Win or lose, the grift is the thing

Too many in the political game are in it to profit from it.

It doesn’t matter the time of year: someone’s PAC or campaign is casting its wide e-mail net for money. There’s always some kind of threat for which it’s necessary to RUSH your contribution in and receive a triple or even quadruple match. (If they have that kind of match, tell Mr. Deep Pockets to chip in a little more and leave me alone!) With a CAPS LOCK and bold I could even write these things, but I like to do serious work.

And this isn’t a new subject to me. In writing Rise and Fall, I devoted some space in Chapter 10, called “The TEA Party is Dead,” to the idea:

The incessant fundraising off TEA Party regulars, who skewed heavily toward those 60 and over who had the disposable income to use for political causes, made consultants – a group of characters who often countered that doing mass e-mail appeals wasn't as cheap as those on the outside of the business thought – fabulously wealthy for next to no effort, while achieving little to assist actual candidates who could have used the funds if they were given directly. Oftentimes less than 10% of the money raised by a PAC would go toward candidates, with much larger amounts used to pay for more fundraising.

It was a clarion call initially issued by then-political pundit Erick Erickson, who has since become more of a multi-media personality. But he still feels this way, too. I held onto this piece for a couple weeks, but earlier this month in the wake of the Georgia runoff Erick wrote:

A number of years ago, I noted a connection between various Republican consultants and the incestuous ties within political campaigns.  The GOP has a problem with a lot of consultants.  They get paid commissions whether a candidate wins or loses.  They get commissions from most parts of a campaign business and, interestingly, do not invest in parts that do not pay commissions.  It is time for action.

On the consultant front, here in Georgia, it is not just that Raphael Warnock outspent Herschel Walker.  It is how Warnock outspent Walker. In 2021, Warnock had over seventy varieties of streaming ads for digital services.  The Republicans had two.  This time, again, Warnock more precisely targeted various voters online than the GOP did.  One will not be surprised to discover how little consultants make off digital advertising.

He was writing in the wake of the stinging defeat of Herschel Walker by Senator Raphael Warnock, a victory that assured the Senate would be in Democrat hands for the next two years and give Kamala Harris a lot less to do. (That may be the only silver lining.)

I’m betting that 90% of all e-mails purporting to support Herschel Walker’s candidacy came from these consultants who may have given, at most, a dime on the dollar collected to his campaign, with the rest going to fellow grifters whose profession is that of glomming onto campaigns perceived as conservative. To that point, look for a huge number of e-mails to support Ron DeSantis next year despite the fact he hasn’t made his 2024 intentions known. (Donald Trump kept grifters going for the better part of six years, but DeSantis is the next hot thing.)

But, as I pointed out later in Rise and Fall, imagine how things may have changed for the better if the money sent from donors in response to the never-ending fundraising appeals of the Tea Party Express, Tea Party Patriots, and other Beltway-based entities that had long since abandoned the grassroots and simply traded on the TEA Party name had instead gone directly to individual candidates, particularly at the state and local levels. Those local candidates were the people who had to “smile and dial” in addition to knocking on doors because they weren’t just plowing their proceeds into their personal coffers and additional fundraising - they were trying to win office for themselves and needed to get their message out against opponents who were often incumbents with big-money PAC backing.

For example, you may not have agreed with the guy once he became Senator, but the stakes when Scott Brown ran for the “Kennedy seat” in Massachusetts back in January, 2010 were somewhat similar to the Walker-Warnock race: control of the Senate was not in question, but the filibuster-proof majority was. Fortunately this race was conducted before the era of Big Consultant and Brown, who was billed as “Mr. 41,” was the beneficiary of a massive TEA Party grassroots effort from all over the country. (This despite the fact that Brown’s general election campaign lasted longer than the Georgia runoff campaign but was also bisected by the holidays.)

Yet I never got that sort of vibe with the Georgia runoff - some of the professionals went down there to help out, but it didn’t seem to have that same sort of grassroots appeal Brown’s 2010 special election campaign did. Perhaps people thought they were helping out by e-mailing a donation to these collection agencies, but it appears little of that loot made it to assist Walker’s effort, as he was heavily outspent.

I don’t think I’ve ever sent money to those TEA Party entities (especially as I had little to spare at the time) but, aside from the mandatory donation I made to the Maryland GOP to attend their conventions, I would occasionally drop a few bucks into the kitty of local and state candidates, often to attend their fundraisers. If you cared to look my record up, you’d see a smattering of small donations over the years to local GOP hopefuls as well as a few instances where I was the recipient of funds from a campaign because they advertised on monoblogue. Compared to others locally, statewide, and nationally, though, I was but a piker.

Almost every campaign (with a web presence) I’ve ever run across has a way of collecting donations, making it easy to support them and insuring they will get a more significant portion of what you give. And giving $50 in a local race will do a campaign much more good than sending $100 to some e-mail donation collector who doesn’t tell you what percentage goes to the big guy, regardless of what the so-called match is.

If we starve the Beltway insider beast we can do more for the Constitutional conservative movement and rectify the mistakes those who backed the priciples of the TEA Party too often unwittingly made.

Postscript: This morning (Friday) I got an appeal from Convention of States Action. Not to completely pick on the group, since I support their cause, but I had the bold part down. Didn’t have the ALL CAPS part on this particular appeal but they substituted italics, hyperlinks, and even highlighting (that I can’t do here.) And, of course, like I predicted there was a match. And all of this needed to be done by tomorrow because George Soros “and the largest coalition the Left has ever seen” were putting together “anti-COS lobbyists to thwart our efforts.”

The time to deal with this was during the election, when the CoS question should have been asked of candidates. But Mark Meckler (who is President and co-founder of CoS Action) is a TEA Party original so he has this down pat, and old habits die hard.