Show Notes
“Spam PACs” and gullible grannies. Money in politics is taking a sinister turn. A Stanford professor studied how unscrupulous political funders are targeting senior citizens with apocalyptic come-ons to raise money for themselves and their candidates.
Adam Bonica, a Stanford University political science professor, combined contribution data from the Federal Election Commission with age data from voter registration lists, covering more than 300 million donations. He found that donors who send money in response to Democratic fundraising spam are overwhelmingly elderly, and a surprisingly concentrated group of them accounts for the bulk of the money raised.
Yet, an article he wrote detailing those findings went through eight months of fact-checking and legal review by the New York Times before the Democrat-aligned Elias Law Firm intimidated them against publishing it. Even the conservative-leaning website The Bulwark demanded heavy rewrites after they were pressed by attorneys for the “Progressive Turnout Project” and “Mothership Strategies.” Bonica published his full report on his own Substack this month.
Even the left-wing magazine The Nation called them out on the intimidation tactics.
What is going on here?
“What’s interesting about this piece is that they spam them on their phones and on email, and the numbers are quite shocking,” says author and investigative journalist Peter Schweizer on his podcast this week. “A CNN investigation found one person who discovered that their 93-year-old father was being inundated with Democratic donation appeals,” Schweizer says.
As Bonica writes, “Who is behind this flood? A thriving industry of digital-fundraising consultants who specialize in offering spam as a service, and the political action committees and candidates who adopt their methods. Together, they form a broader network of fundraising that deploys these methods at scale.”
“You’ve got this 85-year-old guy from Oxford, Ohio, who made 7,800 donations worth nearly $650,000 to Democratic causes, which by the way is more than double what is House is worth,” adds co-host Eric Eggers.
The hosts open the show with a great quote: “Politics is the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.” That was uttered in the 1940s by a German-American socialist named. Oscar Ameringer. And while it captures a lot, it misses some modern twists.
Bonica’s report notes that it was actually the Republican Party that pioneered this tactic several election cycles ago but has mostly “hollowed out” their donor base and got less from small- and mid-sized donors in 2024, a presidential year, than they did in the 2022 midterms.
It is not clear whether some of the older contributions Bonica analyzed were part of ActBlue’s “smurfing” scheme, in which contributions from one donor were entered and reported as having come from an individual who had no recollection of doing so. After Bonica wrote several articles on Substack last year about deceptive fundraising practices, ActBlue leadership announced a crackdown on deceptive fundraising tactics, explicitly forbidding the impersonation of candidates and unverified matching donations.
“Yet, in the four months after ActBlue’s crackdown, donations to spam PACs were up by 33 percent from the same period in 2023, the most recent comparable non-election year,” Bonica wrote. “Elderly donors are still being squeezed. Fifty-eight new Democratic PACs that meet my criteria for spam PAC behavior have begun raising money since the 2024 election. In 2025 alone, Democratic-aligned spam PACs raised more from individual donors than all Democratic Senate candidates combined.”
Like many people, Schweizer gets the same spam. “I get these texts from time to time to raise money for political candidates, and they do try to manipulate you,” Schweizer says. “I got one the other day that said, ‘Why are you ignoring us?’ And I’m like, ‘Because I don’t want to give to you!’ But if you’re 93 and you’re mentally impaired or emotionally fragile, you’re going to feel guilty and you’re going to be goaded into making these donations.”
Eggers quotes from the study about the money raised by leading Democratic House members like minority leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY).
“In 2018, he had one of the youngest donor bases of any House Democrat (average donor age of 54),” Eggers says. “Only 21 percent of his donors were 65 or older.”
“Now, since he became caucus chair, he started using these spam PACs, and it starts to shift. In this election cycle, his average donor age is 73 and the donor base of the senior citizens (65+) is now 86 percent,” Eggers says.
“The professor calls them ‘captive spam donors,’” Schweizer says. “It’s shocking to me that The New York Times did not want to run this piece.”
GAI has worked with the Times in the past. In 2015, Schweizer collaborated with reporter Jo Becker on a blockbuster frontpage story detailing the Clinton Foundation’s involvement with the sale of the Uranium One mining company to Russia.
“We used to work with the New York Times all the time. We’re happy to work with them now if they’re interested in sharing our information. But It’s really become a protection racket precisely for those who are against Donald Trump,” Schweizer says.
“[The Times] do not want to run any article that they believe is going to weaken anybody who is critical of Trump. So, in this case, the Democratic Party. If this was about the Republican Party, I think they would have run this piece, and they should have run the piece.”
Schweizer and Eggers also tip their hats to a very good piece of reporting by the Washington Post this week tabulating the big-money donors to both parties. While there are few surprises at who the top individual donors are (spoiler alert: George Soros), the industries spending the most on politics are not the traditional ones.
“It shows you how the world is changing. If you had asked most people, including me, who were the top two donors to political campaigns, I would have said, Big Tech, Big Oil, and Wall Street,” Schweizer says. “But no, it’s the crypto guys. They want to make sure there is minimal regulation, which is a reasonable position, but they also want to shape it.”
