Special offer for Epolitics.com readers: 10% discount on PoliticalWire.com membership. Use this link to save 10% on your membership, or learn more.

Follow Epolitics on Substack, Bluesky, Threads, or Twitter/X. Top image via Wikimedia. This post was also published on Substack.

Launched in 2006, Epolitics is written and edited by Colin Delany, who has worked with nonprofits and political campaigns to help them use digital tools in effective and creative ways since the early days of the political internet. He is also a frequent speaker and trainer and the author of How to Use the Internet to Change the World – and Win Elections. Contact him at cpd@epolitics.com.

Recently in Epolitics:

• Will Grassroots Democrats Save Us from the DNC?
• AI is Not an “I Win” Button for Political Campaigns
• Democrats Must Compete in Hostile Territory This Year — Or Else

John McCain Cried “Communist,” Too — Before He Lost to Obama

Stuck in Iran, with prices rising and public approval plummeting, Trump and his allies have turned to an old favorite tactic: calling Democrats “communist”. Ed Kilgore:

But the GOP is trying something fundamentally different heading into the 2026 midterms: calling Democrats “communists,” “Bolsheviks,” and “Marxists.” Unlike radical, these are terms with a specific content and a very long history. And it’s not just Donald Trump doing this, though he pioneered the practice by calling Kamala Harris a communist (and also a “monster”) back in 2020.

Of course, Kilgore means that Trump “pioneered” the Red Scare in our current political context, because this angle of attack has a long history in the U.S. — at least as far back as the Palmer raids and the mass deportation of leftists after the First World War.

It has a more recent political pedigree, too. John McCain’s memory has an air of sainthood about it now, but when he was alive, he was perfectly willing to echo the darker strains of conservative political discourse when he needed to. Let’s go back to the Epolitics archives and a 2008 article called “Halloween 2008: Obama, Witches and the Slow Death of Joe McCarthy”:

Boo! That’s all McCain and his supporters have left. Obama is a “Marxist,” a “socialist” and a “terrorist,” all fascinating words to see applied to a center-left senator from a Midwestern city embedded in a relatively conservative state. Not that most of the folks spouting the word “Marxist” would know a dialectical theory of history if it bit them in the ass, but that’s not the point: when used by right-wing activists, the actual meaning of words like “socialist” is irrelevant. They’re really just another way of saying “bad,” “scary” and “wrong,” and they’re what you use when you’re out of ideas. He’s a witch! Burn him!…

Hence the shouts of “terrorist” when Obama’s name comes up at McCain rallies: some may actually picture Obama in a suicide bomber’s vest in their minds, but for most it’s a stand-in for “other,” “alien,” “scary,” “non-white,” and “dangerous”…

If Florida in 2000 was tragedy, McCain/Palin is farce: this round of conservatism ends not with a whimper, but with a ragged fearful howl in the dark.

I wrote that piece in the last days of the 2008 presidential campaign, when Obama’s impending victory seemed more certain by the hour. McCain’s attempt to reinvigorate his campaign by picking a charismatic outsider (Sarah Palin) for veep had failed, grassroots enthusiasm was on the Democratic side, and McCain’s non-response to the financial crisis building that year put Obama in the driver’s seat in the months before Election Day.

So, communism it was! Adding to a long and varied history of scare tactics on the political right:

As East and West veered from confrontation to détente and back to confrontation, other scare terms came to the fore, particularly ones based on race and class. “Crime in the streets” was Nixonian code for keeping white people safe from poor minorities, just as “crack babies” justified draconian prison sentences for inner-city cocaine users 20 years later (their white suburban counterparts went to rehab). The 2000 election might have been a pivot point, since the peace and relative prosperity of the 1990s had taken much of the sting out of the scare words of the previous generation, but Bush’s response to 9/11 brought a new round of fear-mongering right back into the political toolbox — so much for “compassionate conservatism”.

In 2026, the targets may have switched from “welfare queens” to immigrant “invaders”, but the approach is the same: inflame the fears and prejudices of voters and give them someone to hate. For Trump, it’s a reflex. For the rest of us, it’s a curse — and historically at least, it has worked all too often.

But it didn’t elect John McCain in 2008, and I don’t think it’s going to save Trump in 2026. McCain’s struggle to stay on top of the financial crisis may have undercut his credibility, but Trump’s tariffs, his war of choice with Iran and his physical attacks on American cities have destroyed his, at least with anyone not huffing those MAGA fumes. As in 2008, this year’s grassroots energy is firmly on the Democratic side.

Alas, though, I was too sanguine eighteen years ago. I knew by then that Obama would win, but I did not understand how fast a new opposition would rise and how virulent it would be. The Tea Party came first, with a revolt theoretically over budget deficits but really about the fear of money flowing to minorities under a Black president. Then came Trump, who felt their resentment in his bones and welded them into an anti-immigrant/anti-minority movement, which birthed a full-fledged mob on January 6, 2021.

Perhaps it’s not false patriotism that’s the last refuge of the scoundrel, but fear and false patriotism united. In 2026, Donald Trump wallows in his Roy Cohn roots, Steve Scalise decries the “Bolshevik takeover of the Democrat Party”, and the Supreme Court revives the Republican war on the New Deal. As Faulkner put it, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past”.

So “a ragged fearful howl in the dark”, sure. But how this cycle of the conservative movement ends, no one can yet say. November may hint at an answer, but Trump and his team will remain in office for two more years, though I hope constrained by a Democratic Congress. As long as fear and nativism hold sway on so many millions of minds, however, we can never count out the dark side of conservative politics. No matter how much I wanted to, eighteen long years ago.

– cpd

Please share this post: John McCain Cried “Communist,” Too — Before He Lost to Obama

Special offer for Epolitics.com readers: 10% discount on PoliticalWire.com membership. Use this link to save 10% on your membership, or learn more.

Follow Epolitics on Substack, Bluesky, Threads, or Twitter/X. Top image by Kredite via Pixabay. This post was also published on Substack.

Launched in 2006, Epolitics is written and edited by Colin Delany, who has worked with nonprofits and political campaigns to help them use digital tools in effective and creative ways since the early days of the political internet. He is also a frequent speaker and trainer and the author of How to Use the Internet to Change the World – and Win Elections. Contact him at cpd@epolitics.com.

Will Grassroots Democrats Save Us from the DNC?

Democrats have a chance to win big enough in November to break the Republican grip on Congress. But will they have the money to do it?

This year, big-dollar Democratic donors have shunned the DNC, leaving it with more debt than cash (and apparently, vulnerable to email scams). Party committees supporting Democratic House and Senate candidates have less in the bank than their Republican counterparts, even as the Supreme Court changes the rules to make committee contributions more valuable. Meanwhile, the RNC was already sitting on $128 million at the beginning of July. Democrats are doomed!

Or not. In fact, high-profile Democratic candidates are generally rolling in dough this year, with some raising many times what their Republican opponents have brought in. The difference? The grassroots isn’t giving much to the committees. They’re giving to candidates, and that’s okay.

Unlike large donors, who still face at least some restrictions on political spending, small donors aren’t going to run into contribution limits. Nor will a single donor’s waning enthusiasm cripple a campaign — I worked on projects in 2022 that had to scale their plans back when Sam Bankman-Fried bailed on his big promises, which was not cool. By contrast, grassroots donors tend to send relatively small amounts repeatedly, making a small-donor list the gift that keeps on giving, quite literally.

Not everyone likes this dynamic. Idrees Kahloon wrote recently in The Atlantic about the downsides of grassroots funding, such as inefficiency. Activists love to pour money into long-shots with a national profile and a compelling story, for example, when a dollar spent on a local campaign would make much more of a difference. He also highlights the tendency of the grassroots to give to candidates farther out on the ideological spectrum, potentially amplifying political polarization.

On the latter front, I’ll note that his argument seems to me to embody the assumption that “moderate” is inherently good, and I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide whether he’s right. Considering that conservative talk radio has been around for decades, I’m not going to lay too much blame for our deep political divisions on a tendency for activists to push the envelope when they’re parting with ten bucks. And if you look at the numbers, grassroots donations functionally elected both Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the last two Democratic presidents.

The inefficiency Kahloon identifies is definitely real, though, and I would be happier if more donors spent their money locally rather than giving it to someone across the country who’s on MSNOW. But grassroots fundraising isn’t necessarily zero-sum: If I’m inspired in the moment to give $10 to a campaign, it doesn’t follow that some other campaign WON’T get $10, too. Campaigns are actually competing with everything else potential donors could do with their money, not just which candidates they could give it to. And for most of us, that equation changes constantly.

In practice, grassroots donors turn out to be somewhat wealthier than average, and many of them will be able to spare relatively small amounts over and over if they are properly inspired. As someone who’s worked on digital fundraising projects for a couple of decades, it’s our job to motivate people to give money when they weren’t planning to.

Finally, a losing campaign is not necessarily a loss. These days, state parties and local activists have woken up to the idea that even long-shot campaigns can leave behind structures — like supporter lists and local volunteer circles — that can fertilize the ground for the next person in the area willing to run. Likewise, the act of campaigning can crack open information bubbles, which is one reason state Democrats have worked so hard this year to contest every race they can.

In any case, the DNC is still in a tight spot, and I suspect Ken Martin may not have his job at the top for long after the midterms — assuming makes it that far. But one reason the party is so short on money is that it’s been funneling it directly to the states:

The DNC each month is distributing $1 million among party organizations in every state and key U.S. territories, besides allocating $5,000 more per month to nearly two dozen Republican-controlled states, to help build party infrastructure.

That’s what the Democratic National Committee should be doing! For all the flaws in Ken Martin’s chairmanship, he understands that the most important mission for the national party this year is to help state parties help candidates. The millions the party is sending down the line will pay for field, digital and data staff as well as technology and other resources local campaigns need but often have trouble accessing.

Similarly, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee just announced a plan to spend $40 million across ten states with competitive Senate races, specifically to support field organizing. The list includes Texas and Florida, big states that have left the national party feeling burned in recent years. Since we’re talking about the Senate, whole states are in play, and these field programs could reach into areas where Democratic organizers aren’t often seen. And the fact that the DS is investing this much in field organizing rather than paid media indicates a leadership mindset more to my liking. Which is cool.

Can the grassroots save us from the DNC and the dreaded Establishment? Do they need to? The top of the Democratic party may not be raising enough money, but it is paying for state-level work that national Democrats too often ignore and that will help candidates up and down the ballot. Likewise the party committees, who’ll be able to coordinate with cash-flush campaigns to a wider degree this year.

So once again, it’s all part of a balanced breakfast. I’m happy for Democratic activists to give to prominent individual campaigns, but I hope they also give to the national organizations, state parties and people running for state lege, governor, mayor or city council. Your money will go farther the more locally you spend it, but in the aggregate, donations to the DSCC or directly to a Talarico, a Peltola or a Turek may help Democrats take the Senate. Which would also be cool.

In related news, the new Democratic nominee for Maine Senate just raised $2 million from 30,000 donors in twenty-four hours. By November, they’ll be joined by many thousands more citizens eager to give candidates they support a chance to compete against billionaires. Sounds pretty democratic to me.

– cpd

Please share this post: Will Grassroots Democrats Save Us from the DNC?

Special offer for Epolitics.com readers: 10% discount on PoliticalWire.com membership. Use this link to save 10% on your membership, or learn more.

Follow Epolitics on Substack, Bluesky, Threads, or Twitter/X. Top image by crkmaga via Pixabay. This post was also published on Substack.

Launched in 2006, Epolitics is written and edited by Colin Delany, who has helped nonprofits and political campaigns use digital tools in effective and creative ways since the early days of the political internet. He is also a frequent speaker and trainer and the author of How to Use the Internet to Change the World – and Win Elections. Contact him at cpd@epolitics.com.

AI is Not a Magic “I Win” Button

My friend Jamaa Bickley King dropped a great line on the crowd at the Digital Campaign Summit a few weeks ago: For political campaigns, AI is not an “I Win” button. The audience replied with knowing laughter, since they understood that you can’t just flip a switch and have AI run a campaign.

That moment came to mind recently when I was talking with a new friend who works at a corporate consulting firm. Her communications team had been allowed/forced to dwindle even as the company spent heavily on AI tools. Naturally, a problem arose. They had a lot of expensive AI tokens, but no one to use them.

For political campaigns and communicators, AI platforms can be a powerful ally. They help us crank out words, parse data, experiment with video ideas, tweak images or generate them from scratch, and a whole lot more. But they can’t do it without a human to prompt them — at least for now.

As Jamaa explained, AI cannot substitute for an actual political campaign. It can help staff get more work done in less time, but it can’t and won’t replace them. If you need to turn a press release into a bunch of social-media posts optimized for various platforms, Claude’s got you covered. But the process requires someone to know which messages are important to highlight and which platforms to employ. Without people who understand politics to put it to work, Claude’s not helping persuade voters to do much of anything — apparently, not even as a source of news.

Years ago, a candidate called me who’d managed to get a line on the ballot for lieutenant governor in a tech-focused state (three guesses which one). She’d decided that she was going to position herself as “the blockchain candidate”, but she had hit a speed bump: she didn’t know what being “the blockchain candidate” actually.

Neither did I! Though she seemed to expect me to work magic and help her ride the blockchain to victory over better-known opponents. Not surprisingly, she didn’t appear to have a firm grasp of what blockchain technology involved, but she did know a good buzzword when she heard it. Tragically, when she asked me to work for her, I demurred. And despite good ballot placement, I don’t think her campaign ever really got going, and she certainly came nowhere close to winning. The blockchain, alas, did not suffice.

Some campaigns will always try to make news with an intriguing or novel AI application, as Dean Phillips did a couple of years ago — until his audio chatbot got kicked off of OpenAI. Candidates have used their adoption of digital tech to portray themselves as forward-thinking for years, at least back to the era of Second Life. A good press hit is a good press hit, even when the tech in question isn’t actually doing much practical work for the campaign.

The AI hype cycle is still rolling strong, despite a nagging sense that artificial intelligence as we know it may not add as much to corporate productivity as it does to corporate costs. But with voters increasingly skeptical or downright hostile to it, campaigns may find that AI adoption doesn’t yield much of a PR boost, if any. Perhaps that will spare us this year from some of the “gee whiz” coverage political tech often generates.

Which takes us back to AI’s practical political applications. For campaigns, AI can help a small team fight at the same level as a much larger one, and it can help a larger one get even more done. But you have to have that team in the first place, and they must have the political talent, experience or expertise to know what to do with the technology. Otherwise, AI is just another shiny box on the shelf.

– cpd

Please share this post: AI is Not an ‘I Win’ Button

Special offer for Epolitics.com readers: 10% discount on PoliticalWire.com membership. Use this link to save 10% on your membership, or learn more.

Follow Epolitics on Substack, Bluesky, Threads, or Twitter/X. This post was also published on Substack.

Launched in 2006, Epolitics is written and edited by Colin Delany, who has helped nonprofits and political campaigns use digital tools in effective and creative ways since the early days of the political internet. He is also a frequent speaker and trainer and the author of How to Use the Internet to Change the World – and Win Elections. Contact him at cpd@epolitics.com.

Before we start today:

• The Digital Strategy Summit kicks off next week! Check out the sessions and register now
• The digital politics world — and I — lost a good friend

Democrats Must Compete in Truly Hostile Territory This Year — Or Else

In 2016, the Democratic organization American Bridge plans to invest in voter persuasion and turnout in places the national party and major donors often ignore. Via the NYT [link unlocked]:

A major Democratic super PAC hopes to stretch the midterm battleground map by kicking off a roughly $50 million advertising campaign targeting Republicans in more than a dozen House districts and four Senate races, most of them in traditionally Republican areas…

Bradley Beychok, the president of American Bridge, said in an interview that Republicans were vulnerable in parts of the country that had been exceedingly tough terrain for Democrats in recent elections.

“We’re going to Republican territory and planting a flag,” Mr. Beychok said.

The campaign will run on TV, radio, streaming and digital channels, with ads targeting voters in parts of Iowa, Alaska, Texas, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina and Ohio that Democrats have largely written off in recent years. The program emphasizes outreach to working-class voters based on American Bridge’s research into their “frustrations and priorities”. Notably, Bridge plans to start early, with its ads intended to make inroads before the fall campaigning blitz.

It’s a good start! I’d love to see national funding expand downballot to state legislative races, but simply getting out in hostile territory at all is better than Democrats usually manage to do. Likewise, I hope these ads can help prime the pump for field outreach in the same areas, but on their own they’re a lot better than nothing.

Why spend money on races that may not pay off? For one thing, if 2026 truly is a Democratic wave election, some Republicans who’d be safe in a normal year could find themselves vulnerable. What would suck? Waking up the day after November’s election with a bunch of Democrats losing by a few hundred votes. In those cases, even relatively small investments in media and field organizing could put unlikely candidates into office.

But more generally, Democrats need to show up even in areas they’re likely to lose this year, if only to build relationships in long-neglected places. As NC Democratic chair Anderson Clayton put it:

“Rural North Carolina didn’t leave us overnight, but we’ve got to invest in it for the long haul,” she said.

That’s meant contesting nearly every legislative seat, she said. “People in rural North Carolina are finally going to have a Democrat to vote for.”

When I worked on projects with the Michigan Democratic party in recent years, they emphasized building the vote from the bottom up. That included nurturing good local candidates to fire up Democratic voters in districts where they’d lost the habit of turning out.

Similarly, the NC party is giving grassroots tools like the VAN (Voter Activation Network) to candidates rather than charging them for access. The better local campaigns can perform, the better congressional and statewide campaigns can build on them. And for all the criticism DNC chair Ken Martin has earned since his election last year, the national party is funneling money to state parties at a rate that can help them build the technical and human capacity they need to put up a fight everywhere.

Most political coverage this year will focus on a handful of priority races for Senate, Congress and governorships. But Trump’s raging unpopularity opens the door for Democrats to begin to open minds long closed off to our ideas — something we desperately need. As I wrote a few years ago,

…most of Trump country won’t give Democrats the time of day. If you live in a place like East Texas (where I grew up), you can go a long time without encountering a liberal/progressive/Democratic idea in its undistorted state, at least if you’re White.

Waiting in the doctor’s office? Fox News is on. Waiting to have your brakes fixed? Fox News is on. Clumping on the treadmill at the gym? Fox News is on. You can switch the channel, but you can’t change the narrative: before Sinclair brought Boris Epsteyn into millions of living rooms, local news in places like Texas was already out-Foxing Fox. Meanwhile, conservative talkers fill the radio dial, mocking straw-man liberals to their advertisers’ content.

If you’re a White Democrat in Trump country, you learn to keep your mouth shut — which only compounds the problem. As political science research has shown for decades, most of us make voting decisions based largely on what we hear from friends and family. The current crop of Trump voters may have no one in their lives presenting an alternative to the vision put forth by the Right-wing media machine.

America doesn’t have decades to wait for us to get our act together. If Democrats, liberals, progressives and our pro-democracy allies want to fix America’s problems over the long term, we need to persuade skeptical and even hostile voters to give us a chance. Otherwise, our 2026 victories could be as fleeting as Donald Trump’s attention span.

– cpd

Top photo via Pixabay

Please share this post: Democrats Must Compete in Hostile Territory This Year — Or Else

Special offer for Epolitics.com readers: 10% discount on PoliticalWire.com membership. Use this link to save 10% on your membership, or learn more.

Follow Epolitics on Substack, Bluesky, Threads, or Twitter/X. This post was also published on Substack.

Launched in 2006, Epolitics is written and edited by Colin Delany, who has helped nonprofits and political campaigns use digital tools in effective and creative ways since the early days of the political internet. He is also a frequent speaker and trainer and the author of How to Use the Internet to Change the World – and Win Elections. Contact him at cpd@epolitics.com.

2026: Finding the Limits of Political Money (Again)

$10,400,000,000. $10,400,000,000. That’s about how much a political ad-monitoring firm recently predicted that political parties, campaigns and their allies will spend in 2026. Just to buy digital, TV and radio ads for the midterms. As Max Greenwood observed at Campaigns & Elections,

The forecast underscores how media spending in U.S. elections has surged in recent decades. Michigan alone is projected to absorb over $1 billion in political advertising in 2026 – more than the entire country saw during the 2006 midterm cycle. The Atlanta area is expected to be the most expensive media market this year, with an estimated $591 million in political ad spending, according to KPI’s forecast.

$10.4 billion is a lot, and it’s not too far below the $11.2 billion spent in the presidential year of 2024. But it’s still “only” a 17% increase from the 2022 midterms, when political groups spent about $8.9 billion on media.

Most of this year’s political money will go right into the fight for Congress, with state legislative races seeing an estimated $729 million by comparison. Budgets in local races will likely amount to a rounding error in the Congressional context, putting the rough total for House and Senate somewhere somewhere in the neighborhood of $9.5 billion.

Can You Even Spend That Much Money?

Campaigns, PACs and Independent Expenditure groups will spend that money in different ways than we would have a decade ago. A quarter or so should go to ads on streaming services (CTV), a massive increase since 2020. Broadcast TV and cable will suck up more billions of dollars, but their star is fading — they’ll drop as a percentage of the overall budget. Radio ads seem to be on the outs, with spending forecast at perhaps $300 million. We’ll see where non-TV digital video ads come in, since they’ll get a lot of the spillover when premium venues run dry.

But hold on a minute. Can campaigns and their allies spend that much money efficiently? Can they even spend it at all? Just short of ten million people live in Michigan, for example, meaning that campaigns could spend about $100 per resident — just on ads. About 4.5 million Michiganders turned out in the last midterm year, putting media spending closer to $200 per actual voter. Across the country, a perhaps eight or nine Senate races and 30-50 House races will command the bulk of the budget. And most of that money will be spent over a couple of months in the fall.

TV can absorb a lot of money, but come September, TV stations, cable providers and streaming services will surely run short of ad slots to sell, particularly since many popular streamers don’t allow political ads. Similarly, inventory on Facebook/Instagram, YouTube and other digital favorites will either evaporate or become punishingly expensive — particularly if you’re targeting the same voter lists everyone else is.

Bigger picture: how much help are any of our ads when people tune them out? Even if your content grabs the heart and seduces the mind, does it make a difference when someone sees it for the 200th or 300th time? Kamala Harris and her allies spent about $2 billion to try to put her in the White House in 2024, more money than any campaign before it. Worked great, right?

Her campaign demonstrated quite clearly that money alone can’t elect someone if the environment is wrong, or the voters don’t buy what you’re selling. Cash CAN be decisive, particularly if the race is really close or one side vastly outspends the other. But it’s just one factor influencing the results.

Not that I think campaigns should financially disarm! But as the system approaches the practical limits of political media spending, we should definitely try to diversify:

• Allocate budget to put field organizers on the ground early, not in October, for all the reasons we’ve covered before. Likewise, invest in volunteer recruiting and training, and do it early.
• Connect with influencers who speak to audiences in your district, using paid outreach or by allocating staff time to building relationships.
• Deploy relational organizing tools to allow you to reach voters through friends and family. Information from people we already trust may be one of the few things that can break through the clutter this year.
• Look for less conventional channels, such as audio ads on podcasts or ads on digital billboards and other public screens.
• Consider advertising on local media, including radio and the websites and streaming channels of local TV stations and newspapers (if newspapers still exist where you’re running). Radio naturally breaks down into demographic segments, people in some communities spend a lot of time listening to it, and it can be cost-effective.

• Above all, campaigns should talk to people face-to-face, whether by going to specific doors or by camping outside the local grocery store.

Donors face a different question: where should I put my dollars? With so much money flowing to federal campaigns, consider going down-ballot. A $100 donation to a U.S. Senate campaign isn’t even a drop in the bucket, but it might really help a candidate for state legislature or city council.

A final consideration: a 15% commission is typical for firms buying political media. Under this kind of arrangement, a relative handful of companies could earn upwards of a billion dollars in 2026! Most grassroots donors would be offended by the notion that fifteen cents of every dollar they give will be siphoned off by political consultants. What would they think if they knew that managing a $5 million streaming ad buy is not THAT much harder than managing one a fraction of the cost?

Donors deserve to know that their money will go to help elect someone, not to boost the bank accounts of a select group of political consultants. Of course we should compensate media-buyers, but they shouldn’t get to live like lottery winners. No matter how big the budgets get in 2026.

— cpd

Please share this post: 2026: Finding the Limits of Political Money (Again)

Special offer for Epolitics.com readers: 10% discount on PoliticalWire.com membership. Use this link to save 10% on your membership, or learn more.

Follow Epolitics on Substack, Bluesky, Threads, or Twitter/X. This post was also published on Substack. Top photo via KendelMedia/Pexels.

Launched in 2006, Epolitics is written and edited by Colin Delany, who has helped nonprofits and political campaigns use digital tools in effective and creative ways since the early days of the political internet. He is also a frequent speaker and trainer and the author of How to Use the Internet to Change the World – and Win Elections. Contact him at cpd@epolitics.com.

Three Things We Can Learn from a Republican Canvasser in Arizona

Today let’s see what we can learn from the head of the Republican Party in the most-populous county in Arizona:

In the Phoenix metro area, Berland, the Maricopa County chair, said door-to-door canvassing has become more difficult since the onset of the war.

“We’re even going around canvassing neighborhoods and registered Republicans are yelling out the door, ‘go away, or I’m calling the police,'” Berland said. “I find that very discouraging.”

Discouraging indeed! This observation comes as we also see signs that Republican grassroots donations are drying up, at least in two battleground states. Between an unpopular war, a hard economy and a whiff of blasphemy in the air, Trump’s 2024 voter coalition seems to be suffering just a bit of disillusionment.

That’s ONE lesson we can learn from those Republican canvassers the party chair was talking about. Here’s another: Republicans in Maricopa County are canvassing NOW. They’re not waiting for the fall; they’re getting in front of voters today.

Last year, I talked about four good field organizing practices Democrats too often seem to forget. Number One? Starting early. In 2024, too many field organizing and canvassing campaigns only got rolling in the fall, when

Had they started months earlier, grassroots volunteers and staff could have begun contacting voters well before traditional campaign season. They would have worked in a more relaxed political environment, before TV and digital ads flooded people’s screens and their opinions hardened. As an experienced campaigner pointed out on a recent panel I attended, election season is the most difficult time to start building a narrative. By starting late, Democrats missed the opportunity last year to talk to people when they may still have had an open mind.

They also missed the chance to talk with people repeatedly to build rapport….

Besides missing the chance to reach voters early and often, campaigns also didn’t have time to train volunteers to handle conversations with skeptical or hostile voters:

Face-to-face conversation is one of the few things that can break through and reach people in an insanely crowded media environment, but only if those conversations go well. Late-starting field campaigns also give themselves little time to train volunteers to go back-and-forth with voters, some of whom will be skeptical or even hostile.

At least in Maricopa County in 2026, some Republican canvassers are already in the field more than six months before Election Day. I hope Democrats in the state are out there too, connecting with voters while we still have time to reach hearts and change minds.

Which brings us to our third lesson: the power of voter-data feedback loops. That Republican county chair is clearly paying attention to what canvassers have been finding on the ground. But what happens to the data after that? Too often, nothing. Insights from grassroots volunteers may or may not actually reach campaign (or national party) leadership in ways that can affect strategy and resource allocation.

It doesn’t have to be this way! And at least in 2008 and 2012, it wasn’t. Again from last year’s field article:

Unlike Clinton in Michigan in 2016, Obama’s staff used it to help make real decisions about where to put people and money. David Plouffe said after the campaign:

…In our own campaign, polling was just one way we viewed how we were doing in a state in the general election. We had a lot of voter identification work. We had a lot of field data. So we’d put all that together and model out the election in those states every week. So we’d say, okay, if the election were held this week based on all our data, put it all in a blender, where are we? And obviously, with technology today, we could measure this very carefully. We don’t have to wait for a state to report in how they did that night; we can look at it, down to the volunteer level, because we trusted our volunteers. We gave them the voter file, we said here are the people on your block, you go talk to ’em, you record the result of the conversation. We in Chicago could look at that…

…It makes you enormously agile. You’ve got real-time data, and that makes you make scheduling decisions and resource-allocation decisions and where to send surrogates and you’re adjusting those by the end multiple times a day. Not just down to the media market, but down to chunks of voters in those media markets. We’re not doing as well as we need to here, so we’ve got to throw a lot of our resources in there. These guys are making a surge in a media market, we’ve got to go try and correct that.

In 2012, if I remember correctly, those decisions included where to send high-level surrogates such as Michelle Obama herself. After the president’s reelection, Democrats continued to enjoy the fruits of his labors, including in Virginia’s 2013 off-year elections. Terry McAuliffe won a tight race for governor that year in part because of a statewide turnout machine that incorporated the same kind of voter-data feedback loops the Obama campaign employed.

Mobile canvassing apps SHOULD ease the process of moving data up the ladder, since field teams don’t have to fill out paper sheets after talking with voters anymore. But that only works if staff and volunteers enter the information accurately and consistently! Garbage data is worse than useful when it leads us astray. While you’re there, make sure volunteers know WHY their work is important, so they understand why they’re being asked to have those awkward conversations in the first place.

Of course, if American politics looks in November like it does now, canvassing (and campaigning in general) might not matter as much as we think. If this many of Trump’s voters are still this pissed on Election Day, many Democrats will win big by default.

But wave elections have a habit of opening opportunities in places where they don’t normally exist. In fact, direct voter outreach may be even MORE important for Democrats in a wave year, particularly in districts that have an unusual chance to swing. When Trump voters are wavering, conversations with canvassers and callers might be enough to push them over the edge — perhaps to stay home, if not to vote for a Democrat.

Just as state Democrats need to recruit candidates for every seat they can, as a movement we also need to be talking to as many voters as we can. In 2026, data models that predict “likely” Democratic or Republican voters may miss a whole lot of opportunities, and outreach programs that concentrate on the faithful may miss the chance to persuade. Perhaps cast your net wide this year?

Just please, start those conversations early.

– cpd

Please share this post: Three Things We Can Learn from a Republican Canvasser in Arizona

Special offer for Epolitics.com readers: 10% discount on PoliticalWire.com membership. Use this link to save 10% on your membership, or learn more.

Follow Epolitics on Substack, Bluesky, Threads, or Twitter/X. This post was also published on Substack. Top photo: Two connected cats, by 세혁 장 via Pixabay

Launched in 2006, Epolitics is written and edited by Colin Delany, who has helped nonprofits and political campaigns use digital tools in effective and creative ways since the days of the political internet. He is also a frequent speaker and trainer and the author of How to Use the Internet to Change the World – and Win Elections. Contact him at cpd@epolitics.com.

Hi folks, thank you so much for your patience! Long-time readers may remember that I was in Texas most of last year, helping my 88-year-old mother after my father died. She endured four hospital stays in 2025, including three rounds of pneumonia and two broken hips, but a couple of months ago, we were able to make our escape in one ten-hour journey via road and air from East Texas to the District of Columbia. It’s been quite the time, and I honestly haven’t had the cognitive surplus to write anything substantive since the hip incidents in July.

But Mom and her geriatric cat have now settled into an assisted living place in Upper Northwest, and my siblings and I are wrapping up the sale of my childhood home in Texas. With the hardest fifteen months of my life (so far!) over, let’s get back to work. Thank you for sticking with me.

The Most Precious Political Commodity in 2026

If you’re running for office in 2026, you probably have a problem: How the hell do you get noticed? You’re not alone! Politicians, activists, comedians, corporate brands and everyone else trying to build a public audience confronts the same obstacle.

Ad after ad, video after video, text after text…even without a war sucking up all the air, we’re endlessly bombarded with messages trying to get us to do something that usually will make money for someone else. The attention economy is real, whether you’re Clavicular or running for Congress, and its dynamic forces us to compete for eyeballs in a crowded space.

With AI slop flooding our feeds, candidates may have an even harder time catching people online this year than ever. And attention, whether earned or bought, is a prereq for persuasion. If voters don’t know a campaign exists, the best policies and the most compelling story won’t change their minds. Still, attention only starts the process. To seize our minds and (preferably) hearts, candidates and causes really need to create connection.

Voting is at least as much an emotional act as a logical one. How people FEEL about a candidate (or cause) often outweighs everything else. Fundraising works in a similar way, since people tend to break out the credit card when they’re all fired up, not at the end of a long deliberative process. In practice, connection usually depends on a dash of head and heart, with emotion more often the deciding factor. People go with their gut, based on an intuitive sense of who candidates are and what they stand for.

What creates connection? Any encounter with a candidate or campaign could start the process, whether in person, through a volunteer, on TV or online. People CAN feel a strong emotional bond with via video, news coverage or ads alone, without any direct contact with at all — just ask Obama and Trump. But wise campaigns go out of their way to create opportunities to build connections over time.

Of course, negative stories, images and videos can poison a potential relationship before it has a chance to grow. That’s why successful campaigns generally try to shape and nurture ties with voters or donors through as many channels as they can, knowing that an emotional bond can go a long way toward sustaining support through hard times on the campaign trail. Which leads us to:

Rule #1: Never miss a chance to turn a fleeting encounter into a sustained connection

Digital tools excel at maintaining relationships on a vast scale, but connection has to start somewhere. In-person event? Have someone handy to gather email address and cell numbers, preferably entered directly into a spreadsheet or grassroots app on a tablet or phone. YouTube video? Make sure the candidate or cause is easy to identify and include clickable links. TV ad? QR code, URL or Facebook page — you get the idea.

Rule #2: Make it easy

Don’t make people work to get involved! The website should have obvious email signup and social media follow options, for a start (Pro tip: don’t hide the “Donate” button). Similarly, Facebook pages, Bluesky accounts and Instagram profiles should feature links back to the website or other digital channels. Yard signs? A URL can’t hurt. Put simply, every piece of content should include options to stay engaged. Pro tip #2: Try adding extra links to Facebook posts via the comments.

More Good Practices

• Use digital tools to enable one-on-one relationships. Personal contact with the campaign, staff or volunteers almost always makes more difference than any other form of campaign outreach. Digital tools can help, though! Field organizers routinely mass-text volunteers to start conversations, and candidates can do the same. I remember seeing Deray McKesson talk about using a peer-to-peer texting app to send a message to all of his donors at once, launching a bunch of one-to-one conversations from what’s often more of a blast medium. Likewise, an email signup could trigger a message from a local organizer and an invitation to coffee.
• Different channels can reinforce each other in other ways, too. Before canvassers try to talk with priority voters, try to reach them with Facebook/Instagram ads in advance. When you’re sending fundraising emails, try priming the pump and reinforcing the ask with more social-media ads. Rinse, repeat and multiply — it’s all about the virtuous circles.
• Trusted messengers can break through the communications clutter. Whether you’re a family member or a famous YouTuber, trust opens a lot of doors. On one end of the spectrum, relational organizing and political data could help identify a volunteer whom a priority voter might listen to. At the other end, a podcaster can introduce a you to a whole lot of people, most of whom may not to be able to vote for you but who may be persuaded to donate.
• Don’t just talk about yourself! On social media in particular, try to mix it up. Feature volunteers via photos, videos and stories. Link to news articles relevant to the issues you’re running on. Have staff or volunteers interact in the comments, using a little nudge to start a snowball rolling. Make a joke here and there.
• More More Video. Social-media algorithms love short video these days, so it behooves us to try to create it. Likewise, online ads come in lengths as short as six seconds, putting a premium on concise messaging. Longer-form videos have a role, too, and not just those podcast interviews. Way back in 2008, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe posted weekly videos intended for volunteers and staff, helping them understand the strategy that underlay their work — and reinforcing the connection they felt with the candidate.
• Think of canvassers and callers as local ambassadors. Train your volunteers to handle conversations at the front door, on the phone or in front of the WalMart. As much as possible, have volunteers canvass and call close to home, not halfway across the country. Something that rarely hurts? Having a candidate whom voters in the district can relate to as well.
• While we’re at it, all of your supporters are potential ambassadors within their own personal and professional circles. Create content for them to share and let them know about it. Pro Tip #3: Asking supporters to share a video is a nice break from begging them for money.
• Watch out for channel saturation. I am already receiving a whole bunch of fundraising texts I never signed up for, and I’m expecting orders of magnitude more between now and November. Since political texting really took off about a decade ago, campaigns have relied on voters and donors actually paying attention to them. In 2026, I wonder if that will still be true. If your plans heavily involve texting prospective donors and persuadable voters out of the blue, you may want to have backups ready just in case. Similarly, take a good look at all of your outreach channels. What could possibly go wrong? Better to think about it now than in October.

Of course, as with all digital campaigning advice, Your Mileage May Vary, and tactics that work well for one campaign could yield eyeball-melting failure for another. But for all but the highest-profile campaigns this year, attention is a scarce commodity, and connection more precious still. Wise campaigns will nurture it, hoping to transmute voter and donor love into electoral gold in November.

– cpd

Please share this post: The Most Precious Political Commodity in 2026

Special offer for Epolitics.com readers: 10% discount on PoliticalWire.com membership. Use this link to save 10% on your membership, or learn more.

Follow Epolitics on Substack, Bluesky, Threads, or Twitter/X. This post was also published on Substack.

Launched in 2006, Epolitics is written and edited by Colin Delany, who has helped nonprofits and political campaigns use digital tools in effective and creative ways since the days of the dot-com boom. He is also a frequent speaker and trainer and the author of How to Use the Internet to Change the World – and Win Elections. Contact him at cpd@epolitics.com.

Welcome, new readers! And everyone else, thanks for sticking with me through another sparse publishing period. Let’s get right to it — on with the show.

Quick Hits: September 28, 2025

• Ten lessons Democrats can learn from Catelin Drey’s big win.
• The Fundraising-Industrial Complex Is Eating American Politics. “New data reveals campaigns burn about a third of donations raised just asking for more donations”.
• Innovation Will Be Driven by the Need to Meet Voters Where They Are.
• Memo Calls on ActBlue to Ramp Up Enforcement of New Policies. Featuring friend-of-Epolitics Josh Nelson.
• Right-wing Facebook scammers are grifting off Charlie Kirk’s death.
• Right-Wing Activists Are Targeting People for Allegedly Celebrating Charlie Kirk’s Death, and ‘War Is Here’: The Far-Right Responds to Charlie Kirk Shooting With Calls for Violence.
• Why Charlie Kirk Mattered So Much to the Right. “Kirk reimagined what it means to be a modern right-wing political figure. His most lasting legacy may be that he showed the Republican party the way to compete in today’s frenetic media world.”
• How Charlie Kirk Used Controversy—Often Delivered in Person—to Construct Our New Media Ecosystem.
• With few facts about the Kirk shooting, wild speculation abounds. [Published shortly after the shooting].
• How Charlie Kirk’s social media machine rewired a generation’s politics.
• The Fallout from Charlie Kirk’s Death Online. Including “Google Search spikes and unprecedented engagement for right-wing social media”.
• Social Platforms Duck Blame for Inflaming Divisions Before Charlie Kirk’s Death.
• Why Right-Wing Outlets Attacked Wikipedia After Charlie Kirk’s Shooting. Once again, the facts have a liberal bias.
• Global politics happens on Discord now.
• All the Sad Young Terminally Online Men.
• What Democrats Can Learn From Charlie Kirk. Creating a “culture of belonging”.
• Trump Downplays Post Threatening Chicago, Saying He Wants to ‘Clean Up’ City. C.f. Trump Angrily Tells Reporter His Own Truth Post Is ‘Fake News’.
• DOJ Deletes Study Showing Domestic Terrorists Are Most Often Right Wing.
• I Gazed Into the Abyss of Truth Social’s Streaming Service. “Truth+ exposes the grift and grief at the heart of Trump’s big media bet.”
• We Analyzed Thousands of Videos by MAHA Influencers. Here’s what we found.
• The Influencer FBI. “The skill set required to succeed online may not always translate to effective law enforcement.”
• Yet ANOTHER Right-Wing Payola Media Scandal!
• A Dark Money Group Is Secretly Funding High-Profile Democratic Influencers, pledging them to silence and controlling content. Many were not amused. C.f. Why Dems Keep Screwing Up Media Efforts.
• Instagram Account Promotes Holocaust Denial T-Shirts to 400,000 Followers. Meta: It’s cool, yo.
• Beyond Our Borders: How Foreign Disinformation Exploits America’s Pain.
• At least 19 killed, hundreds injured in protests after Nepal social media ban.
• How ICE Is Using Fake Cell Towers To Spy On People’s Phones.
• Google admits the open web is in ‘rapid decline’. Adios, digital commons.
• Newsletter Frequency Test: The Strategy Behind A 500% Engagement Surge.
• Consumers Are Warming Up to Digital Ads and AI, Report Finds.
• I Thought I Knew Silicon Valley. I Was Wrong. “Tech got what it wanted by electing Trump. A year later, it looks more like a suicide pact.”
• She Fought the Far Right Online for Years. Now She Wants to Do It in Congress.
• Why Feminists Must Defend Encryption.
• ActBlue Enters the Digital Organizing Game With New Acquisition.
• How to Turn a Brain Dump into a Strategy Using AI.
• The Virtual Reality Hype Cycle: Lessons for the Age of AI.
• Stop Chasing Magic Words. Start Connecting. “Yes, words matter. But authenticity matters more.”

– cpd

Top photo via Pixabay

Please share this post: Digital Politics Quick Hits: Forty Good Stories

Special offer for Epolitics.com readers: 10% discount on PoliticalWire.com membership. Use this link to save 10% on your membership, or learn more.

Virtuous circle: ©iStock/jntvisual

Follow Epolitics on Substack, Bluesky, Threads, or Twitter/X. This post was also published on Substack.

Launched in 2006, Epolitics is written and edited by Colin Delany, who has helped nonprofits and political campaigns use digital tools in effective and creative ways since the days of the dot-com boom. He is also a frequent speaker and trainer and the author of How to Use the Internet to Change the World – and Win Elections. Contact him at cpd@epolitics.com.

Welcome, new readers! If you missed them, check out Sunday’s collection of 39 excellent stories about digital politics and advocacy and the last Tuesday Tip, explaining why Democrats and progressive should promote stories from Fox News and its ilk when it’s to their advantage. On with the show.

Tuesday Tip: The One Good Way to Use Someone Else’s Email or Text List

David Hogg is still spamming me — and he’s definitely not alone. Democratic primary candidates have been adding me to their lists in numbers since mid-summer, but Republicans have joined their ranks in force in the last few weeks.

People have been buying and selling political lists for ages, at least since direct mail and phone solicitation came on the scene. But with just about every political campaign of any scale creating an email or text-message list, the number of spreadsheets circulating for cash or friendship these days must be ridiculous.

Sometimes a candidate brings a legacy list from a previous career or campaign, but more often the campaign or consultants pay for one. Naturally, many buyers upload the list post haste and start spamming away. Equally unsurprising: I find many of their appeals in my spam filter, not my inbox. I can actually trace a bunch of Republican signups over the years back to Newt Gingrich’s list, which I joined in maybe 2010 to keep an eye on it. The current conservative wave includes organizations and campaigns alike, and several of them seem to be connected to the same sender. Buy once, spam repeatedly!

We’ve covered several reasons why you SHOULDN’T email people out of the blue before. Recipients tend not to open unsolicited messages, dragging down the performance of the entire list. Victims also tend to mark them as spam, which can put the hurt on a campaign as well. A surprisingly small number of spam complaints can cripple an email-fundraising operation, at least until it makes enough changes to get out of “spam jail”. I assume similar factors apply to text-message appeals as well.

But I know a way to use a list that landed in your lap without abusing it. I covered the tactic in last spring’s training on effective and ethical list-building (shout-out to sponsor Civic Shout), and it’s also in my digital-campaigning ebook:

I do know of ONE good way to put someone else’s list to work, ethically and often effectively: instead of using it to spam people, you could upload it to Facebook (and some other platforms) as a “custom audience”. Facebook et al will match your list to users’ email addresses or mobile numbers to what it has on file and then allow you to target ads specifically at those people. That way, THEY can decide whether they want to bite or not.

You can also create lookalike audiences to target people similar to your donors or activists across everything Facebook knows about us, which is not creepy at all:

[L]ookalike targeting [typically] uses a custom audience as the basis for outreach to “similar” people, with the assumption that they’re more likely to be interested in your issues than a random sampling of the population (you can choose the “lookalike percentage” — how closely the new people resemble the ones on your list — during setup). When you upload your supporter list and choose lookalike targeting for recruiting ads, you can turn a small list into a bigger community in a short time.

You might upload a list of your own donors and use lookalike targeting to try to expand your fundraising base. As more people sign up, you can feed their information into the system and further refine your targeting. You’ll create a circle virtuous in more ways than one: ever-improving and completely opt-in.

Communicators can create custom and lookalike audiences from other sources besides spreadsheets, including people who’ve engaged with a particular piece of content on Facebook or who’ve gone to a defined place on a website. The latter can connect you with people who land on your donation page but who don’t make it all the way to the thank-you page, for example.

Whatever the source of a list, the basic concept is the same. Dangle bait in front of an audience, see who bites, and target more people who look like them.

For more, check out the list-building training or drop me a line to chat. Next tip next week, Lord willin’ and the creek don’t rise.

– cpd

Please share this post: Tuesday Tip: The One Good Way to Use Someone Else’s Email List

Special offer for Epolitics.com readers: 10% discount on PoliticalWire.com membership. Use this link to save 10% on your membership, or learn more.

Follow Epolitics on Substack, Bluesky, Threads, or Twitter/X. This post was also published on Substack.

Welcome, new readers! Be sure to check out my six-part 2025 digital politics training series, now live on YouTube. On with the show.

Quick Hits: September 7, 2025

Welcome to the waning days of summer! As usual, Trump’s been barraging us with so much madness that it’s hard to keep up. I’ve started at least three articles in the last couple of weeks that I’ve had to shelve because events overtook them. Fortunately, plenty of our peers have been on top of things. Let’s dive into a curated selection of excellent stories related to our digital-politics moment. More to come.

• Political Ad Spending Expected to Hit Nearly $11 Billion in 2026.
• Democrats spotlighting inflation as they target vulnerable House Republicans in Labor Day weekend ads. “The DCCC [was] launching the five-figure ad buy in 35 districts it says are ‘in play.’ The ads [ran] on Instagram and You Tube and [were] aimed at young men between the ages of 18 and 44”.
• White House launches TikTok account with Trump saying ‘I am your voice’.
• White House’s New TikTok Push Epically Backfires. Hahaha: “Less than 24 hours after the White House launched a TikTok page, its videos have been inundated with comments about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.”
• Why Everyone Should Stop Freaking Out About Gavin Newsom’s Social Media, as bTeam Trump Responds to Newsom Trolling With Sad Mad Men Meme.
• Preposterous ICE videos have a holy war to sell you. “Religious-themed government videos portray a grim, never-ending battle between us and them.” At the same time, The Trump Administration Is Using Memes to Turn Mass Deportation Into One Big Joke.
• Trump’s pick to lead BLS ran Twitter account with sexually degrading, bigoted attacks, and An Account Using the Same Name as Trump’s BLS Pick Posted Red-Pilled Conspiracy Theories.
• So Far the Only Thing Trump Has Won From Russia Is More Ridicule.
• Amy Klobuchar: What I Didn’t Say About Sydney Sweeney. Deepfake!
• Super PAC aims to drown out AI critics in midterms, with $100M and counting.
• Can AI Help Fundraisers Create Deeper Connections With Donors? Following up after Quiller.ai gets acquired.
• The Single Word That Explains Why Chatbots Sound So Human. One word for you: pragmatics.
• AI Stokes Concerns Among Political Voiceover Talent.
• It’s happening: People are starting to talk like ChatGPT.
• The Trump administration is trying to suppress public input. What should advocacy organizations do? Shutting down the API that helps orgs deliver rulemaking comments.
• Spam PACs Raise Money by Deceiving Seniors. “One 89-year-old woman made 7,532 donations totaling $68,666.”
• BREAKING: Only a $5 Gift Can Stop the Lies About Mothership! And, Bad News and Good News on the Fundraising Front.
• Maine Democratic Senate Candidate Sits at Nexus of Spam PAC Network.
• Chinese Hackers Pretended to Be a Top U.S. Lawmaker During Trade Talks.
• When podcasts do what the legacy press won’t. “Unconventional hosts are cornering politicians in ways legacy outlets rarely attempt”.
• Everyone Hates Him. Why Is His Podcast so Popular? Surprise! It’s Ted Cruz.
• Stop Chasing Gimmicks: The Case for a Permanent Progressive Media Structure.
• Video Briefing: How to Reach Working Class Voters Through the Platforms and Media They Use Most.
• Why the Democrats’ Digital Strategy Is Doomed to Fail. “What happens when you produce content so tightly controlled? So desperate for heart emojis? It feels flat and sterile, devoid of any of the qualities that helped Zohran’s videos break through.”
• How to Run Digital Like It’s 2025.
• We Can’t Talk to People That Way. “Professionalized language has bled into our public-facing communications and isolated us from the people we need to be reaching”.
• The Future Is Already in Their Feed: What the New Catalist Memo Tells Us About Winning the Information War.
• Canvassing Giant Progressive Turnout Project Buys Into New Tech. Moving away from VAN.
• The Party Outside the Party. “Understanding the Democratic PACs working around rather than in the Democratic Party”.
• Rethinking Canvassing: From Knock-and-Go to Layered Organizing.
• Democratic voter-registration strategies may not be working, as some traditionally Democratic voters move away from the party. C.f. Democrats Need To Get Serious About Partisan Voter Registration.
• A history of statistics in political life.
• How Techno-Fascists Are Engineering Our Surrender. “They’ll target our identities, our values, our pain. And they’ll dress it up as principled resistance.”
• On American exceptionalism: “America is exceptional not because God wills it so, or because it has the strongest military, or because capitalism is the best economic system on Earth (although it probably is). We are exceptional because we aspire to an ideal that we know can never be met.”

– cpd

Image by Iván Tamás from Pixabay

Please share this post: Catching Up: Thirty-Nine Good Stories about Digital Politics & Advocacy

Special offer for Epolitics.com readers: 10% discount on PoliticalWire.com membership. Use this link to save 10% on your membership, or learn more.

Follow Epolitics on Substack, Bluesky, Threads, or Twitter/X. This post was also published on Substack. Photo: Some foxes are whiter than others, via Pixabay.

Welcome, new readers! Catch up fast with these recent highlights:

• How to Build a Democratic Persuasion Machine in 2025
• NC Democratic Party Gives Grassroots Tech to Down-Ballot Candidates – For Free
• David Hogg is Spamming Me
• How Did Democrats Forget These Three Things about Field Organizing?
• You can also dig into my six-part 2025 digital politics spring training series, now live on YouTube, and my ebook, How to Use the Internet to Change the World – and Win Elections.

Now, on with the show.

Why Democrats & Progressive Should Share Stories from Fox News

Introducing a new feature, Tuesday Tips & Tactics! We’ll raid the vast Epolitics archive, my ebook and the hundreds of pages of notes I’ve collected in panels and conferences for good ideas you can put to use right away. The article below first appeared in February 2021, and though some of the names would change today, the essential idea holds true. Note that ACRONYM was a project of what’s now Courier.

Nobody on the political left wants to share stories from Fox…but we should. The idea naturally rankles. Why should we boost a news outlet that consistently distorts our views and actively turns people against us? For one reason: sharing Fox News stories can help us reach Americans who would otherwise tune us out.

Most grassroots conservatives take it as an article of faith that liberals lie to them, a sentiment encouraged by Fox News itself. But progressives can use the fact that Trump supporters have been trained to ignore information produced outside the right-wing bubble to our advantage. When we can find stories in conservative media that include something beneficial to our work, sharing the Fox version of story or even a clip of Rush Limbaugh can help us connect with people who won’t pay attention to anything else.

This idea came up repeatedly during ACRONYM’s post-election debrief a few weeks ago. Before the election, their team used the reactions to their own digital advertising to identify themes resonating with conservative voters from week. When they found a topic that worked, boosting relevant news stories to potentially persuadable people, including articles and videos from Fox, often performed better than other content. For example, they might create a video ad from Fox News clips or share a relatively straight-news Fox story about the economy or the pandemic. One ACRONYM staffer described Tucker Carlson as their “golden goose” — when they could promote one of his videos, their engagement rate went through the roof. Stories from the New York Times, MSNBC or CNN simply did not perform as well with the voters they needed to reach.

Since content from Fox News or right-wing talk radio comes from a trusted source, it creates a “permission structure” for conservative audiences. Wrapped in familiar paper, the package won’t be ignored automatically as it would when it’s in a story from an outlet they’ve been told to dismiss. Naturally, groups on the left should frame each piece carefully, for instance using a headline or the introductory text or preview image in a Facebook post to highlight the parts we want people to take away. We might also pick Fox quotes for the substance of a digital ad but link to a video of our own that pivots off of them to make a progressive point.

However we manage to jujitsu a story to our advantage, though, information from a trusted messenger can help us get at least a toe in the door. The trick, of course, is to find the stories in the first place, and I do not envy those with the job of sorting through hours of disinformation and bile. Pity the poor interns….

Hah! Now we should extend our pity to a poor, hard-working AI.

– cpd

Please share this post: Tuesday Tip: Democrats & Progressive Should Share Stories from Fox News

Special offer for Epolitics.com readers: 10% discount on PoliticalWire.com membership. Use this link to save 10% on your membership, or learn more.

Follow Epolitics on Substack, Bluesky, Threads, or Twitter/X. This post was also published on Substack.

First launched in 2006, Epolitics is written and edited by Colin Delany, who for close to three decades has helped nonprofits and political campaigns use digital tools in effective and creative ways to achieve their political, policy and organizational goals. For more, contact him at cpd@epolitics.com.

Welcome, new readers and new paid subscribers! I can’t begin to tell you how much I appreciate all of you. And, greetings from New Orleans, the city of my birth! I rolled in Wednesday evening for Netroots Nation, which wrapped up with an excellent party last night that began with a second line parade to the venue. It was a great gathering as always, with many old friends and the chance to meet new ones, and you’ll see the first fruits of my extensive note-taking in the piece below.

Readers may remember that my family was planning to move my mom to assisted living close to me in DC three weeks. We kept having to postpone the trip for logistical reasons, which naturally gave her time to fall and break her hip. Oof! A gut punch, but we’re doing the best we can.

She has a pin on one side and a partial replacement on the other, but she’s been out of the hospital and in a rehab nursing home since the beginning of August. So I’ll be driving back to East Texas tomorrow, with good tunes on the stereo and fond memories of Netroots on my mind. If Mom can get her strength back, we still hope to get her to the East Coast and me back home in the lovely DC neighborhood of Mt Pleasant soon. Fingers crossed.

On with the show.

The North Carolina Democratic Party Gives Grassroots Tech to Down-Ballot Candidates – For Free

In a Netroots Nation session this week, North Carolina Democratic Party chair Anderson Clayton revealed something that the audience was audibly surprised to hear. She said that her party now gives every local, state and congressional Democratic candidate free access to vital grassroots tools, including the Votebuilder voter-data platform. Many or most other parties charge candidates for Votebuilder access, meaning that campaigns on tight budgets may delay using it or eschew it altogether.

Rather than nickel-and-dime their candidates, North Carolina Dems have raised enough money to pay for Votebuilder access for every credible candidate, both in the primaries and in the general election. That’s a big deal! As Anderson pointed out, many more campaigns across the state will be adding data from canvassing and other outreach to the voter file early and often, including from areas where the party has had relatively little voter contact in the past.

That voter data is more likely to stick around than before, since campaigns will updating a central repository of information. In the past, some might have used an alternative to Votebuilder that didn’t add to the state party file, and the results of their voter outreach might be lost after Election Day. Instead, NC Dems have created a compounding benefit: every campaign that employs the system helps create a web of voter data that future campaigns can rely on.

Of course, depending too much on a single platform brings its own vulnerabilities, and the national Democratic party is already looking for alternatives to Votebuilder/NGP VAN. In that case, though, NC Dems could of course pivot to a different standard data-management system if they needed to, bringing campaigns along for the ride. That transition would probably not be a whole lot of fun, but it’s at least an option.

Besides Votebuilder access, the NC party also provides tactical and technical training for candidates and staff, and it helps campaigns set up ActBlue accounts to begin fundraising online as soon as possible. Once the primaries are decided, the party pays for the winners to access Mobilize, a powerful toolset for managing events and volunteers. Anderson noted that she’d LIKE to help primary campaigns get Mobilize as well, but that the platform is too expensive for them to afford it early for everyone. Once again, though, having campaigns on a common platform means that data can survive and that other candidates should have a head start getting grassroots outreach programs up and running in the future.

These decisions by the North Carolina party demonstrate a commitment to the kind of persistent, sustained field outreach that I think is essential for long-term voter persuasion. Democrats can’t just keep preaching to the faithful; we must connect with skeptical voters in bulk and (whenever possible) via people they already trust, including friends and family. This week’s redistricting feeding frenzy only hints at how far the other side will go to tilt the political field in their favor, and Dems will likely need huge vote margins to overcome many of the structural obstacles Republicans are building to a fair and representative vote. Once the midterms have passed, Democrats must look to 2028 and presidential-year turnout. With many occasional voters showing up at the polls then, mobilization alone won’t cut it — Democrats need to coax millions more Americans into our tent.

Other state parties should look to North Carolina’s approach to grassroots tech as an example, just as people on the Netroots panel with Anderson mentioned that THEY see persistent field organizing campaigns in Michigan and Wisconsin as an inspiration. Party leaders should approach a tool like Votebuilder as a means to build capacity for the entire Democratic movement, not as a short-term money-maker. With autocracy in the air, Democrats had better be playing for keeps.

– cpd

Top photo via Wikipedia

Please share this post: North Carolina Democratic Party Gives Grassroots Tech to Down-Ballot Candidates – For Free

Special offer for Epolitics.com readers: 10% discount on PoliticalWire.com membership. Use this link to save 10% on your membership, or learn more.

Follow Epolitics on Substack, Bluesky, Threads, or Twitter/X. This post was also published on Substack.

Epolitics is written and edited by Colin Delany, who has helped nonprofits and political campaigns use digital tools in effective and creative ways to achieve their political, policy and organizational goals for close to three decades. For more, contact him at cpd@epolitics.com.

Welcome, new readers! Check out these upcoming events:

• The 20th Annual Netroots Nation, held this year in New Orleans August 7-9. It’s been one of my favorite events since I first went in 2008, and this year I’ll be delivering two trainings at the main event and a third one this week as part of a virtual pre-conference.
• The latest big-league training from the Center for Digital Strategies, a three-month immersion in AI for Nonprofits and Advocacy.
• You can also dig into my six-part 2025 digital politics spring training series, now live on YouTube, plus recent articles on list-building and political persuasion.

Now, on with the show.

Epolitics: Nineteen Years and Counting

Thank you so much for being a part of the Epolitics community! Longtime readers may remember that I normally live in DC but have been down in Texas since December. My father died right after Thanksgiving, leaving my declining and 87-year-old mom alone in my hometown. My siblings have been pitching in as well, but since I’m self-employed and have no kids, I could pack up the cat and head South for as long as I was needed.

But this part of our family’s journey is about to end. On Wednesday, my older brother will drive us the three-odd hours to the airport in Houston, and my mom and I will fly to DC and her new home in an assisted living place in the District. Delany’s have been living in East Texas for more than 170 years, but we will be the last for now.

Many of you will have cared for an aging parent, and you’ll know how much work it is — and how rewarding it can be. Keeping up a blog/Substack while taking care of her and doing my normal consulting work has not been easy (I had to take a break while I was formatting this piece to walk her to the bathroom), and I appreciate your patience more than I can say. With mom in a safe and happy place, I plan to crank up the frequency here. And, I look forward to publishing ideas and perspectives from some of you as well. But overall, I do not regret a moment of the seven months I’ve spent here with her.

I launched Epolitics.com nineteen years ago this month, which blows my mind. Back then, it was a rare site covering the craft of digital politics and advocacy. Now, we have plenty of company, with newsletters like Chaotic Era, FWIW, and The Connector joining practitioners like Will Robinson, Amy Pritchard, Mike Nellis and many, many others in writing and talking about the power of digital tools to change minds and build political support.

Whether you started reading Epolitics yesterday or all the way back in 2006, thank you again for being a part of this community. I have a funny feeling that we’ll have plenty to talk about in the years to come.

Quick Hits: July 21, 2025

• How MAGA influencers put pressure on Trump, Bondi over Epstein. But note that Epstein’s not the ONLY thing they’re mad about.
• Trump Talks About Anything but Epstein on His Social Media Account. Desperate to distract from Epstein by any means necessary…including today’s release of MLK surveillance files.
• Why Democrats are (still) bad at the internet, particularly when it comes to influencers and social media. No biggie, right?
• Democrats Need to Tell the Story of the Big Ugly Bill, and not just in high-profile targeted districts. We need a national narrative.
• Organizing Organizers, a modest proposal.
• This right-wing YouTuber is having a moment. “The fastest-growing political accounts show that the platform’s architecture rewards not just relentless output, but also the creation of highly optimized, sensational videos that follow an almost algebraic formula to game the algorithm. Political actors who are able to understand and follow that formula can grow unprecedented clout and influence heading into the midterms and beyond.”
• Do They Have Your Attention Now? At least some Dems may understand the influencer/attention economy.
• Democrats’ 2024 Autopsy Is Described as Avoiding the Likeliest Cause of Death, but we may still learn a few things.
• Why Grok Fell in Love With Hitler, and what it reveals about the “black box” of generative AI.
• The Road to MechaHitler. Reality has a well known liberal bias, and trying to tweak AI to avoid that fact does not seem to work elegantly.
• Five things I believe about actually-existing AI today.
• Trump Era Phase Two. How does an insurgent movement hold on once it’s the Establishment? Nonstop conflict.
• ‘Who Killed Love?’ A Video Game Plays to Male Resentment in China.

– cpd

Please share this post: Epolitics: Nineteen Years and Counting

Special offer for Epolitics.com readers: 10% discount on PoliticalWire.com membership. Use this link to save 10% on your membership, or learn more.

Follow Epolitics on Substack, Bluesky, Threads, or Twitter/X. This post was also published on Substack.

Welcome, new readers! Epolitics has covered digital politics and advocacy since 2006, and I’m excited to welcome you to the community.

• Drop me a line if you want to chat about anything related to digital politics or anything I’ve written here. For almost thirty years, I’ve worked with campaigns and nonprofits to help them use digital tools to change the world, and I’m happy to share that experience.
• If you haven’t had a chance yet, take a look at my six-part 2025 digital politics spring training series, now a convenient playlist on YouTube
• Check out the Center for Digital Strategy’s AI for Nonprofits and Advocacy program, now accepting a new cohort of enrollees!

Now, on with the show.

MAGA Trump Fury, Rubio AI Impersonator, DCCC OBBA Ads, SSA Puff Email & More

MAGA vs. Trump vs. Dems

Is MAGA truly up in arms about the Trump Administration’s inability to deliver the goods on Jeffrey Epstein? Judging from a conversation I just had with a QAnon-adjacent friend in my East Texas hometown, quite possibly. To him, it was a sign that even the Trump people had been coopted by the powers behind the scenes. No client list? No credibility.

Could the right wing have unleashed one conspiracy theory too many? Well, maybe. It’s possible that the most out-there of Trump’s supporters might start to drift from his orbit, but we should never underestimate the connection he has with the MAGA base. My suspicion is that they’ll find ways to rationalize “betrayals” like this and Trump’s resumption of support for Ukraine, but we should definitely watch for longer-term disillusionment among their ranks. It wouldn’t take that much erosion to swing a few House districts here and there next year.

Hospital closures might break off some support as well, at least if voters ever realize the Big Beautiful Bill is the cause. With that possibility in mind, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is buying Meta ads in the districts of 35 House Republicans highlighting how Medicaid cuts hurt rural hospitals. The ad buy is in the “four figures”, which I hope means four figures per district, not a few thousand dollars spread over 35 separate areas.

Also note the DCCC’s recent attempt to pin grocery prices on House Republicans, which they appear to have given to Fox Business News as an exclusive, perhaps as an incentive to keep the story on screen longer. As with the Facebook ads, it’s necessary but not sufficient! Dems and allies should be preparing to spend orders of magnitude more time and money persuading voters than went into this campaign. Are they?

More Quick Hits:

• Did you get that bizarre fluff email last week from the Social Security Administration, which I’ll emphasize is a branch of the federal government? The message was essentially a press release praising the Big Beautiful Bill for lowering taxes on social security benefits. You will be shocked to hear that it did not mention that the tax cuts will naturally accelerate Social Security’s eventual insolvency. The message was so out of the ordinary that I thought I’d received as a member of the working press, but apparently it went to everyday people with online accounts with the SSA. Your tax dollars at work! And a reminder of how much Trump will use the executive branch to warp the information space in which we live.

• Elon Musk’s Grok AI [hearts] Hitler! Lots and lots and lots of antisemitic and pro-Nazi content, perhaps because of access of unfiltered content from Musk’s Twitter/X. Definitely in character, since for Musk, it’s always Springtime for Hitler.
• An AI mimics Marco Rubio: “An impostor pretending to be Marco Rubio contacted foreign ministers, a US governor and a member of Congress by sending them voice and text messages that mimic Rubio’s voice and writing style”. We shall see many more events like this in the months and years to come! To help, Alexandra Petri lays out a few signs it wasn’t actually him.
• Be sure to read these two important pieces from Will Robinson! First, The Stories Democrats Aren’t Telling (But Should), because “If there’s one thing Democrats should have learned by now, it’s this: voters don’t just remember what you did – they remember how you made them feel.” Next, People Are Our Power. So Why Aren’t We Training Them? Because, “Let me be blunt: we are failing to train the people who want to help us win.” Don’t miss either piece.
• In a similar vein, see Amy Pritchard’s Five Hard Truths about What We’re doing Wrong. A small sample: “We Reward Relationships, Not Results…You can lose a campaign and still get rehired. You can run the same ineffective strategy and still get funded. You can burn through staff and never be held accountable.” Testify, sister. Though Epolitics naturally wonders how we got left out of the grift.
• The Democrats Have an Authenticity Gap. “What creates the ‘relatable dude-bro’ audience is organic connection, not donor checks.”
• About that almost-revolution in Quebec: “‘The importance of social media really can’t be overestimated here,’ Lewis said. ‘They became incubators for this very specific kind of cell-based, networked extremism.'”
• Citizen journalists step up: “And now in this moment when L.A. needs as many eyes on the streets as possible, L.A. Taco has become indispensable.” Hunter Thompson: “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
• Reagan Invoked the ‘Welfare Queen.’ The New G.O.P. Target Is a Lazy Gamer. “Republicans targeting safety net programs once invoked women they claimed were living lavishly on government funds. Now as they seek to pare back Medicaid, the imagery has changed — but not the argument.”
• Hakeem Jeffries’ floor speech as a sign that Dems are waking up to the new reality?. “‘Said the first House Democrat who spoke anonymously: ‘So much of politics has turned into showtime, and so we do showtime.'”
• And finally, Trump wants to tariff Brazil over its trial of his buddy Bolsonaro, a move that would jack up the prices of cofeee. Harold Myerson: “A lesser man might be deterred by the economic consequences and political fallout from this threatened tariff, but give Trump credit where credit is due: His commitment to overthrowing democracy in Latin America’s largest nation will not be deterred by such mundane considerations. Up the fascists! Drink less coffee!”

– cpd

Top photo by Gerd Altmann via Pixabay

Please share this post: MAGA Trump Fury, Rubio AI Impersonator, ‘Beautiful’ DCCC Ads & More

Special offer for Epolitics.com readers: 10% discount on PoliticalWire.com membership. Use this link to save 10% on your membership, or learn more.

Follow Epolitics on Substack, Bluesky, Threads, or Twitter/X. This post was also published on Substack.

Welcome, new readers and new paid subscribers! Thank you so much for being part of the Epolitics community. I’ve been running Epolitics as a blog and now a Substack for almost twenty years, and I’m excited to welcome you aboard. Digital politics is a radically different animal than it was in 2006, but so many of the same rules still apply. Including some basics that seem to be forgotten all too often, as we shall see below.

David Hogg is Spamming Me

David Hogg is spamming me, but the one he hurts could be himself.

On June 20th, a “Welcome to the Team” message from Hogg’s Leaders We Deserve appeared in my email inbox. Had I signed up for his list? No, I had not. The message itself wasn’t too bad; it was long, but since it was intended as an introduction, I forgave it. Did it ask me for anything but money? No, it did not — it included no attempt to treat me as something other than an ATM with legs. Of course, I assumed more appeals would be coming, and I was not wrong.

I received five more messages from Leaders We Deserve over the remaining ten days of June, for a total of six for the month. Four more have arrived in the first five days of July, making a total of ten unsolicited messages from one organization in just over two weeks. I have given them no money, and I only clicked on a single donate button to see where it went (an ActBlue landing page). Yet the messages continue to pile up.

Now, I have nothing against Hogg and have actually written about him and his Parkland peers as a model for distributed organizing. I also have no problem with his drive to unseat certain Democratic incumbents, since the party needs fresh ideas and no elected official should feel entitled to a seat. I do think Hogg was wrong to push challenges from a position on the Democratic National Committee, but that’s because I believe the party apparatus must remain as neutral as possible to keep its legitimacy.

But I do have a problem with spam, which a stream of unbidden donation appeals clearly is. Leaders We Deserve or its fundraising consultants have obviously purchased or otherwise acquired lists of past Democratic donors, and they have not been shy about using them. I’m sure they’re having some success, since quantity has a quality all its own and even a blind pig finds the occasional acorn. Then why do I object?

Counter-Productive Tactics

When you email a bunch of people out of the blue, even from a name as well known as Hogg’s, some recipients are going to mark the messages as spam. Others will ignore them, particularly after the first two or three, and your open and click rates will usually drop.

Email Service Providers like Gmail, Yahoo, MSN and AOL track overall performance for big senders, and low open and click rates can put your appeals in the “promotions” or “other” tab in recipients’ inboxes. Worse, spam complaints can kill your messages dead! I’ve worked with a client before who’d ended up in “spam jail” with a couple of the big ESPs, and it’s a tough spot to escape. No matter how good your content is, if no one sees it, it may as well not exist. Also note that sending to people who haven’t opted-in to a list generally violates the terms of service for mass-email systems, not that many of them seem to police it.

List-buying is an old practice. One small example: In 2016, Chris Christie endorsed Donald Trump after he dropped out of the presidential race, but Marco Rubio ended up with Christie’s donor list. I recall hearing from a friend who specialized in political email deliverability that Rubio’s open rate dropped significantly after he started sending to Christie’s supporters, as one might expect when spamming a list of people who actively didn’t back him in the first place.

I did check my spam filter to see if any messages from Leaders We Deserve had landed there, and none had so far — a sign at the least that they got their sender settings right. I DID find a recent Republican National Committee email flagged as spam, but I approved it so I can bask in the light of their future missives. The RNC message provides a cautionary tale for Hogg, though, showing that even big political organizations can find themselves in deliverability trouble.

Generic Content

Since I love you all, I went through each of Hogg’s fundraising appeals looking for themes. What I mostly found was bland writing all about Leaders We Deserve, with little to lay out what’s in it for me as a donor. Overall, nothing about them made these messages stand out from the scores of similar emails I get every week.

An early entry in the sequence even employed one of the spammier tactics out there, the “we’ve checked your record and you haven’t donated yet” scam. Really? You checked MY record individually? I’m touched! No, you just ran a database query for people on your list who hadn’t donated yet and tried to guilt them into giving you money. It’s about as bad as the “renew your membership” emails from an organization you’ve never joined (I’m looking at YOU, DLCC). Blech.

I will note that the July 3rd message announced support for a young, progressive candidate in the race for Raul Grivalva’s congressional seat in Arizona, with a donation split between Hogg’s group and the campaign. THAT one gave people a concrete action to take to help someone running for office more than a year before the midterms. It also might tempt donors who might not be excited about giving to Leaders We Deserve but support the goal of building a younger political bench. One email out of nine ain’t bad!

Disrespecting Activists

Spamming people out of the blue, treating them like cash machines and employing cheap, manipulative tactics all suggest one thing: a fundamental disrespect for potential donors and supporters. To Leaders We Deserve, our only apparent value is the contents of our bank accounts, not our ability to contribute time, creativity or passion to a cause. Millions of Americans are primed to act now to help save our democracy. Why not help them find outlets that work for them and still benefit you and your political goals? Some people can donate, yes, but others need options too. Sign a petition! Share content on social media! Recruit a friend! Something that doesn’t require the transfer of funds, and that does require consent.

Despite our rough introduction, I’ll keep watching Leaders We Deserve to see what they’re up to. Heck, I might have joined their list on my own if they hadn’t spammed me first. For now, though, nothing says “we’re an authentic voice changing the political system” like adopting some of the worst practices of the Old Regime.

Better Ways to Build Lists

Instead of investing in spam, Leaders We Deserve could build its list organically. That approach lets potential donors choose to come on board because they want to, not because their names were on a spreadsheet someone ended up with. I covered plenty of good practices in my recent Effective & Ethical List-Building and Online Fundraising 101 trainings, a few of which I’ll summarize below. Note that old-school list-building is often slow — trench warfare rather than blitzkrieg — but lasting relationships take time to build.

• Use an acquired list as a basis for a Facebook Custom Audience. Expand via Lookalike audience if you want to expand the tent. Run acquisition ads on Facebook and Instagram against the audiences. Anyone who comes in through the ads has chosen to follow you, so you can email them with abandon. As people sign up, use the new names to create an expanded Custom Audience and Lookalike to refine your targeting beyond the initial list.
• Run acquisition campaigns in other online channels, including activist communities like Civic Shout, Daily Kos or Care2. When possible, go fishing in ponds that are already well stocked with potential donors.
• Roll out joint actions with allies or partners, in which both of you promote the action and reap the rewards in the form of new names
• Go on YouTube shows, appear on cable news, recruit influencers and reach out to relevant online niches to help spread the word to new audiences. Note: Epolitics is available for bribes! Our small-but-mighty community might just make all the difference your success or failure. Just be sure to have an easy action (such as a petition signature) for readers, viewers and listeners to take.

Watch the full training series for more. The final takeaway? An organization helmed by someone as well known as David Hogg shouldn’t have to scrape the bottom of the tactical barrel to raise money. For now, my dollars are staying in my bank account, not going to his.

– cpd

Photo: by freezelight – Spam wall, CC BY-SA 2.0, Link, via Wikipedia

Please share this post: David Hogg is Spamming Me