post published yesterday on Substack by Adam Bonica, a political science professor at Stanford. He writes that Mothership Strategies is still using the same panic-inducing texts to raise lots of money, almost none of which goes to candidates or campaigns.
The illusion of a sprawling grassroots movement, with its dozens of different PAC names, quickly gave way to a much simpler and more alarming reality. It only required pulling on a single thread—tracing who a few of the most aggressive PACs were paying—to watch their entire manufactured world unravel. What emerged was not a diverse network of activists, but a concentrated ecosystem built to serve the firm at its center: Mothership Strategies...
The core defense of these aggressive fundraising tactics rests on a single claim: they are brutally effective. The FEC data proves this is a fallacy. An examination of the money flowing through the Mothership network reveals a system designed not for political impact, but for enriching the consultants who operate it.
To understand the scale of this operation, consider the total amount raised. Since 2018, this core network of Mothership-linked PACs has raised approximately $678 million from individual donors...
After subtracting these massive operational costs—the payments to Mothership, the fees for texting services, the cost of digital ads and list rentals—the final sum delivered to candidates and committees is vanishingly small. My analysis of the network's FEC disbursements reveals that, at most, $11 million of the $678 million raised from individuals has made its way to candidates, campaigns, or the national party committees.
Why does the Democratic Party tolerate this? Bonica says it's likely because half of the $11 million being paid out goes to the DNC, DCCC and DSCC. Five million dollars is a tiny percentage of the overall take, but it's not nothing.
Beyond the fact that less than 2% of the money raised goes to campaigns, critics of this system fear it will eventually result in donors who are exhausted by the constant messages asking for money. That creates a lack of trust which could hurt the party long term.
These are the garden variety unhinged type of messages. "EVERYONE is signing to STOP Trump's plan to defund NPR," one announces, claiming "Senate votes in 2 hrs & your name is missing." Another warns of Ken Burns's "EARTH-SHATTERING" statement about public broadcasting. A third simply shouts: "CORY BOOKER: FILIBUSTERS!!"
The goal is to startle, not inform. Picture someone bursting into your living room, shouting about an emergency, then holding out a collection plate before vanishing.
The Democratic Party has made these dishonest panic appeals the norm even though everyone knows they are lies.
A disturbing question hangs over modern political fundraising: when did deceiving supporters for contributions become acceptable? According to industry insiders, the practice of fake donation matching—a tactic that would violate campaign finance laws if real—has become so normalized that fundraising consultants openly acknowledge "nobody is actually matching anything." Yet campaigns demand its use anyway.
Consider how abnormal this behavior is. Costco doesn't text daily claiming they're "close to tears" because I haven't renewed my membership. Netflix doesn't scream "STREAMING EMERGENCY!!" at 6 AM. Amazon doesn't claim Jeff Bezos is personally devastated by shopping cart abandonment. Only political campaigns and fraudulent charities communicate this way.
This is more than just a marketing failure; it is a failure of political leadership. A party that claims to champion consumer protection in public policy employs deceptive, bait-and-switch tactics in its own communications. A party that purports to protect the vulnerable builds fundraising models that prey upon them.
A party that claims to be trying to rescue democracy is in fact treating people who believe in democracy like marks for personal enrichment. How are people going to feel about the party when they find out?
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