The Democratic Party is always losing ground, falling short of its goals, and running out of time. Candidates and PACs say this again and again, day after day, to loyal supporters, one-time donors, and what can feel like nearly every human being whose email address or phone number they’ve gotten their hands on. A campaign’s cash has dried up. An opponent is gaining steam. A critical fundraising deadline has been missed. The midterms are approaching and Trump doesn’t want you to see this! Please help?

Sometimes their pleas are sheepish. Since the end of July, Sherrod Brown’s Senate campaign has warned supporters at least 17 times that “donations have taken a nosedive.” Ten of those emails included the same apology: “I’m sorry to be sending this, but I have no cards left to play.” (Luckily, he keeps finding more cards.) Other times candidates confess their nerves, hoping for sympathy. “I’m getting worried,” Roy Cooper wrote in October; “I am worried,” Gavin Newsom shared hours later; and “a very worried James Carville” emailed the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s list twice that month. At times, subject lines are only an attention-grabbing interjection: “Ugh …” from Yassamin Ansari, “Oof …” from John Hickenlooper, “Yikes” from Gina Hinojosa, “Uh oh ⏱️” from the Senate Majority PAC.

By now, we have gotten used to this register each campaign season. Most of these messages are so transparently ridiculous that they’re easy to ignore. Yet their sheer stupidity and volume raises an obvious question: If everyone you know immediately deletes these things, why on earth do they keep coming? The truth is they aren’t really for you. The unhinged dialect is the product of a modern and effective campaign apparatus built on half-lying to supporters and milking as much cash as possible from the shrinking pool of Americans who still find these panicked emails enlivening. Never mind the long-term cost to the party or to politics itself — it works.

Does it involve lying? Well, define lying. When House Majority PAC announced in August that it was matching donations 800 percent until a midnight deadline “for the FIRST time all year,” that may well have been true. But then it offered the same midnight-deadline match for the “FIRST time all year” in early September and again later that month. Was that lying? How about on September 24, when the PAC upped the ante, promising to match donations made before midnight by 900 percent, also “for the FIRST time all year” — a claim it proceeded to repeat, along with a midnight deadline, five more times in October? (House Majority PAC did not respond to a request for comment.)

And what should we call it when the party peddles essentially imaginary credentials to its supporters? From January 2025 through September 2026, the DSCC sent 122 separate emails urging recipients to activate their “Democratic Membership,” according to an archive maintained by the journalist Derek Willis. This year, the Democratic National Committee is peddling “2026 DNC Member Cards” for $7 apiece — official-sounding stuff, though not one of the 52 emails pitching them in Willis’s archive names a single benefit that “membership” actually confers.

Maybe it’s not so bad. You would never fall for these emails. “Most of us dismiss them as annoying spam,” Adam Bonica, a political scientist at Stanford, wrote in a Substack post in August. But not everyone does. “Federal election records reveal a hidden population,” Bonica concluded, “for whom these messages prove surprisingly effective.” Specifically, old people.

Ironically, Bonica stumbled onto the problem while trying to study young donors. As of 2020, he tells me, about 85 percent of donors who were millennials or younger were giving to Democrats. However, when he and the Berkeley political scientist Jake Grumbach updated their research on donor ages through the 2024 cycle, they noticed something strange. Instead of getting younger, the average Democratic donor had gotten older — way older. Much of that shift, they discovered, was being driven by a small group of elderly donors who were donating over and over again, hundreds and sometimes thousands of times.

And where is all the money from this small cluster of seniors — the ones who seem to really believe those urgent emails — ending up? Often not with candidates. When those panicked appeals come from actual campaigns or official party committees, the cash pays for door knockers and TV ads in swing states. But increasingly, candidates are competing for those donors against a vast ecosystem of PACs that raise millions through a barrage of breathless texts and emails, only to spend much of the haul on raising even more money.

Bonica calls these outfits “spam PACs,” and he counts 145 of them; he refers to their targets as “captive donors.” By his tally, some 138,000 people have donated to spam PACs at least 100 times each; their average age is 75. Though they make up less than one percent of all Democratic donors, this tiny cohort of givers has supplied nearly half of the $1.4 billion these PACs have hauled in since 2017. It is, Bonica feels, “tried-and-true, ridiculous but effective elder exploitation.” And the problem, he claims, is getting worse. Since the 2024 election, Bonica counts 58 brand-new Democratic committees that fit his definition of a spam PAC. In 2025 alone, he found, these groups raised more from individual donors than every Democratic Senate candidate combined.

Of course, both parties spam and mislead their donors. If anything, Republicans are worse. When CNN traced over $6 million that a group of vulnerable elderly donors gave between 2019 and 2024, nearly $4 million went to Republican candidates and groups. In January, Trump’s leadership PAC emailed supporters in the president’s name about an overdue “Citizens Only Survey.” “Don’t tell me,” it read, “YOU’RE AN ILLEGAL ALIEN?!?” This was the “FINAL MOMENT” to prove otherwise — if not, it warned, ICE would “track you down.” The survey led to a donation page.

With Republicans literally threatening to deport their would-be donors, why focus on Democrats? Bonica says it is because he’s trying to save the party from itself. Lately, the Republican Party’s small-dollar donation machine has begun sputtering. This cycle, roughly 1.5 million people have given to federal Republican candidates and committees through WinRed, down from 2.2 million at the same point in 2022, according to a Politico analysis of FEC filings. Bonica suspects that years of relentless spammy appeals to older donors have finally burnt out the GOP’s base. Now, he worries, Democrats are headed down the same path.

His research has drawn plenty of criticism, including from fellow Democrats (and, less surprisingly, from the lawyers for some of the groups he names). Still, even his critics concede he’s onto something. A Democratic consultant who has spent years analyzing donor data for nonprofits and is critical of Bonica’s work agrees that “scammy fundraising” is........

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