The Democratic Party's relationship with its voters has turned spammy and abusive

It's becoming apparent that there's not going to be any serious Democratic postmortem on how a party of boring but generally honest sanity cannot muster an election win against a sneering, frothing authoritarian-minded convicted felon who intentionally led an attempted insurrection against our own government.

Certainly, much or most of the blame can be pinned squarely on billionaire donors and massive media conglomerates who all decided that a dishonest and criminal strongman promising to purge 20 million people from the country and who has neither shown remorse nor faced consequences for an Actual Damn Coup Attempt is a thing that can be stomached, if he promises to cut their taxes and free their companies from regulations that bar them from cheating people outright. There is not much a party can do when a nation's media is devoted to normalizing coup and crookery, especially when thy are doing it on the orders of billionaire owners or chief executives who do not give a shit about anyone but themselves and their wealthiest friends.

The whole point of a political party, however, is to muster up strategies that can change public narratives. To the extent that such conversations may now be happening, however, they appear to mainly be led by the same party charlatans that have long promised that what the public most wants is a second Republican Party, one that's perhaps less racist but still unfailingly corporate.

Maybe Democratic lawmakers should have been a bit less alarmed about that whole mass death event, eh? Maybe state elected officials should have held off, let the hospital systems collapse entirely under the weight of that first surge—and it was so, so close to happening—and bury the resulting bodies in the mass graves that were already being prepared for the purpose?

Emanuel may be an outlier in his unfailing terribleness, but party leaders and strategists have never strayed too far from his own prescriptions for how to fix the party. The Democratic Party motto, at least of those ensconced safely in Washington, D.C. and collecting good paychecks for deciding these things, often appears to be: Why Don't We Just Give Up?

Democrats have a plan to take back power in Washington back from Republicans in two years: work with them now.

Democrats, who are already planning their comeback after being swept out of power in Washington last month, have said they'll oppose President-elect Donald Trump and his allies when their values collide but are open to cooperation on a range of issues, including immigration, federal spending and entitlements.

The strategy marks a turnaround from 2017, when "resistance" to Trump was Democrats' rallying cry. But, some lawmakers and operatives said, it also marks a challenge to Republicans for bipartisanship at a time when narrow GOP congressional majorities will likely mandate some level of cooperation.

"People want to see government work, and we're going to hold Republicans accountable for whether they're willing to help move things forward for the American people. So, if they aren't, then absolutely, that will impact them at the ballot box," said Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., who led House Democrats' campaign arm this year and will do so again for the 2026 midterms.

Given that more than a few Democrats are already making noises about not opposing malevolent crackpots like Robert F. Kennedy Jr as one of their early shows of "cooperation" with the coup-attempting convicted felon, one shudders to imagine what "cooperation" on mass internment camps for migrants might look like.

Again, the irony of party strategists deciding that they should cooperate more with The Criminal after his violent attempted coup than they did before it is—well, that may sum up exactly how we found ourselves here. Nobody in government had the guts to stake out the position that Trump's attack on the Capitol was truly an unforgivable act, a betrayal of his country that could not stand, no matter how many Republicans dared assist him in doing it, and so it became forgivable. Because the parties wanted it to be; the corporatized press wanted it to be; the urge to muddle through dangerous times with the playbook of fatter and happier days all but demanded it.

But there's another new development—or perhaps a return to another past norm—that I have been struggling to put into words, and I think so far Adam Bonica has come closest to it. What can we glean from Democratic Party fundraising efforts that have increasingly turned from merely spammy to outright abusive?

In 2024 alone, my inbox was bombarded with over 3,200 emails from Democratic campaigns, peaking at 48 in a single day. That doesn’t include what lands in spam or the stream of fundraising texts.

This relentless pursuit of cash isn’t just irritating — it also reveals a deeper issue within the Democratic Party. Fundraising has overshadowed genuine voter engagement, treating supporters as wallets rather than allies. As someone who studies money in politics, I know that fundraising is a reality of U.S. elections. But it’s clear we need a frank discussion about Democratic fundraising practices and their long-term consequences. Too often, Democrats’ current approach sacrifices loyalty for quick cash. It’s madness, and it needs to change. [...]

Badgering your supporters in this fashion is disrespectful, annoying and, frankly, counterproductive. Imagine any reputable charity using these tactics — supporters would walk away. Yet in Democratic politics, this has become the norm.

The commodification of donor information only makes things worse. Once you donate, your contact details become currency — bought, sold and shared by campaigns eager to flood your inbox and phone. First-time donors often face an avalanche of fundraising requests, leaving them feeling unappreciated.

"This is not the work of a few bad actors," Bonica emphasizes. "[I]t’s deeply embedded within the Democratic establishment, with some of the worst offenders tied directly to party leaders and national party committees."

And that, I think, is a substantial reason why the Democratic Party struggles mightily to convince even their own less-than-fully-engaged voters that a coup-attempting madman is not, in fact, a viable alternative to competent democracy: The party most emphatically does not want to. It's never wanted to; the whole netroots premise of crashing the gates was an attempt to force the party into partnering with its own grassroots supporters, and it worked for only a handful of cycles before the party retreated into its usual beltway isolation and re-adopted its prior strategy of listening to wealthy donors often and campaign volunteers never.

The result is an operation that has been streamlined into something akin to a shady call center. The party has great success and deep expertise in squeezing their voting base for ever-larger amounts of money. The party has no expertise when it comes to translating that money into effective campaign strategies, because the party strategists and consultants who know how to best hoover up that cash are outright hostile towards any constituency that suggests the party ought to attach itself to some ideology more definable than whatever the party puts on that year's bumper stickers.

When was the last time you had any communication at all, from the party that supposedly represents you, that was not premised first and foremost on you forking over another few dollars? Instead, party strategists fill our inboxes with messages like:

This is Nancy Pelosi, and my car is getting towed unless you send me $20.

It's the end of America. There's nothing we can do about it, but donate $18 and we'll send you the official End of America tote bag.

Your brother is dead—or will be, if you disappoint him by not giving $5 when I promised him you would.

As Bonica points out, it's not just the relentlessness of the party asks. It's that, as above, they've turned scammy. Predatory. They've adopted the same sleazy cash-grab tricks of spam shops, with misleading titles and a near-assurance that donating once, just once, will open the floodgates and leave you swamped with identical fundraising messages from every other campaign in the country.

When I asked a Democratic fundraising consultant about the long-term damage of such tactics, he dismissed it. “Every election cycle starts fresh,” he told me. “People forget.” This cynical view underscores a deeper problem: a willingness to exploit fleeting impulses rather than build lasting relationships with supporters.

And:

There is mounting evidence that these tactics are largely effective because they prey on vulnerable populations, such as elderly Americans suffering from dementia, raising serious ethical concerns.

We are all wondering why, despite facing the potential return of a coup-backing convicted felon who has shown contempt for the law and has vowed a litany of cruelties and catastrophes if returned to office, Democratic voters responded with relative lethargy compared to past campaign cycles. Let me instead ask: Why wouldn't they have?

If the party's relationship with its voters is primarily that of a grifter and his marks, if the primary, secondary, and tertiary modes of communication between the party and its supporters consist of fundraising begs coupled with few if any actual promises in return, why would anyone expect the public to view the party as anything more than that?

Ah yes, I am a member of the Democratic Party. It is the party that believes that if I don't send Nancy Pelosi another $20, her car will be towed. Let me run down to my local precinct and cast my vote so that I can show my allegiance to the Don't Tow Nancy Pelosi's Car Party. And also stop fascism, I guess, although the party's been much more evasive about their plans for that.

It is not that the Kamala Harris campaign did not have concrete ideas and promises. In short order, they built an impressive catalog of new proposals and refinements of previous ones. It is not that Democrats themselves do not have a deep agenda and are still devoted to core party premises like make it harder for the powerful to cheat you or poison you.

But unless you went trolling for press releases you likely heard of very few of them, because the strategists who sent out the emails and harassed you with text messages ignored all of it to flood you with the partisan equivalent of crank calls. And that was it; that remains the sole means through which the Democratic Party itself communicates with the base it relies on.

It's messaging that shows, clearly, the contempt for the base that has always existed among Democratic strategists. Voters are seen as wallets, but certainly not as partners; constituencies who demand specificity on promises are considered irritants and potential saboteurs by strategists who instead prioritize abstracting party rhetoric into a bland porridge not likely to offend the stomachs of the wealthy donors.

If the base believes it is being treated with contempt, every time a new fundraising ask gets blasted out with cheap, clickbait headlines or their phone lights up with a text from a campaign they certainly did not agree to become a target for back when they donated to a favorite, then it only shows the public to be observant. Of course the party's growing reliance on the tactics of spam shops shows contempt for the base. This is not a partnership, but a shakedown.

There is a path forward here, but it may not be one current party leaders are capable of pulling off. It requires direct-to-voters communications that are not focused primarily on telling them to hand over their wallets and shut their mouths. It might include aggressive town hall schedules. It should include a commitment to rebuilding allied media sites rather than intentionally starving them in favor of astroturfed versions that party strategists can themselves control.

It would require building a sense of community and cooperation, even though the Democratic Party of the last three decades has embraced only strategists willing to do the opposite.

Most to the point, however, we are now in an environment in which the "free press" is not free, not in this country, but instead has been largely captured by billionaire owners and corporate conglomerates that bend their political coverage in order to best benefit subsidiaries that do government business. We can bleat all we like about the unfairness of the current environment to Democrats and, in fact, to anyone who seeks to oppose the blindly crooked fascism of The Criminal, of Elon Musk, and their insurrection-allied backers; the point of an opposition party is to oppose, and if the media environment makes such opposition difficult then it is the job of the party to make its own environments in which it can be more successful.

If there is no such effort, among Democratic Party strategists, then by God remove them already and find someone who considers partisanship and ideology to be something slightly more substantive than the basis for a new fundraising pitch. Remove them all. Remove every strategist who thought the key to victory was to squeeze every last penny out of every last supporter but who could muster no strategy that would convince the American public that the Democratic Party was a far better answer to America's problems—whatever they premised to be—than a convicted felon and literal seditionist.

We're not likely to get anywhere with this. It's more likely that the grassroots is going to have to lead the charge, and it may very well mean withholding donations to the party and redirecting them to other groups willing to share a vision for America that Democratic strategists themselves are too risk-averse to stomach. The party is not dead, not by a long shot, but we are likely entering another period in which the "official" party and its strategists fumble along in a near-fugue state while the task of selling America on Not Fascism, and Not Criminality, and Not Being Cheated Out Of Your Every Dime is taken on by organizations that have the distinct advantage of having none of those spammy bunglers in charge.