Elderly dementia patients are being scammed by political fundraisers. Guess which party is the worst offender

Confirmed once again: The Republican Party is a party of grifters. The latest evidence comes from CNN, which investigated how vulnerable elderly people, including dementia patients, are being scammed by an avalanche of political fundraising text messages and emails.

The report includes elders scammed by Republicans and Democrats alike – but makes clear that this is overwhelmingly a phenomenon of one party. Actually, Federal Trade Commission complaints make that clear: WinRed, the Republican online fundraising portal, had 803 FTC complaints from January 2022 to June 2024. ActBlue, the Democratic online fundraising portal, had 120 complaints in the same time period. 

ActBlue recently booted a handful of scam PACs of the sort that can create these problems – organizations that claim to be supporting Vice President Kamala Harris' presidential campaign or working to defeat Donald Trump but exist mostly to spread money around among political operatives. The scam PACs ActBlue ejected don't show up in the CNN report, though, and the worst offender the report flags on the Democratic side when it comes to taking money from vulnerable seniors – the Progressive Turnout Project – remains on ActBlue. 

Republicans could hardly kick out their own worst offenders, since the Trump campaign and affiliated PACs have a massive lead over all other entities when it comes to taking money from a sample of just 52 "elderly, unwitting donors" who gave more than $6 million combined. Of that $6 million, Trump affiliates got $440,033, the National Republican Senatorial Committee got $373,586, and the National Republican Congressional Committee got $165,479. 

The stories CNN reports are heartbreaking: confused elders thinking they made a one-time donation but actually having been automatically opted in to weekly donations, or not realizing that they had the option to not contribute in response to urgent text and email appeals. Some drained their savings before their families realized and stepped in. At least one believed that he was getting personal messages from Trump and Don Jr. and that he had been invited to Mar-a-Lago – because he believed all those "I want to meet you" fundraising appeals under Trump's name.

This investigation once again lays bare how corrupt, manipulative, and abusive the Republican Party is. Democrats are imperfect, but an impartial look at a single problem – after all, FTC complaints on this are made by people who were receiving the fundraising appeals, so most of the complaints about Republican fundraising will have come from people who were initially open to Republican fundraising appeals but ultimately found them abusive – shows the difference in scope.

It strikes me as a microcosm of the parties more generally. The Democratic Party is not perfect on anything. But the Republican Party is reliably so much worse on everything that it's hard to make honest comparisons.

There's also a media angle here. CNN did a great job on reporting this story and the story itself makes clear where the problem really lies. But you wouldn't know from the headline or subhed: "How elderly dementia patients are unwittingly fueling political campaigns: A CNN investigation reveals how deceptive political fundraising has misled elderly Americans into giving away millions of dollars." An alternative headline shows up as "Political fundraisers WinRed and ActBlue are taking millions of dollars from elderly dementia patients to fuel their campaigns."

When you share the article on social media, the graphic suggests far more parity than the text reveals, showing a phone with five fundraising messages, three of them in red and two in blue. As the FTC complaint data makes clear, four red and one blue would be closer to the truth.

Even when the media investigates and reports that Republicans are much worse about a specific, quantifiable thing than Democrats, Republicans get a break when it comes to the most visible parts of the story, the ones many people will not look past.

And by the way? If you have an elderly relative, you might want to check in on their political giving.