Thursday, April 22, 2021

Following The Money

Two of the leading Republican firebrands in Congress touted big fundraising hauls as a show of grassroots support for their high-profile stands against accepting the 2020 election results.

But new financial disclosures show that Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., relied on an email marketing vendor that takes as much as 80 cents on the dollar. That means their headline-grabbing numbers were more the product of expensively soliciting hardcore Republicans than an organic groundswell of far-reaching support.

I made some donations to the Senatorial campaign of Beto O'Rourke.  I was inspired, it was easy, I gave small amounts.

I am now on every Democratic candidate and organization e-mail list in Christendom.  Most of my e-mail is fundraising appeals sent by Nancy Pelosi or Eric Swalwell or Joaquin Castro or some other name I'm sure to recognize (no, I don't think any of those e-mails are personally typed and attached to a mailing list by the people named), when I'm not getting "Rand Paul" or "Ted Cruz" alerts, calculated (clearly) to outrage me enough to reach for my wallet.  It's constant, it's incessant, and frankly, it's irritating.  I finally caught on to what a scam it was when I saw the amounts raised for the Georgia Senate run-offs in January, while I was still receiveing e-mails assuring me disaster loomed because Republicans were vastly outraising Democrats.

The news said the opposite was true.  At that point I understood (yes, an old incandescent bulb lit up just above my head.  I am that old.) that the fundraising was the purpose, not the message, not the means to an end.  Small donors, in other words, are getting fleeced.

That doesn't mean everybody is doing what Hawley and Greene are doing; but who knows?  It is now clearer that Trump didn't invent the grift of political small-dollar donors, he didn't even perfect it.  

And it really raises the question of the old chestnut of political reporting: how much a candidate reports to have raised. Because it could well be all that money ain't goin' to the candidate's campaign, anymore than what the GOP spends at Mar-A-Lago is being contributed to GOP campaign efforts.

Hawley and Greene each reported raising more than $3 million in the first three months of the year, an unusually large sum for freshman lawmakers, according to new filings with the Federal Election Commission. That’s more than the average House member raises in an entire two-year cycle, according to data compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics. The tallies generated favorable press coverage for Hawley and Greene, and they both seized on the numbers to claim a popular mandate.

Politico called Greene’s result “eye-popping” and “staggering,” a sign that she “appears to have actually benefited from all the controversies that have consumed her first few months in office.” The House voted in February to remove Greene from her committee assignments because of her social media posts that promoted far-right conspiracy theories; racist, anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim rhetoric; and violence against Democratic leaders.

“I am humbled, overjoyed and so excited to announce what happened over the past few months as I have been the most attacked freshman member of Congress in history,” Greene said in an emailed statement on April 7. “Accumulating $3.2 million with small dollar donations is the absolute BEST support I could possibly ask for!”

As for Hawley, who was the first senator to say he’d object to certifying the Electoral College results on Jan. 6, Politico proclaimed that his massive increase showed “how anti-establishment Republicans are parlaying controversy into small-dollar fundraising success.” Hawley’s pollster, Wes Anderson with the political consulting firm OnMessage, said in a memo distributed to supporters that the “fundraising surge” made “crystal clear that a strong majority of Missouri voters and donors stand firmly with Senator Hawley, in spite of the continued false attacks coming from the radical left.”

It wasn’t until later, when the campaigns disclosed their spending details in last week’s FEC reports, that it became clearer how they raised so much money: by paying to borrow another organization’s mailing list.

“List rental” was the No. 1 expense for both campaigns, totaling almost $600,000 for each of them. It’s common for campaigns to rent lists from outside groups or other candidates to broaden their reach. But for Hawley and Greene, the cost was unusually high, amounting to almost 20% of all the money they raised in January, February and March.

The actual return on renting the lists was likely even lower, since it’s probable that not all their donations came from emailing those lists. It’s not possible to tell from the FEC filings which contributions resulted from which solicitations. Firms that sell lists sometimes demand huge cuts: The top vendor for Hawley and Greene, LGM Consulting Group, charges as much as 80%, according to a contract disclosed in Florida court records as part of a dispute involving Lacy Johnson’s long-shot bid to unseat Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn.

The large print giveth, the small print taketh away.

Far beyond these two campaigns or this one company, small-dollar fundraising has exploded thanks to easy online payments, which are rewriting the playbook for campaign finance in both parties. At the same time, the rise of email fundraising has spawned some aggressive or even deceptive marketing tactics and made plenty of room for consultants and vendors to profit. A move by then-President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign to sign up supporters for recurring payments by default led to as much as 3% of all credit card fraud claims filed with major banks, according to The New York Times. In some long-shot congressional races, consultants could walk away with almost half of all the money raised, The Washington Post reported.

Are Hawley and Greene important power brokers in DC?  Well, they've raised a lot of money, haven't they?  Politico says so; and it's all a game of perceptions.  But who's playing the game, and who's paying the house?

The cost to rent a list can be a flat fee, a percentage cut of money raised, or even all money raised after a campaign clears a certain threshold. Donors have limited visibility into where their money goes and may not realize how much is being diverted from the candidate they mean to support. 

Big money donors know who their money is going to, and know they'll get their phone calls answered because of it.  Small donors?  What do they know, at all?

Political professionals have gotten more sophisticated about efficiently converting online outrage into campaign cash. At the same time, candidates who court controversy may increasingly rely on rage-fueled online fundraising as more traditional donors freeze them out. In the aftermath of Jan. 6, Hawley lost the support of some big donors, and major companies such as AT&T and Honeywell pledged to withhold donations from lawmakers who objected to the Electoral College vote.

“The news cycle that emerges out of controversial behavior by a candidate is like a strong gust of wind, and these mechanisms like list-building are the equivalent of sails,” said Eric Wilson, a digital strategist who has advised Sen. Marco Rubio and the National Republican Senatorial Committee. “For candidates like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Josh Hawley, who have largely been shunned by traditional corporate donors who are frequently the mainstays for elected officials, especially in off years, they have no choice but to pursue grassroots fundraising. And in order for that to work, they have to continue to make more noise. It is a feedback loop in that regard.” 

We have met the enemy, and he is us.  And have you wondered what keeps Tucker Carlson on FoxNews, besides the support of Rupert Murdoch?  Wonder no more:

In one email, sent on March 6, Hawley touted his interview on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show, in which Hawley said Democrats would use the Jan. 6 insurrection “as an excuse to seize power, to control more power, to step on people’s Second Amendment rights, to take away their First Amendment rights.” Following up on a major media appearance with a fundraising email is an effective technique, Wilson said.

In a second email using the Rudnick-linked domain, Hawley explicitly laid out his goal of posting an impressive fundraising number.

“I will be filing the first FEC financial report I have filed since I stood up for the integrity of our nation’s election and the left began their attempts to cancel me,” Hawley said in the email. “With your donation of $25, $50, $100 or more before the critical deadline on March 31, we will shock the left — they won’t be able to ignore us any longer.”

Grifters gotta grift.  And marks gotta get taken. 

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