That “Team Beto” fundraising email? It might not be from Beto
Kenneth Pennington, a top digital strategist for Beto O’rourke, had a simple plan.
O’rourke would announce his bid for governor of Texas early on a recent Monday morning, and Pennington would break the news via email to O’rourke’s lucrative list of supporters, a loyal following that raised tens of millions of dollars for O’rourke in his past bids for the Senate and the White House.
But Pennington soon noticed something troubling: a parallel wave of look-alike emails from groups completely unaffiliated with the O’rourke campaign that were designed to capitalize on the Texas Democrat’s moment. The emails used subject lines, sender names and URLS embedded with phrases like “team Beto” and “official Beto.” And in most cases, none of the money these emails raised went directly to the campaign.
O’rourke still brought in more than $2 million from 31,000 donors, the largest 24-hour sum any new candidate has announced this year, his campaign said. But for Pennington and the rest of the campaign, the nagging question was how much more they might have hauled in if other Democratic groups had not been so busy siphoning off their share.
“The frustrating thing,” Pennington said, “is we will never know how much we lost.”
Welcome to the sometimessketchy world of online campaign fundraising, where misdirection and misleading everyday Americans — often older Americans — to maximize clicks and cash is increasingly a dark art form.
Imitating others and mimicking official correspondence with postage-paid mailers is an age-old trick that marketers have used since long before the internet. The tactic has been adapted and updated for the digital era — and appears to be accelerating in prevalence in the political sphere.
At stake can be millions of dollars in an era when mass online political donating is in vogue in both parties. Copycatting O’rourke’s brand surged in popularity recently, but on the Republican side, mimicking the brand of former President Donald Trump has been common for months.
In some cases, established organizations are simply capitalizing on the day’s big news or the politician of the moment to gin up excitement among their own supporters with some verbal sleightof-hand. In others, political action committees with anodyne names are raising funds in the name of a popular politician that they have no affiliation with at all. Pennington described such groups as “leeches” and “scam PACS.”
Where the money goes from there can be murky, although big payments to the operatives and consulting firms that operate those PACS have drawn increasing scrutiny from political colleagues, regulators and law enforcement alike.
Some of these operations are legal, sometimes burying the requisite disclaimers in the fine print. Others may not be. This month, the Justice Department charged three political operatives with running a scheme that prosecutors said defrauded small donors of $3.5 million.
“I am not at all surprised that unscrupulous actors are essentially impersonating popular Democratic campaigns to try to raise money,” said Josh Nelson, a Democratic digital strategist who runs a firm, The Juggernaut Project, focused on growing email lists more ethically. “That’s the unfortunate trend we’ve seen.”
Nelson has been pressuring progressives publicly to abandon more deceptive fundraising tactics and has asked the leading Democratic technology companies to intervene because new laws are unlikely to stiffen penalties for deception anytime soon.
“Ultimately, I think it is going to take technology vendors cracking down on these tactics,” Nelson said.
For now, there seems to be little that the most aggressive politicians and PACS in both parties will not say to raise more money.
“Your COVID test result,” read the alarming subject line of a fundraising email from the campaign arm of House conservatives the day before O’rourke entered the governor’s race. (The email was about mobilizing opposition to a COVID-19 vaccine mandate.)
A new favorite tactic of the Republican National Committee has been making it appear as if supporters have urgent and overdue bills. “WARNING: Payment Incomplete” has been the sender line of more than 15 party emails since August, including one just before Thanksgiving. (A warning this week was about membership status as “Trump Social Media Founding Supporter.”)
The day after O’rourke’s announcement, the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, sent an email to supporters who had not ordered anything, using “Your Order Confirmation” as the sender and “Order ID: 73G526S” as the subject line. (The email was an effort to sell “Let’s Go Brandon” wrapping paper, which references a popular conservative phrase that has become a stand-in for an insult aimed at President Joe Biden.)
The House Conservatives Fund, the Republican National Committee and Abbott’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment.
Some of these examples may seem like easily detectable and even harmless deceptions. But strategists in both parties say a huge share of online cash is raised from older Americans who are less adroit online and have a harder time separating fact from hyperbole.
When O’rourke ran for Senate in 2018, he shattered Democratic fundraising records, and his entry into the 2022 governor’s race had been highly anticipated. His campaign team held discussions about how to limit the funds that less scrupulous actors might try to cannibalize.
And outside groups did pounce almost immediately.
Nelson, the Democratic digital strategist, said groups keep doing it because it works. But he worries that over time bad actors could poison the well for the whole party if donors stop trusting political groups with their money.
“Ultimately there is a real risk that we’re going to push donors away,” he said.