How politicians got comfortable sounding desperate when asking for money

A photo illustration of the desperate language used by politicians, of both parties, to solicit campaign contributions.

Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images; Rebecca Zisser/BI

You may have noticed how desperate some politicians’ fundraising appeals can sound.It’s because raising money from everyday people has grown ever more important for campaigns.But sometimes, it can go too far, veering into outright scammy territory.

If you’re a person who’s at all involved in politics, from the most seasoned operative to the casual observer, you’re undoubtedly familiar — and perhaps a bit annoyed — with the desperate fundraising appeals uttered in the voice of politicians.

It may be an email purportedly sent from the candidate’s iPhone, a text with Nancy Pelosi’s smiling face on it, or a screenshot from a Notes app from a Senate candidate on your social media feed.

These urgent requests for political contributions take various forms, but they often share an unseemly stench of desperation that feels unbefitting for our country’s elected leaders.

It’s not a Democratic or Republican issue, either — campaigns from both parties can often come across as downright silly when they’re trying to raise an extra buck.

So how did we get to a point where politicians are willing to stoop to this level?

Going down the ‘rabbit hole’

In recent decades, changes in both technology and the law have made small-dollar fundraising — bringing in tons of donations under $200 rather than massive donations from a few people — an increasingly important part of how campaigns are funded.

The internet now allows campaigns to cheaply solicit contributions from people at a scale and frequency that letters in mailboxes never could. The Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United vs FEC also dramatically increased the importance of money in politics, as campaigns now had to contend with an unlimited influx of spending from outside groups and corporations.

That created a political environment where any campaign that didn’t want to solely rely on wealthy donors — whether out of sincere convictions or for optics — had to figure out how to raise large sums of money from large groups of people.

Mike Nellis, founder and CEO of the Democratic campaign firm Authentic, said that “a lot of the urgency that you see” in fundraising messages is due to the importance of small-dollar donors to campaigns.

President Barack Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign is seen as the pioneer of the urgent fundraising appeal. One email simply entitled “I will be outspent” generated more than $2.6 million that year, according to Bloomberg.

But over time, some campaigns have taken an increasingly apocalyptic tone, employing increasingly guilt-driven tactics.

Now we’re at a point where a campaign may tell you the fate of the election, and the country, depends on your $20.

Former President Donald Trump’s campaign has embraced this strategy. It has sent emails ranging from “Biden’s political firing squad is lining up” to more banal gimmicks like “the most important email I’ve ever sent.”

Just this week, those on the campaign’s distribution list received one that read: “all hell breaks loose at 11:59 PM!”

One key factor here is message testing, campaign operatives told BI.

Political campaigns and the professional firms they hire to implement their fundraising strategies get real-time data about which messages raise lots of money and which ones don’t, they said.

“You’re able to rapidly test things, and that can bring you down a rabbit hole,” said Kenneth Pennington, partner at the progressive campaign firm Middle Seat. “So if ratcheting up the desperation is bringing in more dollars than versions of the content that have less desperation, it might lead you to believe that more desperation is always good.”

There’s also an arms-race dynamic to it all. Just about everyone — from presidential candidates to city council hopefuls — is fundraising via email, texts, and social media. Campaigns are forced to compete over a limited amount of people’s attention and money.

“It is a race to the bottom to get attention, and that makes people increasingly desperate,” Nellis said.

“You have to make some choices,” Pennington said. “Either I’m going to send out a lot more messages to compete with the volume of messages that are already out there, or I’m going to ratchet up the nature of those messages, make them more desperate, or more alarming, or eye-catching or urgent.”

‘Ways to get attention that I think you wouldn’t be super proud of’

If you were hoping that the volume and urgency of political fundraising messages might ever truly diminish, you’re out of luck — the only way to change that would be to decrease the importance of money in politics via campaign finance reform, and that seems more illusory than ever, the operatives said.

In the meantime, campaigns aren’t going to unilaterally disarm.

“I don’t really have a moral problem with sending a lot of emails to you to elect another Democratic senator,” said Pennington. “Campaigning is a big part of American life, and if we want to change it, we should change some of our laws.”

But there’s a big, ongoing internal conversation among campaign professionals in both parties about how far is too far, and how to avoid the long-term consequences of scorched-earth fundraising appeals.

“There’s ways to go after and get attention that I think you can hold your head up high and feel pretty good about that work,” Nellis said. “And there are ways to get attention that I think you wouldn’t be super proud of, like sending out emails that are like ‘the sky is falling, we’re all gonna die if you don’t donate $10.'”

A growing number of campaigns are now drawing the line at engaging in tactics that are outright scammy, such as claiming that donations will be matched multiple times over when that’s not the case, or roping people into making recurring donations without them being fully aware of it.

Others are simply pushing for more honesty — being realistic about what an individual donor’s contribution will mean for the campaign while avoiding manipulating people’s emotions.

John Hall, a leading GOP fundraising and communications professional, called for honesty with donors in a Medium post last year, arguing failing to uphold that principle would eventually lead to donor burnout.

“What raises the most money is often the most extreme messaging, the most aggressive tactics, and a willingness to guilt individuals into donating,” Hall wrote. “This tactic is effective at getting an immediate initial donation, but over time, the donor is either desensitized to or begins to resent this ‘strategy.'”

Donor burnout has become a real problem for Republicans, as the Washington Post reported in April. Trump and the RNC have brought in less money from smaller donors than expected compared to 2020.

But it’s a difficult problem to address as a party, or as an industry, in part due to the structure of campaigns themselves.

They crop up when a candidate runs for office and often disappear when they lose, leading to a lack of long-term thinking about the effect their appeals have on the public.

One way to avoid sounding too embarrassing and veering into manipulative tactics, campaign operatives argue, is to simply lean into the talents that a politician already has.

If the candidate is inspiring to voters on their own, there’s less need to scare people into sending them money.

Vice President Kamala Harris, for example, has raised record-shattering sums of money since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, all while generally avoiding the more manipulative fundraising tactics that have come to define much of politics on both sides of the aisle.

“There’s an assumption that the more desperate the appeals become the better the fundraising works,” Pennington said. “That’s a notion that kind of goes unchallenged, that I don’t really subscribe to.”