This is on the media's midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. If you've ever donated to a Democratic candidate,

you've probably been rewarded with an inbox full of never-ending streams of pleas for more money.

We're not talking about polite reminders here. Demands come in all caps sometimes,

attached to the names of celebrities like

George Clooney or Taylor Swift and warnings that something awful is about to happen.

Adam Bonica is a professor of political science at Stanford University. He reached his

breaking point with Democratic Party spam last year, which spurred him to investigate why they

landed on this strategy and whether it actually works.

Yeah, it sort of came to a head in, you know, the run up to the 2024 election.

So I did an analysis of like how many fundraising emails I got from Democratic campaigns.

It was $3,600 in that year alone, which is a lot.

Yeah.

Right?

We're being spammed in a pretty serious way.

It's something that people talk about all the time.

They say, oh, I gave to this candidate, and then they never left me alone.

And one of the aspects of this is that not just that we're getting tons of these text messages,

but they're really bizarre. One came that said, we're close to tears, or one from earlier that day

from that same organization saying, not mad, just disappointed. So let's talk about the system then. Who is writing and sending these out?

So there is a whole cottage industry of what are called digital fundraising consultants.

They are the ones who have developed these strategies, convinced candidates, and the official

campaign committees to use these strategies.

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