Republicans‘ WinRed and Democrats’ ActBlue donation platforms are looting elderly dementia patients of their life savings to fund their political campaigns, CNN reports.
WATCH:
From CNN, “How elderly dementia patients are unwittingly fueling political campaigns”:
The 80-year-old communications engineer from Texas had saved for decades, driving around in an old car and buying clothes from thrift stores so he’d have enough money to enjoy his retirement years.
But as dementia robbed him of his reasoning abilities, he began making online political donations over and over again — eventually telling his son he believed he was part of a network of political operatives communicating with key Republican leaders. In less than two years, the man became one of the country’s largest grassroots supporters of the Republican Party, ultimately giving away nearly half a million dollars to former President Donald Trump and other candidates. Now, the savings account he spent his whole life building is practically empty.
The story of this unlikely political benefactor is one of many playing out across the country.
More than 1,000 reports filed with government agencies and consumer advocacy groups reviewed by CNN, along with an analysis of campaign finance data and interviews with dozens of contributors and their family members, show how deceptive political fundraisers have victimized hundreds of elderly Americans and misled those battling dementia or other cognitive impairments into giving away millions of dollars — far more than they ever intended. Some unintentionally joined the ranks of the top grassroots political donors in the country as they tapped into retirement savings and went into debt, contributing six-figure sums through thousands of transactions.
James O’Keefe last year contacted people at random who made tons of small donations to ActBlue and found similar cases.
Both parties are draining our elderly of their life savings like Indian phone scammers.
Most establishment politicians don’t even need their money because the funding they used to have to raise from small donors and large corporations now all comes from a few billionaire megadonors like Miriam Adelson and Michael Bloomberg.
The Washington Post shared this list of the top donors for the 2024 election cycle which they updated on Oct 16th:
Elon Musk is the only one on the list who has done anything to buck the system and he’s been rewarded for it with endless investigations (including a DOJ lawsuit against him for hiring Americans over refugees and asylum seekers).
Lawfare with diagrams! 😂 https://t.co/RA9liZbXfs
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 21, 2024
Musk has gone all-in on Trump because, if you take what he says at face value, he believes a Harris administration will throw him in prison.
The AP reported last week that Trump’s donations from small donors have plummeted since the last election.
“Fewer than a third of the Republican’s campaign contributions have come from donors who gave less than $200 — down from nearly half of all donations in his 2020 race, according to an analysis by The Associated Press and OpenSecrets, an organization that tracks political spending,” the AP reported.
The AP continued:
The total collected from small donors has also declined, according to the analysis. Trump raised $98 million from such contributors through June, a 40% drop compared to the $165 million they contributed during a corresponding period in his previous presidential race.
The dip has forced Trump to rely more on wealthy donors and groups backed by them, a shift that cuts into the populist message that first propelled him to the White House. The decline in donations could not come at a worse time for Trump. Democrats have raised massive sums from small-dollar donors this cycle. President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris have raised a staggering $285 million from such donors since April 2023, representing more than 40% of their fundraising, according to data from OpenSecrets.
The aggressive tactics WinRed is using were partly to blame, the AP noted:
Republicans also engaged in a hyperaggressive — often combative — style of digital fundraising that is alienating voters, the operatives said. Campaigns and committees often share or rent lists of donors to each other, leading to voters being flooded with similar solicitations that can be confusing.
“Republican vendors have so mistreated our donors that many grassroots donors don’t want to give to us anymore,” said John Hall, a Republican fundraising consultant and partner at Apex Strategies. “If you make a donation to almost any Republican candidate today, within three weeks you are going to start getting 30-50 text messages from other candidates you have never heard of before.”
Hall’s firm sent surveys to Republican donors earlier this year and found that a majority of those who responded said they continued to receive text message solicitations after they had requested to be removed from a list.
“Donors feel like they are never thanked, they feel abused, and they don’t know how to get off lists,” Hall said. “This has a chilling effect on everyone’s fundraising.”
Our political system is just one giant grift machine and the only issue our representatives agree on is giving Israel endless weapons to commit genocide.
The main reason they’re even asking for small donations these days is to give plebs the illusion they’re part of the system.
This article originally appeared on Information Liberation and is republished by The Noticer with permission.
