A few days ago I wrote up a deep dive into the finances of one of the numerous "Save Democracy!" left-leaning Political Action Committees which has been clogging up my in box with fundraising requests daily for the past several months.
"Blue States PAC," which has sent dozens of emails to their mailing list begging people to chip in to help elect Democrats and defeat Republicans, never actually tells you in either the emails or on their website which candidates the money they raise goes to or how much goes to any of the candidates.
So, using Open Secrets and the Federal Election Commission database, I dug into the fundraising and expenditures of "Blue States PAC" over the full 2022 midterm cycle and concluded that:
- They raised over $750,000
- They spent around $720,000
- Only 30% of it went to actual Democratic candidates, Party Committees or activist groups
- Another 10% went to legitimate overhead (4% to ActBlue for credit card processing/etc; 1% refunded to donors; 4% for accounting/legal/etc)
- A full 17% went towards "marketing" and "outreach"...that is, buying the email lists & phone numbers and then spamming the shit out of both of them with emails and text messages
- A whopping 33% ($240,000) went to a "Digital Consulting" firm which did god knows what
- The final 10% ($72,000) went to a guy named David Phelps for "Digital Consulting."
As I noted earlier, I'm not accusing Mr. Phelps or any of his associates of doing anything illegal here, but a PAC which purports to raise money specifically to help elect Democratic candidates only giving 30% of what it raises to the actual, y'know, candidates doesn't sound like the most, shall we say, efficiently run operation, to put it mildly.
Again: 96% of what I raise via the links at Blue24.org goes directly to the specific candidates campaign funds (and/or Democratic Party committees/etc) clearly listed on each page. The other 4% goes to ActBlue for their gateway/processing expenses and other overhead, which is quite reasonable.
I RECEIVE NOTHING.
Anyway, the other day I promised to tackle another one of these "progressive" PACs as soon as my fundraising total broke $370,000. Since that happened last night, I'm keeping my promise.
The first thing I want you to notice about "Fight the Right PAC" is that the website design looks awfully familiar...
Yep, they have the same layout and even virtually identical splashscreen images.
The only real difference is that "Fight the Right" includes a few extra pages like "About us" and "The Fight for 2024" (both of which are just generic "fight for democracy" boilerplate language), a "News" link which brings up a blank page, and a "Partners and Endorsements" page which seems like it might be interesting until you visit it and realize that no, they haven't been endorsed by anyone; it's just images of four candidates and two action funds which they say they gave money to during the 2022 election cycle.
Oh yeah...and they have this mission statement on their home page:
WHY FIGHT THE RIGHT
Fight the Right is dedicated to defending our majorities in Congress and the Biden-Harris agenda.
We are a new kind of political organization. Many organizations start with large donations from wealthy donors and then rely on grassroots supporters to supplement their efforts.
We’re taking a new approach. We started and will continue to grow through grassroots donors.
We don’t employ a large staff or throw money at high overhead costs. We are focused on alerting you about what the right wing is doing and getting resources where they are most needed.
The political battle moves fast. We’re here to get resources where they’re needed. Fast.
"WE DON'T THROW MONEY AT HIGH OVERHEAD COSTS."
Anyway, like "Blue States PAC," the emails from "Fight the Right PAC" also love to slap the names & images of various Democratic candidates in there...but the wording is very careful to never actually state that any of your donation will go to those specific candidates:
Anyway, let's look at the 2022 cycle numbers for "Fight the Right PAC," shall we?
- Coverage dates: 04/02/2021 to 12/31/2022
- TOTAL RECEIPTS: $1,061,803.81
- TOTAL DISBURSEMENTS: $993,375.25
OK, so they raised just over $1 million and spend just shy of that. This is around 38% more than Blue States PAC.
Where did all that money go?
- Federal Candidates: $43,100
This was split among a bunch of Senate Candidates (Val Demings, Raphael Warnock, Mark Kelly, Catherine Cortez Masto, Maggie Hassan, Tim Ryan & Peter Welch) as well as Molly Gray, who ran to replace Welch as Vermont's sole U.S. House member but lost in the primary to Becca Balint.
- Non-Federal Candidates: $5,000
The sole state-level candidate Fight the Right PAC donated to was Nan Whaley, the Democratic nominee for Governor in Ohio.
- Party Committees: $124,000
This went to the DCCC, DSCC, DGA and DASS. Good.
- Other Activist Organizations: $60,000
A mish-mash including "Rev Up PAC," "LiftOff PAC," "Freedom to Learn Advocates PAC," "Equal Ground Action Fund," "New Georgia Project Action Fund..." and "Abolish the Electoral College," which I'll talk more about below.
Add all of these up and we're at $232,100, or 23.4% of the total spent. Fair enough.
They had to refund $14,500 to donors (1.5%) and of course ActBlue got their 4% (actually 3.9%, interestingly): $39,313.
The website, such as it is, cost $2,000, and they spent $1,500 on legal services to the law firm of Sandler, Reiff, Lamb, Rosenstein & Birkenstock, both of which seem quite reasonable.
They paid $16,782 on "Compliance Services" to a firm called Mele, Brengarth & Associates out of DC, which appears to also be their accounting firm. It's also the same accounting/compliance services firm used by Blue States PAC, which I suppose isn't that surprising.
We're now up to $306,186 or 30.8%, and so far I'm not seeing any red flags...except that, again, only 23.4% of the total actually went to Democratic candidates or activist organizations.
In fact, it's only 21.9% of the total they raised, since they ended the cycle with $68,429 still in the bank.
However...here we go:
- List Acquisition & Rental: $95,000.00
This went to three firms: Opt-In Strategies, PACtion Data & True Blue Analyics
They spent 9.5% of what people donated getting ahold of presumably thousands of email addresses they then spammed in order to get people to donate.
- Database Services $57,443.57
This went to EveryAction, Inc., the parent company of NGP VAN. EveryAction was sold to a British private equity group called Apex Partners and is now called Bonterra.
That's $57,400 spent on spamming the hell out of people with the generic money beg emails I have screenshots of above.
The next two are kind of interesting:
- Ad Production: $7,500.00
- Online Ad Buy: $125,000.00
Both of these payments went to a company called "Modern Political Media" out of Washington DC. Apparently they produce ads as well as buying them for their clients...which would be fine, I suppose, except that nowhere in any of Fight the Right's emails does it say anything about donations going towards web ads. There's also not a single reference or link to the ad they supposedly produced & spent over 13% of their budget on at their website or on a YouTube channel, which seems...strange.
- "Digital Consulting": $317,734.44
Nearly 1/3 of their entire spending went to "Collective Action LLC"...whcih you may recognize as being the same "digital consulting" firm which Blue States PAC also gave around 1/3 of their total budget to.
And I still have no idea what the hell "Collective Action LLC" actually does.
- "Management Consulting": $62,500.00
This went to Praxis Strategies of Arizona. There's a bunch of companies called "Praxis" but I can only find one in Arizona; all I've been able to find out about them is that they've apparently only been around since December 2021 and the sole point of contact listed is someone named Rory Gerald Steele.
Speaking of which, that leads us to the next entry:
- STEELE, RORY, AZ: $16,452.49
Mr. Steele is listed as receiving a salary of $6,452.49, plus another $10,000 for "general campaign consulting."
Finally, we get this:
- "Payroll, Payroll Fees, Payroll Taxes": $9,168.70
Here's the thing, though: The "Payroll" portion of this is...$6,452.49, the exact same amount to the penny as Mr. Steele's salary. Huh.
In any event, here's how this all breaks out:
"WE DON'T THROW MONEY AT HIGH OVERHEAD COSTS."
Again, for comparison, here's how the money I raise for Democrats breaks out:
Oh yeah...I mentioned above that one of the recipients of Fight the Right PAC's funds is another PAC called "Abolish the Electoral College."
It turns out that Dave Kamper did a similar analysis of "Fight the Right PAC" back in 2022.
His findings were similar to mine, but included some additional insight:
...this PAC also took in $25,000 from the "Abolish the Electoral College" PAC, which is a huge scam as well.
Side note: Kamper finds that Fight the RIght PAC received $25,000 from "Abolish the Electoral College PAC"...but as noted above, according to the FEC, Fight the RIght also paid $25,000 to Abolish the Electoral College PAC in a series of "transfers to authorized committees." Hmmm...
I can't read the article linked to in Kamper's tweet since it's behind a paywall, but the gist of it seems to be that "Abolish" supposedly only gave $2,500 (out of $1 million raised) to actual candidates.
I'll look into this in my next analysis...
